At the suggestion of my friend Grandy I have utterly blown off his request that I help him write a review of YET ANOTHER MMORPG that is fashionable for some reason, to play a game that was in vogue twenty years ago.

I'm speaking of Star Control II.

For our readers who WERE NOT ALIVE twenty years ago, and we have a number of you, I'm pretty damned old.

And yet old men occasionally have things to say that are worth hearing.

To be less abstruse, Star Control II was published by a now defunct publisher called Acclaim in 1992.  It was developed by a pair of dudes who went under the name Toys for Bob, a reference that none of you children will get, I AM SURE!

Taking off my old man wizard hat, Star Control II was one of the last games written before Wolfenstein 3D  came along and crystallized all games into distinct genres, in other words fucking everything up:  Star Control II is, in terms kids would use today, an amalgamation of a Sci-Fi RPG, a flight simulator, a tactical battle simulator with side advancement for goal completion, and a Larry Niven novel.  It was so far ahead of its time that it's still ahead of its time, easily, TODAY, one of the ten best computer games ever made despite the fact that the idea of a black man wielding as much power as Bill Clinton was SCIENCE FICTION on par with a Larry Niven novel back in 1992.

And it's freeware, though you have the option of paying five bucks to enjoy it in a version even more primitive than the freeware.  I play the freeware, but I bought the five buck version to give back to the guys who made this game in hopes that Electonic Arts or Activision, two other long defunct game publishers which are still around for some reason, will buy the rights for a measly million bucks and create a modern version of something that's STILL better than anything they've ever published.

Still too abstruse?

Star Control II places the player in a near future in which a space traveling humanity has encountered alien intelligence, in fact a galaxy full of alien intelligence: Humanity joined the losing side of a galactic civil war between a "libertarian" coalition of races that wish to exist in chaotic individuality, and an "authoritarian" coalition of races dominated by the Ur-Quan, who simply wish to impose ORDER on the galaxy for everyone's benefit.  While humanity almost turned the tide with our comically primitive ships (looking like space shuttles bristling with nuclear missiles and surplus SDI lasers), the freaks lost, and ORDER was imposed on the galaxy.

Until a lost human expedition to the galactic core discovers a "Precursor" starship built when all of the protagonists of the last war were using femurs as weapons against space leopards.  You are the captain of this ship.

And yet there's so much more: twists and plot turns I won't mention,  voice acting (from a console version on the sadly defunct and all but forgotten 3DO) on a par with James Earl Jones voicing Darth Vader (for the scary Ur-Quan who are the INITIAL villains), and dozens of riddles and hints for the future, like the information-trading Melnorme, who promise you secrets and mysteries about the real history of the galaxy which you can only almost afford, and the Orz, a race of friendly, smiling space-goldfish, whose speech is never QUITE accurately captured by your universal translator (the title of this post is one of the translations), who may or may not FREAK YOU OUT when you realize that they are in fact Lovecraftian horrors from another universe, who intend to merge our universe with their own in order to…

Your mouse will not work in this game.  It's all keyboard.  But you can configure the controls to familiar WASD standards in the freeware version that I therefore recommend you download, known as "The Ur-Quan Masters," which includes the wonderful voice work from the console version:

Here is is.

Don't be frightened by the less than zero version number.  I've played about twenty hours (SC II requires about a hundred hours to complete) on a Windows 7 64 bit machine without a single crash.

After you're through with it, buy the official, DOSbox version from Good Old Games, both to give the developers money, and to reward Good Old Games for republishing this and many other good, old, games. As a bonus, you'll get the original Star Control, which is an entirely tactical, non-RPG game featuring great space combat with even more varied alien ships and races.

At five bucks, it's more entertaining, and less expensive to you, than a speech by a black man who wields as much power as Bill Clinton.

I confess: I don't know what the Obama Administration's game plan is here.

It's clear that the decision to obtain, and release, a different form of birth certificate is a recent one. The decision seems to coincide with The Donald getting attention for bringing it up.

What are the possibilities?

1. Possibility: Obama has things to do and places to go, and wants to put this behind him, because it's a distraction from more important issues.

