December 2008 Archives

I'm just returning from a week-long Christmas visit with my parents. It was a good Christmas, with Brian and Nattie returning to join us this year on Christmas Eve. (Last year was a little bare with them visiting her family in Thailand--not that I object, just observing that they were missed.) But the holiday was better than expected on two counts.

First, we had a minimum of family friction, despite some ongoing trouble between my Uncle Mike and his youngest son, Luke. Just a bit of hard feeling over the Trivial Pursuit board. I don't know why we play parlor games. As much as I enjoy games as a way of systematizing social interaction, and for the competition itself, my family just wasn't built for them. Too much bad sportsmanship.

Second, and much more important, this was the first Christmas without Dan, after his death in May. I wasn't looking forward to his visible absence. But Aunt Linda overcame her fear of the oncoming storm and joined us on Christmas Eve, as has become tradition, and stayed overnight, which has not. So she was there on Christmas morning, which helped fill what might have been an awkward hole around the Christmas tree. I don't know whether Mom planned it that way, or whether it helped either of my parents, but it helped me. A strangely literal benefit of family coming together after a death.

Some of my Christmas shopping left me standing indecisively. I'm not generally prone to indecisive shopping, but then, I generally shop for myself. The women's department of Macy's is unfamiliar territory, however, so I ended up in exactly the kind of brain freeze described in a recent episode of Radio Lab.

The topic wasn't shopping, but the brain, and the roles of reason and emotion. One of the articles described a guy who suffered organic brain damage that essentially eliminated his passions. As a professional CPA, he was an easy target for jokes about how long it took to discover the fact. But eventually it came to light, and the first symptom noticed was an inability to make decisions, even simple, simple decisions like whether to use a black or blue pen on a document, or which cereal to buy at the supermarket. He found himself taking hours on decisions like that. And the experts' conclusion was that, without access to his emotions, he could not use the mental short cuts all of us rely on.

The theory is that emotions are not so much hard-wired into us, but rather collective responses to experience. We all accumulate emotional associations, positive or negative, rational or irrational, to whatever we come into contact with over the course of our lives, and our emotions are the summation of those associations. Without these emotional associations to supersede raw logical assessment, the accountant had to evaluate every decision from basic principles: every option's relative advantages, plus the relative importance of every relative advantage.

With the show fresh in my mind, I was conscious that that was what I was doing: picking through many criteria deliberately, which I don't have to do with, say, groceries, or even something actually requiring some amount of analysis, like board games. For all my logicality, I apparently don't make all my shopping decisions from logic alone.

The funny part of all of this is that Eileene is prone to that brain freeze, almost regardless of what she's shopping for. It seems she's the real left-brainer of the house.

So the presidential transition continues. The cabinet is shaping up in a more centrist, more hawkish, and above all more establishment outline than proper liberals are entirely comfortable seeing. It’s a strategy that speaks well for promises to reach across the great schisms of today’s political landscape, but not so well for promises of change. A fair number of Clinton’s circle are appearing on short lists—Hillary Clinton herself for the Department of State. Obama has named Eric Holder his choice for attorney general, which is drawing some criticism. (What choice wouldn’t?)

It seems the problem is not with his career as a whole, but specifically with his last few days as Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton, when Clinton issued his infamous sweeping pardons. Asked to consider the legal justification for and obstacles to a pardon for Marc Rich—fugitive from indictments for tax evasion and illegal trade with Iran, “friend of Bill,” and all-around shady character—Holder replied with a tepid evaluation that Rich “meets the minimum standards” for a pardon. Holder did not comment on the moral justification for pardon. That was all the go-ahead Clinton needed.

Agreeing to pressure from your boss’s boss on a matter of presumed mercy might seem a small sin, especially since Holder has since expressed regret for signing off, however mildly, on the pardon. Clinton and others characterized the investigation and indictment of Rich as political hay-making, rather than a pursuit of justice, which is possible though it seems unlikely. The whole matter is likely moot, insofar as it affects Holder’s confirmation, since Republicans are unlikely to object very loudly to questionable pardons as Bush the lesser nears the end of his eight years presiding over decidedly indictable offenses and the possibility of a blanket pardon looms large.

But it’s precisely for that reason that Holder is an inappropriate choice for Attorney General. We’re about to see a whole lot of people pardoned for crimes committed with wink-and-nod approval from their boss’s boss, or even farther up the chain of command. Setting things right, repairing eight years of terrible damage to US reputation, and especially the reputation of the Justice Department, abroad and at home—in short, bringing desperately needed change to Washington—requires an Attorney General with a steel-bound commitment to right and the rule of law, not one willing to let things slide when convenient.

I did some barnstorm Christmas shopping today, and I have to revise my take on the music the stores pipe so insistently to you. They seem to be moving beyond the Santa-Rudolph-Jingle Bell Rock set of overtly Christmas-y but prudently non-religious music into songs that merely take place in winter.

That's a mixed blessing. At first, it seemed like a good idea: "Let it Snow" is a less grating than such focus-group wonders as "Frosty the Snowman," and waaaaaaay less grating than "Feliz Navidad"--that guy's voice could peel paint. But, as the day progressed, I began to notice that the list of acceptable songs, those with no actual Christmas content, was embarrassingly short. Every single store played "Let it Snow." Every. Single. One. Including a couple I merely ducked into for a moment. And every store I visited for more than fifteen minutes played "Baby, It's Cold Outside"--which was particularly off-putting immediately after hearing it described as "a creepy date-rape song."

I dunno. Maybe there is no palatable balance. Back when I worked a cash register to cover college expenses, it was still okay to play the good Christmas carols, whether or not they made it past the market-testing department. Unsurprisingly, even Adeste Fidelis began to wear a little thin when played for the tenth or twelfth time that day, and were well past worn through by the tenth or twelfth shopping day. And the more narrowly we limit the choices we can tolerate, the heavier the strain each one must bear. Maybe we just need to let the flood gates open, and play all the Christmas songs, regardless of religious connotations, or lack thereof.

Except "Feliz Navidad." I like the paint where it is, thank you.

I read myself to sleep last night with some old Dungeons & Dragons modules. Middling old. Somewhere around the 2nd edition era, when Gygax had been persuaded to step down from the throne and let TSR pursue a business model grounded in business theory instead of egotism. That was important at the time, as RPG publishers warily eyed a decline in interest towards RPGs generally, when a shake-out seemed—and later proved to be—inevitable.

The era marked a real shift in tone for published adventures, from death traps of the “instant death, no save” variety, where advancement was merely an exercise in prolonging the inevitable, to fight sequences designed with the expectation that GMs wanted their players to survive so the campaign could continue. Even the tournament adventures, which once measured contestants by how far they got into a strictly linear dungeon before perishing, began to measure contestants by score, awarding points for a variety of small successes before emerging from the dungeon, still alive. The era also saw TSR trying some experimental techniques like narrative structure that didn’t involve arbitrary PC death and abilities without immediate combat applications. (Experimental for TSR, that is. Other publishers had been using them for years, and won many converts thereby. I mentioned something about a business model based on egotism, I believe…) And, thanks to the aforementioned decline in players, some of those experiments aimed specifically at complete novices, hoping to bring fresh blood to the hobby.

Dungeon module N4: Treasure Hunt was one of these. The basic premise was to give the players incomplete character sheets, which they would fill in as they progressed. The action begins with the PCs aboard a slaving vessel which washes ashore in a storm, killing all but one member of the crew and sparing the PCs a life of slavery, but forcing them to search the island for shelter and some means of escape. The PCs start as 0-level humans without any assigned professional adventuring class or moral alignment, and every time they behave in a way resonant with or contrary to a particular class or alignment, the GM ticks their running total upward or downward. Once a PC gains enough experience points to qualify as a proper 1st-level character, the GM would pause to observe, “Well, let’s see… you ambushed three goblins and showed no interest in the desecrated shrine. You also used a meat cleaver and were eager to plunder the library for valuables. I suggest you become a chaotic neutral rogue.” Or similar advice to reflect that PC’s choices. By the end of the adventure, all the PCs should earn enough experience and make enough choices to “graduate” in a similar fashion to 1st-level adventurer, after which they will presumably unanimously decide that living in constant danger is a swell lifestyle and decide to band together as mercenary heroes. (Hopefully, nobody dies at an inconvenient time and find himself forced to start over, but replacements are available as fellow slaves washed overboard while forced to row the galley.)

The idea was to allow newbies to create characters without needing to read any rules at all—the rulebooks could be intimidating to potential customers outside the nerd market—or even needing a basic familiarity with the warrior-wizard-priest-thief class system. That was a good idea, and the attempt was interesting, but poorly executed.

The adventure doesn’t lend itself equally to exploring a variety of classes. It provides many opportunities to behave like a fighter or a thief: killing monsters with whatever weapons are at hand, or sneaking around and ambushing the goblin and orc pirates that infest the island. Opportunities to behave like a cleric are slimmer, essentially limited to one scene where the PCs bed down for the night in a desecrated temple. A goddess appears and gives them some advice; if any PC is particularly fawning or, on his own initiative, tries to clean up some of the damage the pirates have done, that counts as priest-like activity. And mages? Forget it. There’s one lousy spellbook in the ship’s hold at the beginning of the adventure; if PCs think to loot the ship, and they find the spellbook, and someone sets aside hours to study it while everyone else is busy, you know, surviving, and the player who studies it decides that casting his one spell is all he wants to do, because almost any other adventurous activity counts as an inclination to a different class.

The imbalance of opportunities to explore different classes is magnified by player ignorance. Remember: the adventure is designed to introduce the game to players who know next to nothing about it. A player familiar with class stereotypes, who also wanted to play a particular class, might deliberately pursue those avenues, but newbies who might want to play a particular class won’t know what those stereotypes are, and don’t have that option. Fighters and thieves do what ordinary people can do, only they do it better; clerics and mages use abilities to which an ordinary person has no access. So, when the players confront a pair of zombies in the adventure’s climax, a player who knows that clerics can turn undead with a flourish of holy righteousness might try that, and might even succeed, earning points toward becoming a cleric. The idea wouldn’t even occur to a newbie. Nor would a newbie realize that strapping on some armor scavenged from a recently-butchered pirate gang disqualifies him for wizard status, should he want to become a wizard, or that using a spear is some how an un-priestly act. The natural choices for ordinary people surviving a shipwreck play directly to some classes, and not at all to others.

Such failures of the adventure to work as intended—to allow players to select a class to play through natural inclination—highlight some of the weaknesses of the D&D system: arbitrary rules (like mages wearing no armor, or priests using only blunt weapons), highly compartmentalized class stereotypes (warriors are not spiritually inclined), and highly compartmentalized class abilities (warriors cannot be stealthy). A skill-based system like GURPS or CoC would handle the scenario much more smoothly: if you sneak, you learn stealth; if you fight, you learn weapon skills; if you do both, you learn both, albeit less quickly than you might learn a single skill by pursuing it alone—there is no systemic obstacle to mixing and matching skills. There’s also the oddity of advancement through experience, that experience being measured solely in terms of killing and looting. In this scenario, the “right” decision usually means engaging in unnecessary risks to win fights and gain access to more loot, rather than concentrating on the real goal of escaping the island alive—an unnatural artifact of TSR’s intellectual blinders, as well as a clumsy system.

While Treasure Hunt is a technical failure, I nonetheless applaud the attempt. The impulse to grow the gamer base was a good one, and the general willingness to try something new could have done wonders for the D&D line, although in the end it fell back into its dungeon-crawl rut. In the long run, that proved all right for TSR; a lot of gamers are entirely happy reliving the D&D experience specifically, and have little interest in exploring other rules systems, other genres, other character archetypes, and, as the player base has continued to shrink, the hack-and-slash fantasy genre remained the top seller. The genre has been reinforced by products like World of Warcraft, cementing the D&D notion of fantasy adventure as the notion fantasy adventure, complete with class-and-level advancement and crazy rules like “Priests don’t use swords,” as natural a law as gravity. As a result, the D&D line has been successful largely by becoming even more like itself; as the D&D version of fantasy becomes increasingly universal, players become less sensitive to its oddities and frustrations. Still, I would have liked to see what D&D might have grown into had it stuck to its attempts at innovation, rather than reverting to self-imitation.