Problem: Nothing will silence the crazy people, a category that apparently includes Trump. They'll be on to some variation ("The certificate is a forgery") or diversion ("He still hasn't released his college records!") by the end of the day. It's foolish to think this will put anything to rest. Also, Obama is not doing anything that would make people like him more if they paid closer attention to it.

2. Possibility: Everything is shit, so Obama wants people distracted with media circuses, and wants people to focus on silly attacks on him rather than serious attacks on him.

Problem: This is my theory of why Obama has not released the "long-form" birth certificate before. He's been playing rope-a-dope and watching as meaningful criticisms get mixed up with nutty ones. But how does releasing the form now help this plan? He could have just kept ignoring it and allowing the dutifully shallow and fatuous media to keep it on the front page by poking Trump about it. Releasing the certificate locks him in to a particular kind of response to craziness. He could live to regret that when they demand his college applications or immunization records or something.

3. Possibility: Obama would love to run against Donald Trump in 2012, and is attempting to increase his prominence and credibility.

Problem: It's a attractive theory. (It's also a damned sad commentary on the state of the Republican party that it could work.) But it's also dangerous to the point of recklessness. Trump would be an awful candidate and an awful President. But, God help us, if the economy takes a bad bounce or there's a scandal or Obama talks more about guns and religion, this plan could backfire. In a world where people watch "Jersey Shore" voluntarily, that freakishly narcissistic bankruptcy-fetishist huckster could wind up with his finger on the red button. Invest in bunker-design futures.

What's your theory?

Oh, this is so exactly why I left BIGLAW to start a small firm.

Megafirm King & Spalding could not have made a bigger mess of the DOMA representation if they had set out to do so. It started with a mighty coup — the House majority hiring King & Spalding's Paul Clement, a former solicitor general, to defend the constitutionality of DOMA after the Obama Administration declined to do so. Having high government officials tap one of your partners to litigate a high-stakes and high-profile case is great publicity, and a compliment to the firm, whatever you think of the merits of the case.

Clement was willing and able. But someone — or more probably, many someones — at King & Spalding had not thought the whole thing through. They faced loud and vigorous criticism by various gay rights groups, some of which contacted King & Spalding clients to complain. They undoubtedly pointed out that King & Spalding had marketed itself as gay-friendly and pro-diversity. Worse yet, law schools intimated that King & Spalding might suffer recruitment barriers because of their decision to take on the unpopular matter. As my classmate David French points out, King & Spalding had taken on very unpopular matters before and stuck it out. But not this time.

King & Spalding folded. They filed a remarkably coy and uninformative motion to withdraw. That was a risk — many federal judges I know would have hauled them in and ripped them a new one. Paul Clement promptly jumped ship with an awesome fuck-you letter:

"I resign out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client's legal position is extremely unpopular in certain quarters. Defending unpopular clients is what lawyers do," Clement wrote to King & Spalding Chairman Robert Hays. "I recognized from the outset that this statute implicates very sensitive issues that prompt strong views on both sides. But having undertaken the representation, I believe there is no honorable course for me but to complete it."

Damn straight.

Now, it's possible that fear of bad publicity and angry clients and law schools wasn't the only issue that led King & Spalding to drop their shield and run. It also appears that House Republicans snuck in a bizarre gag rule that would have prevented King & Spalding, and its lawyers and non-lawyer employees, from advocacy that the House Republicans didn't like:

The contract, which was entered into with U.S. House of Representatives General Counsel Kerry Kircher on behalf of the House's Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group to defend DOMA in court, contains a provision that prohibits all King & Spalding attorneys and non-attorney employees from any advocacy to "alter or amend" DOMA.

The paragraph in question states that "partners and employees who do not perform services pursuant to this Agreement will not engage in lobbying or advocacy for or against any legislation … that would alter or amend in any way the Defense of Marriage Act and is pending before either the U.S. House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate or any committee of either body during the term of the Agreement."