This BoingBoing entry is astounding. For those too lazy to click the link, it describes a technique of reconstructing people's visual sensations by mapping the flow of blood through their brains. Subjects' blood flow was first measured as they were shown random pixels, in order to establish a base line. Then the blood flow was measured as the subjects looked at coherent images, in this case simple iconic letters. A computer was able to crunch the data measured from the coherent images, compare it to the data taken from the random images, and reproduce a fuzzy, probabilistic image of its best guess about what they were looking at. The matches aren't perfect, but they are clearly identifiable.

The science fiction of my childhood treated direct mental hookups to computers as something of the distant future, the mechanics of how they might work inconceivable, although a boundless faith in the progress of science also meant the science fiction of my childhood treated such hookups as inevitable. Writing after the home computer became common, William Gibson presented a compelling vision of neural interfaces as something of the immediate future. Ironically, actual neural science--as opposed to science fiction--of the same period made such predictions seem farther off than ever. (At least, that portion of neural science which made it past the professional journals to the laymen like me, following Scientific American and the Discovery Channel, did.)

The problem for hopes of a direct mind-computer link was that the microscopic mechanics of thought were far more complicated than anyone had been led to expect after simple neurosensors were able to detect that different parts of the brain thought about different things--visual stimulus, verbal skills, balance, etc. More sensitive equipment didn't find more sharply defined areas of the brain thinking in more sharply defined cubby-holes. There was no brain cell, or dedicated cluster of brain cells, to think "I'm hungry for applesauce," for example. There is a group of brain cells that think such a thing, but (1) those cells aren't the same for everyone, and, worse, (2) the individual cells that participate in thinking about applesauce also belong to groups that think about other things: one of the cells that thinks about applesauce might also participate in a different group that thinks about sports cars and a third group that directs you to zip up your fly after a pee, while another applesauce cell might participate in remembering phone numbers. From a computational standpoint--figuring out which parts of the brain did what, so someone could put together a machine to connect the brain directly to a computer--the difficulties were insuperable. Brain links weren't one-size-fits-all, and we simply couldn't wade through all the permutations quickly enough to produce a personalized brain link within your lifetime.

Not so much any more. Moore's law holds that computing power of a computer in a given price range (a function of how many circuits can be printed on a chip of a given size) doubles every two years. With that kind of exponential growth, we're rapidly coming to a point where we can crunch all the data required to duplicate a narrowly-defined range of thought, such as visual input. A comprehensive duplication of all your thought patterns may have to wait, because we haven't got a clearly defined list of all the thoughts a person can have, but simply starting with visual input--or, soon, all sensory input--takes us a long way toward thinking directly into machines, and receiving their signals directly in return. Full sensory immersion in an artificial environment.

And, perhaps, the next step beyond that is transplanting ourselves from organic bodies into thinking machines, enjoying whatever benefits that might bring--repair easier than medicine, perhaps, or the ability to turn off chronic pain, or immortality. The mind boggles. I'm tempted to say that full transplantation is a fantasy of the distant future, but this experiment reminds us we're already living in science fiction. And when it comes to predictions and science fiction, you never know.

Eileene had a medical check-up today, to see how her diabetes treatment is going. Quite well, I’m pleased to report. All the pertinent values are much closer to normal than they were when the treatment began three months ago, with the exception of her glycerin levels. The endocrinologist confidently declared this meant Eileene was eating too many eggs, which is probably correct—she’s been eating a lot of eggs lately. But, despite eggs’ bad reputation for cholesterol, Eileene’s cholesterol levels are fine, or at least improving.

The connection between eggs and health got me thinking about the disconnect between the medical community (and with it, the larger scientific community) and the ordinary consumer. The general concern over cholesterol, and the unfair condemnation of eggs along with it, erupted when I was a kid. It was grounded in the discovery of a strong correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease.

Science could not immediately go any farther than that. It could, and did, begin pursuing a lot of obvious and important questions growing out of that discovery, like whether cholesterol caused heart attacks and what other circumstances might contribute to or counteract the correlation. In time, with properly controlled experiments, medical researchers learned more. For example, they found that different types of cholesterol may or may not contribute significantly to heart disease, and learned to distinguish between HDLs (good cholesterol) and HDLs (good cholesterol). They learned that white bread and similar processed starches and sugars are worse for your cholesterol-related health than eggs. For that matter, cholesterol may not be much of a threat to your health for the cholesterol, specifically—Eileene’s cholesterol is fine, or at least improving; it’s her glycerin level the doctor objected to.

But the general public didn’t care about evaluating the important follow-up questions. It simply equated cholesterol with heart disease, and, since eggs contain cholesterol, decided that eggs are a health risk. End of story.

You see that kind of behavior a lot around miracle diets: grapefruit contain trace amounts of some enzyme that might aid digestion of sugars, and voila! The grapefruit-45 diet, and the placebo pills that came with it. Zinc plays a part in your immune system, so voila! Zinc pills that never did a thing for my cold, but merely made my aunt feel better about helping treat it.

People may feel the painstaking nature of scientific discovery is too slow to deal with the problems of the moment, and they may be right. But it’s the only way science works, and the only way it enjoys any authority at all. A scientific experiment never really confirms any general rule; rather, it confirms or rejects a specific phenomenon, and often the only way to discover which phenomenon holds true is to weed out all the wrong ones one by one. The moment you try to side-step that process, it all falls apart.

There’s a lesson there for creationists, or for presidents cherry-picking their intelligence reports.

Republicans may have taken a beating in 2008, and to a lesser extent in 2006, and we may hope to see them learn an important lesson—or several important lessons—about the economic ideology of the right. But they seem in no hurry to do so.

Witness the memo circulated among Senate Republicans, as reported by the LA Times, on Wednesday, December 10, concerning the proposed bailout for the auto industry:

Today at noon, Senators Ensign, Shelby, Coburn and DeMint will hold a press conference in the Senate Radio/TV Gallery. They would appreciate our support through messaging and attending the press conference, if possible. The message they want us to deliver is:

1. This is the democrats [sic] first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.
2. This rush to judgment is the same thing that happened with the TARP. Members did not have an opportunity to read or digest the legislation and therefore could not understand the consequences of it. We should not rush to pass this because Detroit says the sky is falling.