Moreover, the preceding paragraph, 4(f), contains a similar prohibition on the partners and employees who are participating in the litigation. Paragraph 4(g), thus, clearly is intended to apply to those who do not participate in the litigation.

(Quick advice from a small-firm lawyer: if the client wants to insert "special language" into your standard retainer agreement, show them the door and look for the next case — they're not worth it.) The clause is intolerable (and very probably unenforceable, and very probably a major employment-law problem for King & Spalding), and it's appalling that the Republicans stuck it in there. Clients have no business trying to regulate the outside First Amendment activities of a law firm's employees. But even if that is the actual reason — not the pressure from angry gay rights groups — one must ask why they didn't see the clause before they signed the damned agreement.

King & Spalding's retreat is a public humiliation for them, and should be treated like one. Look: in general lawyers don't have to take cases they don't like. There are some people some people so vile that I wouldn't defend them. It's not because I think they don't deserve a defense, it's because I think that my feelings about them could render me less than effective. Since I'm no longer on the indigent defense panel, I haven't agreed to take on all and sundry. There are civil clients I wouldn't take, and some legal positions I'd never defend. If somebody tried to enact the PACE Amendment, I wouldn't defend it, in part because my feelings would prevent me from being a good advocate. And it's perfectly reasonable for lawyers and law firms to decline to take cases that would cripple them economically because they are repugnant to their normal clients. Lawyers who represent big banks need not take on clients who want to lobby for anti-big-bank regulations. Lawyers who defend doctors need not take on high-profile plaintiff-side malpractice cases. When it comes to taking on cases, a bar card is not a suicide pact. Further, a lawyer who lacks the spine to deal with bad press or angry clients is a bad choice for a hard case.

But once a lawyer does take on a cause, he shouldn't abandon it because it's unpopular with the public or the press or other clients. That's cowardly, emboldens people who want to prevent unpopular people and causes from finding lawyers, and conveys that it's OK for the justice system to be a beauty contest.

How do you reconcile the right to refuse a representation and the obligation to stick with one once you have it? We'll, you've got to have a competent, professional screening process. No sane or competent law firm would forget to run a conflict check. Why would a sane or competent law firm take on a politically incendiary case without considering the interpersonal, economic, and political conflicts that would result?

Clement comes out of this looking principled, and King & Spalding comes out looking awful. Moreover, the anti-DOMA advocacy groups that attacked King & Spalding — and the law schools that had made noises about sanctioning King & Spalding — come out looking thuggish and un-American. I have no problem with vigorous attacks on evil legal positions. I make them. But I do have a problem with attacks on advocates for taking on unpopular clients and causes and for making unpopular, if legally colorable, arguments. That's an attack on the structure of the justice system — an assertion that not only should a particular legal position fail, it ought not even be heard. It was loathsome when it came from conservative political opportunists attacking lawyers for representing Gitmo detainees, and it's loathsome when it comes from liberal political opportunists attacking lawyers for defending a federal statute. It's amazing how closely the arguments of the two loathsome groups coincide: the conservatives argued that the Gitmo detainees were not criminal defendants, and were not entitled to a legal defense, so that lawyers representing them were doing so gratuitously and ought to be judged; the liberals argue that civil litigants and are not automatically entitled to counsel, nor must statutes be defended, thus Clement ought to be judged. A pox on both their houses — they might be more comfortable in a system where a legal verdict is governed by political dogma, like China or Cuba. It's particularly galling for gay rights groups to take this stance. If they think that, in the long run, gay rights are advanced by normalizing the concept that unpopular causes ought not be defended, then they're drooling morons.

Are there positions so frivolous, or so vile, that it's fair to say they reflect badly on the attorneys who assert them? Certainly. We criticize or ridicule them all the time. But the notion that DOMA is constitutional isn't one of those cases. I think DOMA is a steaming pile of shit, that it reflects a loathsome spinelessness of the Clinton Administration, and that Obama's refusal to defend it (while raising complex and troublesome separation of powers issues) reflects an unexpected spine and a concern for what's right that I didn't expect to see from him. But get real: if the DOMA challenge gets to SCOTUS as it is presently constituted, then the most optimistic scenario for DOMA foes is a very close call. More probably, SCOTUS would find it constitutional. You may think they're wrong, but it's a very arguable position based on extant caselaw. If the DOMA foes win before SCOTUS — and I would bet they will not — it will be damned close.