The sooner you can have press releases and documents like this in the hands of members and the press, the better. Please contact me if you need additional information. Again, the hardest thing for the democrats to do is get 60 votes. If we hold the Republicans, we can beat this.

Set aside the question of whether the proposed bailout is a good idea, and whether you agree with it. I don’t care for the idea, myself. Set aside, also, the sound argument expressed in the second point of the memo. A hasty decision certainly is likely to be poor, as was the hasty decision involved in handing $750 billion to Hank Paulson, no strings attached, to fight the financial crisis as his whims might carry him, or, indeed, as were many hasty Congressional decisions of the past eight years, many of which enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Senators Ensign, Shelby, Coburn, and DeMint.

Rather, consider the first point of the memo, placed before the issue of sound judgment: that the proposed bailout should be fought to prevent any gains by organized labor. Blocking a bailout may be wise on several counts, but the memo wishes to pursue it primarily as a union-busting move, an attack on the working class—or rather, a defense against those who would support it. The memo does not evaluate the bailout on its own merits, but on how much its passage might aid the Democrats politically. Grateful auto workers might look to Democrats as their champions, and continue to vote for the Dems in future elections.

This attitude towards endorsing or rejecting hugely important, even vital, legislation strictly on the question of how it might strengthen or weaken the party is nothing new in politics (of either US party, or of any nation), but it deserves particular attention today because it stands out as a defining quality of the Republican party roughly since the ascension of Reagan in 1980, part and parcel with the growing movement toward party discipline and ideological purity. We saw a politicization of vital government functions throughout the Bush administration: the use of retired generals to push war in Iraq, evaluations of DoJ prosecutors according to how much damage they had done to either party in their pursuit of the law, the use of FEMA to aid red districts while writing off blue ones. The memo above, however, bears the closest resemblance to Newt Gingrich’s determination to defeat a health care plan generated by Hillary Clinton back when Bill was in the White House.

A similar memo circulated among House Republicans, urging them to defeat the plan because its passage would win votes for Democrats. It would, too. People wanted a comprehensive health care plan, and Republican refusal to produce one under Reagan or Bush the elder would look bad if the Democrats produced one. One could argue whether the Clinton plan which emerged was a good one or a bad one, and whether Clinton presented it persuasively to the public, but the salient point here is: the memo urging its defeat circulated a year before the details of the plan were decided. Whether the plan would, upon release, prove to be a good one was immaterial to the Republican leadership; all that mattered was destroying a political enemy, and to hell with serving the public.

We’re seeing that same attitude today, as we’ve seen it since 1980, and it’s doing terrible damage to our government, and to our country. Perhaps it will work. Certainly it worked very well for Republicans between 1980 and 2004, a generation of running the nation…into the ground. Or our Republican leaders may learn from the 2006 and 2008 elections and clean up their act.

But they won’t learn any lessons about governance, or about neocon financial theory, unless the public learns a few lessons first. Lessons about class warfare, and how divisive politics are used to serve the ends of the wealthy few.

For reasons I can’t even remember now, I went back to look at the GM of the Rings online strip. It took me a while to warm up to it—probably because my heart is a shriveled little prune of misanthropy and disgust—but once I did, it was abso-freaking-lutely hilarious. Going back to relive it, I can’t imagine what took me so long. Some of the best lines are in the earliest entries: “Did I mention…the Nazgul???” or “That’s a very specific level of tired.” Maybe it’s because Shamus’s phenomenal screen-capture fu, the mystical art by which he snatches really, really choice frames from the movie to illustrate the strip, took a while to reach their potential.

Anyway, the humor of the strip lies in the retelling of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the Peter Jackson film version, as though it were a role-playing campaign, played out by people who were familiar with D&D, but not with LotR. (A peculiar conceit, to be sure, since D&D drew more heavily on LotR than upon any other fantasy material, but never mind.) Like a lot of RPG humor—c.f., Knights of the Dinner Table—the group represents the lowest common denominator of RPGs: a bunch of hack-and-slash fiends with no interest in story, roleplaying, or indeed anything but loot and slaughter, squaring off against a power-mad GM convinced the players are allowed to follow his predetermined plot as an indulgence. Anyone who’s played any RPG past the stage of rank neophyte will understand the satire.

Which is odd, because not every RPG player has actually been exposed to such base levels of power-gaming. I know I haven’t. I’m not saying such players don’t exist; I can recall a couple players I met at cons who deserve to be thoroughly mocked for their bloodthirstiness, and even one adolescent who slyly shared his secret of cheating at dice rolling. But I’ve never dealt with an entire group of them. Nor have I met players who openly acknowledge deliberate attempts to sabotage their GM’s hard work. (But then, apart from my own very earliest attempts at GMing, I’ve never seen a GM treat his players with such railroading contempt to trigger such a rebellion, either.) Nor have I seen such player-GM hostility sustained for so long; such a toxic combination must implode pretty quickly. (Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it??)

The people who inhabit the GM of the Rings strip are just as much exaggerations as the racist, sexist, ageist, and other –ist and –phobic stereotypes that populate off-color humor: recognizable though unreal. But, unlike the –ist and –phobic jokes, these don’t seem to cause anyone offense. Maybe it’s because nerds aren’t thought to be born that way, an idea that might be challenged as attention continues to be directed at autism and related conditions, and so nerd jokes aren’t taken to mock people who can’t help being that way. Or maybe the nerds are enjoying a good, narcissistic laugh: “Ha ha, yeah, we sure can be stupid that way. Don’t touch my dice.” But I think it’s a matter of ease with which the nerd hierarchy makes nerd humor inherently about the other: like drivers, who always think they drive at the proper speed and everyone else is too fast or too slow, nerds tend to admit they are nerds, but not the really hard-core nerds like those other guys. The line between normal and screwed-up nerd always lies just below one’s self. And the players of GM of the Rings lie below that line, as well.

Eileene shared some disturbing news with me this morning: a fatal accident a few blocks from our house, where a driver hit two pedestrians.