In short,though I support King & Spalding's right not to take on the case in the first place, and would not have commented if they had turned it down, I think their conduct has been appalling. They could have stood up and said so: "We cannot accept this representation because it seeks to establish a legal point that we believe to be contrary to the interests of our other clients." But taking it on only to abandon it upon receiving a little public pressure is the worst possible course, and represents indefensible incompetence. Through its course of action, King & Spalding has broadcast the following message to its clients and potential clients: "Our right hand doesn't always know what our left hand is doing. We make important decisions without careful reflection of the relevant factors. We're committed to representing you, unless it becomes more unpopular than we expected, in which case we'll need to bow out. We're committed advocates, within the limits of our financial self-interest."

Who the hell would hire a law firm like that?

Fortunately for them, there is plenty of shame to go around — they can share it with the people who lobbied their clients and pressured them.

I have resisted what amounts to a dare by Patrick to geek out in front you all over the progress of the HBO series Game of Thrones, which has had two episodes now. Suffice it to say: I am rereading the series (in my iPad this time) in preparation for the 5th book in July, I am faithfully watching and enjoying the series, I am attempting to keep my dear wife (Happy Anniversary, dear) interested in it, and I am using it to think about the necessary differences between art forms. But I am reserving the more effusive geekery to other locales, so as not to embarrass Patrick. It's really the least I can do.

That said: one of the great things about this series of tubes is its ability to deliver to us not only pure geekery in its unrefined form, but geek fusion, in which different types of geekery are combined in new and exciting ways. In that spirit, via the man himself, I give you The Inn at the Crossroads, a blog that documents attempts to re-create both medieval and modern versions of the foods described in GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire series.

I am so making the hot spiced wine this weekend.

Judging by Twitter, the British public is waking up to one of the worst excesses their country perpetrates against the right of free speech: the ability of celebrities, the powerful, and the connected to obtain injunctions "contra mundum", or against the world, prohibiting publication of their embarrassing secrets.  Though allegedly this injunction (a prior restraint against speech as we would call it in the United States) is available to anyone, as a practical matter British courts issue it only for the better sort of person.

In theory, such an injunction prohibits anyone, in perpetuity, from mentioning that BBC political editor Andrew Marr is a shameful hypocrite who used his influence and power to cover up an extra-marital affair with another journalist for three years.  Though now that he has been caught, Marr claims to be ashamed for participating in such an abuse against free speech and a free press, even for writing this  from the United States, Marr could use Britain's notorious libel laws to attack your humble author for truthfully discussing his wanton lewdness and adultery.

Fortunately Popehat has no British readers.

They're all too busy speculating about which English Premier League "footballer" (a term I understand refers to a soccer player) obtained an injunction, contra mundum, prohibiting the world from discussing his extra-marital affair with BBC reality star Imogen Thomas.

Rumor has it that his name is Ryan Giggs.

I have just one question:

Is the blimp making a comeback?

[Okay, two questions. Will HWMNBN's minions be scouring the internet for negative comments again? Will their capacity to do so have improved in the last few years?]

There were many ways this old man could have handled his grandson's query about prejudice, a word his grandson was too young to understand. Or even to pronounce.

He could have explained, without being judgmental, why it's best to think of our friends as individuals rather than classifying them as part of an arbitrary group.

He could have given his grandson a short, sanitized history of anti-semitism, explaining why Jimmy legitimately felt ostracized by being classed as "The Other," while, in his grandfatherly fashion, getting his grandson to agree that, as good people, the grandfather and the grandson are above this sort of name-calling and labeling. He could have started his grandson down the right path, to a future in which the boy judged individuals on their merits, rather than by race, religion, or class. He could have made the boy part of the team.

But did the grandfather do that?  No.