How this could happen is easy to see: Valley Road is a major local thoroughfare, which is not much of a problem in itself. But this fact makes drivers wishing to enter Valley careless, especially drivers wishing to turn right onto Valley get so wrapped up in watching for a break in traffic approaching from the left that they stop paying attention to traffic from the right, sometimes for a minute or more. That’s plenty of time for a car a little outside its lane, or a bus, or a pedestrian to approach from what seemed like a great distance when the driver first stopped watching his right, and when the opening in traffic from the left finally arrives, drivers often lunge heedlessly onto Valley, with no idea what might surround them on the other three sides.

When the days are short, as they are now, and the sun sinks behind the rise to our immediate west at 4:00 or so, the danger rises significantly. Dark winter coats and clothes don’t help. Peripheral vision becomes nearly worthless; I’ve failed to capture the attention of such drivers even by shouting and waving as I seek to enter the crosswalk.

And I do shout and wave. I occasionally walk that route, maybe a couple of times a month, as it stretches between our house and a nearby university, and even in the space of a few hundred walks, was hit by a car once. Just a bump, nothing serious, but an unintended impact nevertheless. Since then, I’ve watched drivers carefully, and signaled my presence. One guy nearly hit me again just a week ago, as I returned from the graduate applications office.

Yep. I’ll be attending classes starting this spring, which means I’m going to be walking that route frequently, throughout the winter season with its short days. That’s what makes the news so disturbing.

Bush-hating blogs are snickering at the “Speech Topper” memo directed towards cabinet and other high officials that “offers a guide for discussing Bush's eight-year tenure during their public speeches,” a list of how the White House would like the last eight years viewed. That there should be such a memo, coordinating talking points and trying to put the most positive spin possible on presidential performance isn’t remarkable; indeed, it’s pretty well standard operating procedure for any presidency that wants to guide the national conversation. What makes the memo so entertaining are the gaping holes and awesome silences between the highlights.

No mention of Iraq, for example. Nor of the faulty intelligence which led us there. Nor of the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Nor of the economic meltdown brought on by deregulation and artificially low interest rates, apart from claiming that Bush “responded with bold steps to prevent an economic meltdown”—which meltdown continues today. Nor of Guantanamo. Nor of the handling of national disasters. Nor the implementation of torture. Nor of attempts to politicize the DoJ. Nor of massive tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy. Nor of the massive debt they created. Nor of the conviction and pardon of White House staff for endangering a CIA agent in order to pursue vengeance on a political enemy. Nor of a vice president claiming to be free from laws concerning the executive branch. Nor of any of the issues and events which defined this presidency. The major issues and events which defined this presidency are such uniform disasters that the memo has to rummage around to find anything at all positive to say, and even then stretches the truth.

The signature achievements of the Bush administration, the bits they would really like to focus on:

Bush “kept America safe” following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Certainly he didn’t keep Americans safe—he needlessly endangers our soldiers daily in Iraq, and has turned the global sympathy in the wake of 9/11 into widespread contempt among our allies and hatred among our enemies, painting a big old “We’re the guys tramping around in your country, shooting the place up!” sign on our collective forehead. By tying our army down in a wild goose chase—and doing terrible harm to it in the process—Bush left us vulnerable to moves by other unfriendly nations. Russia, for example, felt free to voice considerably more hostility after watching us flounder in Iraq, and the other two members of the “axis of evil” saw fit to antagonize the US, safe in the knowledge that we couldn’t even handle what little we have on our plate now. Much of the debacle following hurricane Katrina was a product of mangling a once-effective FEMA to turn it into yet another anti-terrorism program under the new Department of Homeland Security. It’s hard to prove Bush did not keep America safe in the much more limited sense of preventing another terrorist attack, but it’s equally difficult to prove that he did. Like the claim of preventing an economic meltdown, the claim of keeping America safe is a pure hypothetical. We’ve been safe since 9/11 from imaginary attacks, much like we’ve launched a war to protect us from imaginary nuclear weapons. Well done there.

Bush lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts. Sorta. Lifted until now, when the economic meltdown the memo claims Bush to have taken bold steps to prevent has wiped out the gains made on credit since 2001, leaving us with nothing to show for all the debt—except, of course, the debt. The memo prefers not to mention either our current state or the multi-trillion dollar deficit.

Bush also helped curb the AIDS epidemic in Africa. While a good and noble thing, this is nothing like a priority for a US president. That such an item should be number three on the list speaks volumes.

To find campaign promises met, they have to dredge all the way back to the very earliest days of the presidency: the passage of the misnamed “No Child Left Behind” Act, which has not altered the performance of US students as measured against other nations’ to any statistically significant degree, but which has led to a lot of marginal students being dropped schools worried for their performance reviews. Since the act’s passage in early 2001, it seems, no campaign promises of any substance have been kept, at least none for which the White House wishes to be remembered.

“Above all” in the memo’s estimation, “George W. Bush promised to uphold the honor and the dignity of his office. And through all the challenges and trials of his time in office, that is a charge that our president has kept.” Claims of honor and dignity may sound strange indeed, when the Bush years ushered in no-bid contracts, government-sanctioned torture, and massive privacy invasions of our own citizens. But it makes sense if you remember that to uphold the honor and dignity of the presidency was another campaign promise: code for “I won’t be caught in an affair with an intern, like Clinton was.”

That’s it. The grand accomplishment, above all others, that the White House wants to be remembered for, after eight years in the most powerful office in the world: Bush didn’t get caught in an affair with an intern. Talk about lowering the bar.

The news broke this morning that ongoing investigations into Rod Blagojevich, current Governor of Illinois, is under arrest on seven federal charges of corruption. It’s going to be impossible to know the whole story with any certainty, because rumor and conspiracy theories are going to muddy the waters quite badly. Still, at least one thing seems clear: knowing full well he was already under investigation for corruption, but apparently oblivious to the likelihood that he was being observed and recorded in the course of that investigation, Blagojevich couldn’t restrain himself from trying to get what he could out of this plum while the getting was good.

It looks like Illinois will see another governor convicted. Blagojevich’s predecessor, George Ryan, is still in prison for his graft conviction, which one might expect to act as something of a warning, but Illinois had to hold onto the coveted title for “most convicted governors” in the face of a rising challenge from Alaska, with Ted Stevens convicted and Sarah Palin committing highly visible indiscretions concurrently with investigations into her own misconduct and the 2008 campaigns.

The timing of Blagojevich’s arrest in relation to the choice to replace Obama in the Senate is no coincidence. But the relationship between the two is out in the open, not the mark of a conspiracy to influence Illinois politics. In addition to previous crimes, Blagojevich apparently sought to sell his power to appoint Obama’s replacement to the highest bidder. Understandably, federal prosecutor Fitzgerald felt that bringing down the hammer before such an appointment occurred outweighed whatever benefits might be found in waiting to gather more evidence and otherwise secure a conviction. Sadly, there is no right answer to the question of when to make the arrest; a pall of doubt would hang over the appointment in any case. By arresting Blagojevich now, Fitzgerald has closed the door on complaints that the Senate seat was for sale, but opened the door to accusations that outsiders are interfering with the process for reasons of their own.

It’s possible. Had the arrest taken place, say, in 2006, when Blagojevich was running for re-election, I might have believed partisan political motivations were part of the picture. Certainly the Bush administration made little effort to hide its attempts to politicize the DoJ. But to see the arrest taking place today, I’m pretty sure conspiracy theories in this vein are a losing proposition. Bush is so lame that Obama is practically making policy now, despite his insistence that America has only one president, and doing so with the approval of Congress, the news media, and the American public. Politically-minded officials in the DoJ can see which way the wind is blowing, and that they won’t earn themselves any favors by using federal police to interfere with Democrats. If anything, nailing Blagojevich today does the Dems a favor, eliminating the thorny question of how to replace a deeply unpopular governor without ceding the governorship to the Republicans in a general election.

…Hang on. Maybe the field is still ripe for conspiracy theorists. Lemme get back to you on that.

The Big Three auto executives did a lousy job of asking Congress for a whopping great $300 billion bailout. They came across as arrogant, greedy, and incompetent, assured that they, too, are too large to fail, and that they would be given the same kind of free pass as the banks receiving their $750B. Like the banks, they had no plan, no real guarantee that the money would actually prevent disaster, nor even that the money wouldn’t disappear down some hole (or rather, into the pockets of shareholders and of the executives themselves). They went home empty-handed. With good reason.

But Congress did a lousy job, as well.

First: Congress let the Big Three execs come back and ask again. Congressman Ackerman scored a stinging public relations blow when he asked which, if any of the executives had flown commercial instead of taking separate private luxury jets, as a microscopic gesture of willingness to participate in the general belt-tightening they wish to foist on the taxpayers. But somehow Congress got that stinging blow all turned about, as though the real problem in a $25B handout was only that the execs looked arrogant, and incompetent. As long as they were willing to put on a frowny face for the afternoon, they would be allowed to ask again. Would you be willing to drive cross country for $8B? So would I. Why can’t I get the same offer? Do you think that putting on a frowny face somehow transforms these pigs into responsible citizens? Or do you think that the possibility of $8B apiece if only they pretend to be humble for an afternoon might make them willing to pretend to be humble?

Second: Congress is nodding sagely at the idea of a handout now that the Big Three have been chastened into presenting a concrete plan, while treating the actual nature of the plan itself as irrelevant. Consider: one of the major proposals for making all three companies viable, for making sure that the $25B isn’t simply wasted on companies that will go belly up anyway, is a hefty round of layoffs. Now think about this: the whole justification of saving the automakers despite the enormous price tag is to preserve jobs, right? What sense does it make to finance, at a whopping $25B, the deliberate elimination of jobs?

The eagerness with which Congress is looking to pass $25B to the auto makers proves the earlier, more visible arrogance of their CEOs was well founded. As long as it doesn’t have to suffer the kind of bloodletting the Big Three suffered in the editorial pages, then everything is fine: here’s the treasury, help yourself.

Just as long as you’re not a homeowner or an auto worker, the kind of person who actually needs some assistance. Then you get to help pay for these handouts.

We watched Synecdoche, New York last night. The movie suddenly appeared on Eileene’s radar yesterday, probably as part of an online discussion—when our local art theater had only two nights left to show it. We were both going to be busy tonight, so away we went.

The script is very confusing, as you might expect from Charlie Kaufmann. Caitlin Kiernan described it as “not as ‘accessible’ as Kaufmann’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) or Being John Malkovich (1999),” so I knew it was going to be a bumpy ride. Sure enough.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a theater director/producer with severe and often downright weird family problems, and severe and often downright weird health problems who decides to do a theater production of his own life. The refining of the project takes his entire life, and becomes increasingly self-referential as he seeks to depict his attempts to create the play, with people playing the people who play people, and becoming increasingly jumbled concerning to who is who and what is real. And some bits are definitely surreal from the start, like the burning house that assistant Hazel occupies, burning for years until her inevitable death by smoke inhalation. The whole movie becomes increasingly jumbled, really. I can’t claim to understand it—no embarrassment when big-name film critics admit the same—only to have picked up general themes of death, emotional detachment, and a dream-like confusion that seems to reflect the failures of memory.

I found it easiest to digest the movie as the last moments of a Caden’s life, literally his life flashing before his eyes,b but badly distorted by the dementia that can accompany old age and/or death. That probably doesn’t do justice to what is more likely a complex interplay of reality, confusion, and outright fantasy, but it helped.

It’s a shame we had to rush to see the film. You need to be in the right frame of mind to absorb even a good chunk of a movie like that. (Getting it all in one go is pretty well impossible, even with the right frame of mind and a background in film.) It’s a frame of mind that you can create, with time to prepare, and I didn’t have that time. It would have helped me to enjoy the movie. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, exactly, but I definitely did float along thinking, “Huh,” rather than packing elements together in a conceptual framework, only to see it dashed apart, to emerge into ever widening conceptual frameworks, and generally playing along with the head games.

Synecdoche is worth seeing. Twice, so you can pick up stuff. Maybe more, if you would rather spring for the video. But do yourself a favor: go in sharp-witted, and eager for head games. Not a movie to follow a long day at the office, or a big meal, or a bad night’s sleep.