Grandpa lowered the boom. He told his four year old grandson, so young that he still lisped, that the boy was an incurable bigot. Beyond redemption. A thought criminal with no hope of reform.

There is a reason the camera fades away in the last seconds of this public service commercial: so as to avoid showing this boy's face as his own grandfather deals a traumatic blow, an emotional punch in the stomach, that will follow the boy to his shame for the rest of his days. There is no way the child will ever think of himself as a decent person after this. Every time this child looks in the mirror, he will hate the face that looks back at him. Whenever he sees his friend Jimmy, he'll be filled with self-loathing.

Kinder that the grandfather had removed one of those hooks from his hat and gouged out the boy's eye.

Today that kid is probably a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, bouncing between parole and prison in a meth-fueled haze, praying to Wotan, in his lucid moments, that the government never connects him to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Thanks a lot, grandpa. And thanks a lot, Jimmy Carter, for traumatizing kids with this sort of shit during their After School Specials.

Remember Senator John Ensign? You know, the vigorous moral scold who was cheating on his wife with the wife of a good friend and employee? The guy whose parents paid off the family of the woman he had an affair with?

His other shoe has dropped.

Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who is under an ethics investigation by the Senate, announced Thursday that he will resign his seat on May 3.

In the longer term it's unlikely to impact the balance of the Senate: the Republican governor will probably appoint the Republican who was going to run for the seat in 2012, improving his chances.

Meanwhile, watch for nauseating hand-wringing about how Ensign is the victim here.

I should know.  I've argued with him on the internet.

Away from the internet, he's a just a tiny grain of sand, in the wheels of the Obama Administration, Congress, an "arguably" double-dealing bunch of ambulance chasers, and an attempt to compound 222 years of injustice to the largest group of victims in American history.

Read Frank's objection to the outrageous attorney's fee request by the Plaintiffs' counsel (NOT the Plaintiffs) in Cobell v. Salazar, the class action which purports to sell out settle the claims of every American Indian whose land was stolen by the United States government, whose money was then stolen by the Department of Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs, and whose settlement fund is … well … by the attorneys who allegedly represent them.

A sample of Frank's objection to the the request for legal fees:

This includes a seven-year stretch where Mr. [Dennis] Gingold billed 28,230 hours—an average of eleven hours a day, every day seven days a week without a single day off.

As anyone who has had to keep billing records knows, it is rare for ten hours of billing to take only ten hours: there are bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, meal breaks, interruptions, and so forth. There are legendary accounts of tireless attorneys who forgo family and leisure; work on little sleep; and are able to regularly bill 3000 hours a year, but they are few and far between. Perhaps Mr. Gingold is one of these exceptional individuals, so far above average that he can routinely bill 4000 hours a year without loss of productivity or health, but this proposition merits scrutiny.

That's only a sample.  Read.

Via the authors of Crime and Federalism and Overlawyered, through Facebook.

This is the last time Wonkette is ever going to be linked on this blog. I'd delete all of the other Wonkette linked posts at this site, but I didn't write any of them. haven't written one since 2008.

Utterly vile.

And I'm using the nofollow tag.

Jesus. Utterly vile.

UPDATE: Wonkette editor in chief Ken Layne, in an attempt to explain and apologize for this execrescence, proves he's at as least as much a fool as its author Jack Stuef:

I have four kids myself and I wouldn't want them mocked on the Internet by a bunch of cretins on the Internet. And that's just one reason why I wouldn't parade my children around in the media. What kind of mother does that?

The first rule of holes is, when you're in one, stop digging!

UPDATE #2:

Expect to see this image here in the future.  Again and again.  I give it away freely to everyone, on the condition that users must agree to title the image "Jack Stuef" for the benefit of search engines.

Well, everybody has one.

Angry callers and emailers are harassing Koch Brothers, a family-run office supply company that has sixty-five employees in Des Moines, Iowa.

Dutch Koch, president of the Des Moines company, wants everyone to know that he's not one of those Koch brothers, and he's not politically active.