I’m going to be playing a force of nature in our next RPG campaign. This is not excessive; others are playing a demon, a goddess, a fairy noble, and a mortal capable of raising the dead. It’s a high-powered campaign. I’m going with a rather unattractive force of nature: the embodiment of pests and vermin. While the possibility exists in the future to manifest as an anthropomorphic god, for the time being my character will manifest only as roughly human-sized swarms of icky little organisms: rats and cockroaches and mildew and wasps and pigeons and more. The idea isn’t quite unique; In Nomine includes a type of angel that can inhabit multiple bodies at once, which it hijacks from the occupant. If the right kind of angel serves the right archangel, it can inhabit whole swarms of tiny creatures at once. But that’s the only place I’ve seen the idea pursued in an RPG, and we aren’t using that system, so I’m largely on my own in making such a complicated and unconventional character work.

Fortunately, the system we are using requires you to build your character from elemental abilities, so it can handle the task if I’m sufficiently clever. (And I should be, with a good grasp of math and long RPG experience.) Mutants and Masterminds is intended primarily to model superheroes and supervillains, whose abilities are frequently all over the map, too, and it does a fair job of it.

I’m not particularly devoted to superhero campaigns, but I confess I adore creating characters for them, simply as an exercise in minimaxing, and discovering what can be done. I loved tinkering with Champions in college, too, which forces me to speculate: which system is better?

Honestly, they have more in common than they do differences. Clearly, the games have stolen plays from one anothers’ books, if you’ll pardon the pun—that the cumbersome and unintuitive rules for automatic fire alone are nearly identical in both systems prove that someone’s been swiping someone else’s material, and inexplicably stealing bad material, at that. (Both games have gone through several editions, and I’d be willing to bet the theft goes both ways.) I don’t know which system initiated the brilliant idea of separating superpowered effect from the appearance of that superpowered effect, but both use it now. (For example, Mr. Lightning’s electric zap and CrackShot’s sniper bullet are both damaging blasts and use almost identical rules, even though they look very different. But Mr. Lightning’s electric zap and Electric Lass’s paralytic zaps are different powers, and use different rules, even though they look the same.) I don’t know which system pioneered the equally brilliant idea of modifying basic powers with more personalized advantages and disadvantages to get exactly the effect you want, but both use that now, as well. That combination of effect-versus-appearance and customizable modifiers is the heart of both systems, and practically the entire reason superhero games are played at all.

Still, the differences are there, if you look, and if you’re a system geek like me.

M&M’s main advantage is simplicity, which is important if not everyone in your group is an MIT student. Not that M&M is simple, but designing an effective Champs character compares unfavorably with the complexity of a calculus midterm. Seriously. The price of all that flexibility is complexity. M&M also scales down to normals much better, and has a clever damage system that means no one is entirely safe in a fight.

Champ’s main advantage is attention to play balance. It enjoys a lot of small advantages, like a more flexible turn sequence to simulate fast (or super-fast) characters and a bell curve instead of a flat probability distribution, but play balance is the big one. Both systems allow for some horrible, rule-abusive monstrosities designed to take advantage of extremely efficient combinations of powers, but the Champs designers were a lot more careful about making sure that the cost of a power (measured in limited points you have to spend buying your powers) accurately reflects its potential for mayhem. Sometimes, a very ordinary power is overly expensive because a slightly different version of that power would be a lot more effective, but that’s far, far better than an unstoppable uber-power costing a tiny fraction of what it should, as often happens in M&M.

To illustrate: M&M and Champions both use a point system: everything your character can do costs a certain number of character points, and stronger the power in a superheroic environment, the more points it costs. Want to be able to shoot laser beams from your eyes? Twenty points. Want to be able to fly? Ten more points. Want to be an expert cook? One point. This helps ensure play balance, so that no one player can do everything and steal the spotlight from the other players all the time. Both systems also have powers that simulate superheroes who can change into radically different forms, with equally radically different powers—think Bruce Banner and the Hulk, each of which can operate very well in some environments and quite poorly in others. That kind of complementary ability is very powerful; you could design a character with nothing but awesome combat powers, and another with nothing but awesome powers of persuasion, and another with super-senses that allow him to see, hear, and know everything, then switch back and forth between those characters according to whether you’re fighting, or talking, or spying on other people.

In Champs, doing that costs roughly 20% of the cost of what each character can do; you pay for enormous flexibility with an equally enormous 20% reduction in raw power. In M&M, doing that costs roughly three points, out of a total of 150 or so. For a mere 2% of your character point total, you can ensure that all of the remaining 98% are being used to do whatever you happen to be doing at the moment, rather than going unused in powers suited for a different situation.

In the bad old days of D&D, when players were assumed to want all the power they could wrangle within the letter of the rules, and part of the GM’s job was to strip that power away before it got out of control, that would be a deal-breaker. But we live in a more sophisticated RPG era, when players and GMs alike recognize that just because you can do something to increase your personal power doesn’t mean you should, and players tend to limit their own power when the GM asks them, just because it would exceed the campaign’s implicit ground rules and spoil the dramatic tension, like introducing Superman into a Jack London tale. (“You need to build a fire? No problem! I can set that tree on fire with my heat vision!” Brzzzzap! “Good thing I’m immune to the bitter cold of Alaska!”)

Still, M&M misvalues so many of its powers that are useful for creating unique and interesting characters that it can be hard to avoid creating an overpowered monster, even if you aren’t trying, just by trying to create a character who does what you want to be able to do; the interesting power you want becomes an unstoppable uber-power almost as a side effect. I’ve done it twice and my character design still isn’t finished. I had to jump through considerable hoops to prevent my character from being more powerful than I intend, and perversely had to spend a lot of points doing so.

All in all, I’d consider it a near draw. I rather prefer Champs myself, because I was and MIT student, and I first played Champs with other MIT students. (Also, I saw that system first, so it’s hard not to think of it as the “normal” system, and M&M as some kind of variation.) I have to admit that Champs is a horrible nightmare of a kluge. A kluge that works, mind you, but a kluge nonetheless. M&M may be only a little better, but even a little better is…better. Especially these days, playing as I do with English and photography and other liberal art majors. Never having seen the original edition of M&M, I remain ignorant of and curious about which shortcomings it suffers as a result of its original designers’ intent, and which shortcomings it inherited from D&D in its attempt to convert to a d20-friendly format. Probably starting with those stupid, stupid grappling rules.