But I'll bet that Dutch Koch, president of Koch Brothers office supply, has political opinions. And I'll bet that those opinions, and those of his employees who are on the receiving end of the telephone calls and emails, and the death threat which the FBI traced to a sadly unnamed hammerhead in California, have been changed by all the attention from barking moonbats who typed two words into Google and found …

"Funny, this doesn't look like The Sum Total Of All Evil.

Oh well, I'd better send them my informed and insightful manifesto about their plot to weaponize the asteroid belt anyway."

If I ran things, as the just and benevolent President for Life of the American Empire, I would occasionally gin up false controversies as tests of my citizenry: Tests such as inventing shadowy billionaires out of whole cloth, and attributing fantastic powers of Evil to them. The purpose of these controversies would be to find citizens who had somehow passed my rigorous examinations of intelligence and character for citizenship, despite having little intelligence and no character. These people would have their citizenship rights stripped away, and their teachers would be exiled to a small atomic atoll in the Pacific.

Via

Until then, I'll miss Elisabeth Sladen, who passed away after a long fight with cancer this morning.

Fans of Doctor Who know Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, who accompanied the Doctor in the series' first golden age, while Tom Baker was playing the character in the early and mid-1970s.  The character, and the actress who played her, was so appealing that alone among the cast in the series' "first" 25 year run, Sladen was brought back in the series' modern, second run.  Where she was just as enjoyable, so beloved that she was brought back for her own, children's oriented series, in which she still starred.

Au revoir Ms. Sladen.

HBO's adaptation of George R. R. Martin's Game Of Thrones premiers Sunday.  Set your clocks, and your hearts, for this once in a lifetime event Popehat readers.

Unlike Ken (who I know is counting the seconds until Sunday night), I enjoy Atlas Shrugged as much as I enjoy A Game Of Thrones, which is to say, I enjoy it mildly. Rand's followers compare her work favorably to that of Plato and Dostoevsky. Martin's followers call his work C. S. Lewis for adults, or Tolkien meets the Wars of the Roses (and therefore, implicitly, Shakespeare). To call any of these comparisons a stretch is to be kind.  At least Rand knew how her book would end (with a 78 page speech) before she wrote it.

Martin is just stringing his audience along.  When he dies, his fans will compare A Game of Thrones to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony.

But as long as we understand that going in (we surely do four books in), that's entertainment!

Now where is my twelve hour adaptation of Cryptonomicon?  That would be art.

Most politicians are assholes. Many are evil. But very few are all evil, like Hitler or Nancy Grace. It's dangerous to indulge in the very human desire to regard a political enemy as all evil. Why? Because it tends to make you act like a gullible tool. Case in point: Wonkette explains how the Obama-haters at TownHall were taken in by a fake "OMG Obama's mother-in-law practices voodoo-magic in the White House" article calculated — successfully — to make them and their commenters look like credulous asses. It's worth enduring even Wonkette's belabored smug-ironic-detachment to read. Note that many Wonkette commenters were equally gullible, in that they (hating TownHall residents as much as TownHall residents hate Obama) were willing and eager to accept this as a sincere piece by a TownHall rather than a hoax at TownHall's expense.

I have no plans, and no particular desire, to go see "Atlas Shrugged."

I do have plans, however, to read and enjoy the mean-spirited reviews of the movie, the flood of gratuitous, impertinent, and semi-literate swipes at any ideology to the right of Dennis Kucinich, and the mouth-frothing rage of the defensive Randians and Objectivists. No movie can match that.

The movie appears appalling as an expression of filmmaker's art. As for the underlying work — well, I have many small-l libertarian views, but I find Ayn Rand tiresome. Political allegory can be gripping — consider Animal Farm or 1984. No one would say that George Orwell is subtle, but he doesn't have Snowball give a eighty-page speech, because he's not pathologically self-indulgent and self-satisfied. Rand lacks the elements that I require in an entertaining political writer: tolerance of nuance, capacity for self-criticism, and a sense of humor about it all. The folks who are loudest about how awesome she is also seem humorless, in a very humorous way. (Remember how angry the Objectivists got at John Scalizi for a funny throw-away paragraph?)

Dogmatism is dreary.