Huffington Post ran an article yesterday headlined “Bush: ‘I’m Sorry’ About The Economic Crisis,” quoting him from a Charlie Gibson interview on ABC World News. Another writeup of the same interview had him apologizing for Iraq and the 2008 election losses for the Republican party generally. Well, it ain’t true. The quotes Huffington Post uses are short and choppy, some as short as a single word, so I went and watched the interview itself, and the quotes are picked out of context and slipped into politically motivated interpretive text with all the art of an organization with an axe to grind.

Not that Bush looked any better in what he actually said. These supposed apologies weren’t apologies at all, but rather in the nature of complaints, expressions of frustration that things didn’t go the way Bush had hoped. Usually, they carry the implication that someone else was to blame.

For example, discussing his attempts to smooth over partisan rifts came to nothing. “So I didn’t go into this naively; I knew it would be tough. But I also knew that the president has the responsibility to try to elevate the tone. And, frankly, it just didn’t work, as well as I’d like to have it work.” Tough to do when you enter office on a razor-thin margin and act as though you have a clear mandate from the entire nation, and that cooperation means “do things my way.” Tougher still when your efforts to elevate the tone pass through Karl rove for approval. But to Bush, it’s a real shame the rest of Washington didn’t go along with my efforts to elevate the tone.

Bush considers the biggest regret of his presidency was “the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence.” Bush’s memory is a little off; the intelligence in question was released to Congress and a select few world leaders by the Bush administration, not at all prior to his arrival in Washington D.C. Neither received a full picture; the intelligence was cherry-picked for a desired result, and even then failed to convince an awful lot of its audience. The intelligence was also produced by the CIA, at the request of Bush, after he rejected extensive military intelligence indicating no WMDs at all in Iraq. Still, to Bush’s mind, it was a failure of intelligence: it’s a real shame he was so badly misinformed.

(Not that his misinformed decision was wrong. It’s hard for Bush to speculate on whether he would have pursued war had he known there were no WMDs. But the decision was the right one, whether grounded in reality or fantasy.)

McCain’s loss was a disappointment, too, but he was fighting a strong head wind. The first reason Bush cites for McCain’s defeat? The American public rarely elects a party to the presidency for three consecutive terms. (Incidentally, this is untrue; out of 28 opportunities to elect a president of the same party following two consecutive terms of a given party, the country has done so 17 times.) Okay, and the economy had something to do with it. Pressed on the question: was the election in any way a repudiation of the Bush administration? “I think it was a repudiation of Republicans.”

And speaking of the economy, most interesting of all is another of Bush’s not-at-all-apologies for the economic situation. “I’m sorry it’s happening, of course.” Not “I’m sorry for the part I played in creating this mess,” just a sense of the unfairness that something like this should happen to him. Gibson pressed the question: does Bush feel in any way responsible for what’s happening? “You know, I’m the president during this period of time, but I think when the history of this period is written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so before I arrived in President, during I arrived in President.”

I think Bush meant to say that the decisions during the decade or so before he became president, rather than that the decisions happened over a decade before he became president. It would fit with the current attempt by the right wing to paint the entire economic crisis as a product solely of progressive housing and education programs, specifically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the rest of the deregulated circus of speculation, debt, and artificially low interest rates being of no consequence. A propaganda campaign to blame everything on efforts to help the ni—um… that is, African-Americans and other undesirables own houses like the rest of Americans pursuing the American dream fits with Bush’s following comments: “I’m a little upset that we didn’t get the reforms to Fannie and Freddie—on Fannie and Freddie—because I think it would have helped a lot. And when people review the history of the administration, people will say that this administration tried hard to get a regulator. And there will be a lot of analysis of why that didn’t happen. I suspect people will find a lot of it didn’t happen for pure political reasons.” Yes, George W. Bush, champion of massive deregulation, really, really wanted to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and he, head of the entire executive branch of government, simply couldn’t regulate it. His hands were tied. For political reasons. (This directly contradicts a recently released AP review of regulatory documents from a year before the meltdown.)

But, really, who knows with certainty what Bush meant to say? Often, it seems Bush isn’t entirely sure, himself. Whether or not pinning the economic crisis on the previous ten years was his intent, his actual statement was that it was the result of decisions made over ten years ago.

When daddy was president. And beloved Saint Ronnie before him.

A very backwards case of children and fools speaking true, to be sure, but an undeniable one, nonetheless.

The first order of business upon returning from a week-long visit with my parents over Thanksgiving was to restock the refrigerator. Our meat supplies are adequate, but the fresh produce was predictably no longer so fresh. Plus we were missing some basic necessities that I chose to consolidate with a later fruit and veg run.

The first order of business in the grocery store—and other stores, too, no doubt—at the end of Thanksgiving was to fill the in-store speaker system with insipid Christmas music. The few stores I visited before Thanksgiving showed admirable restraint in waiting to switch to Christmas music…or perhaps I should say “Xmas music,” since the good Christmas songs, the ones like Adeste Fidelis or O Come, O Come Emmanuel that have actual religion in them, are too controversial to be piped to a general audience: secularists roll their eyes, followers of other religions take offense, and even the fundamentalists raise a stink about dirty, commerialist interests stealing “their” music.

I can’t begrudge Shop-Rite a month of folks dressed up like Eskimos, because the rest of the year, they play real music, music that you wouldn’t think belongs in a store’s PA system.

Like Eric Clapton in Layla, the infamous invitation to adultery. And not that wimpy unplugged version, either. The original, with its wicked guitar licks. And Jimi playing Foxy Lady. And Don’t Stand So Close to Me, great for the kiddies pushing their “shopper in training” carts. Typically, stores aiming at a general demographic go for elevator music, or, when they’re feeling particularly rockin’, some James Taylor or one of the milder Billy Joel tunes. Our grocery store has a better mix than New York’s classic rock station; I know this because I’ve been tuning in while driving on grocery runs just to see how they measure up against one another. I had to send the Shop-Rite a thank-you note.