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Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt recently offered a statement to the press. Medicare, he claims, is in trouble. This is hardly news; federal officials have warned of a looming crisis for a couple of decades. One might fairly say the crisis is already upon us, and has been for some time. Horror stories of people denied treatment because the budget isn’t there are already daily news. There is no budget because it was raided to fuel military adventures, and to cover income lost to tax cuts for the rich, on a promise to recover the loss when the inevitable economic boom tax cuts create arrived. (Remember the promised economic boom? We’re in it right now. Kinda hard to tell, I realize.)

But stating that Medicare is currently screwed up, largely if not entirely by the current administration, is what they call a “politically untenable” position. Instead, Leavitt characterizes Medicare as “drifting towards disaster,” but reassures us that “The disaster is not inevitable. If we act now, we can change the outcome.” Most people would consider that good reason to act now. Leavitt, however, doesn’t think so.

In his estimation, it is already too late for the Bush administration to do anything about it. (The subject of what the Bush administration should have been doing, but pointedly failed to do, about it during its many years at the wheel, shockingly, did not come up.) Not that failing to do his own job, the job at hand, prevents him from attacking the opposition for inactivity on a job they currently have no control over. Never too late to stick the knife in, or to pass the blame. Apparently serene about his own office’s neglect, Leavitt is nevertheless troubled: “It troubles me that this matter is not receiving more attention in the presidential candidates’ discussions. The next president will have to deal with this in significant part.” We’re ignoring the crisis, so you should ask some hard questions of those up-and-coming candidates you see so much in the news; it’s all their fault. Going to have been their fault. Whatever.

Knowing it is already too late to do anything must come as a great comfort to the administration generally, and to Leavitt in particular. It’s nice to have an excuse to ignore a responsibility you’ve already decided to abandon.

Posted by at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We recently watched a new-ish Christmas special. Due to the delay between airing a show in Britain and its availability online where Eileene harvests food for her BBC addiction (and, possibly, the time it takes even to learn of a particular show of interest), it was unseasonable, but hey, why not? I’ll file it under “keeping the Christmas spirit alive all through the year,” as so many smarmy shows ask us to do.
This show, happily, inflicts a minimum of smarm because it’s Hogfather, one of Terry Pratchett’s satirical Discworld novels. I was a little confused as to why the BBC should start with this one, instead of starting with his first (The Color of Magic), or one of the stronger titles (opinions vary, but there is a general consensus that the books got considerably better with time and practice), or at least something a little cheaper to produce, with simpler sets. Eileene figures the BBC started with this book because it was a relatively safe way to test the waters: they could count on a certain number of viewers simply due to the season, in addition to Pratchett fans. Then, if it tested well, they could consider producing other titles in the series, and if not, they cut their losses. I suppose Eileene’s theory is correct, but a second possible explanation occurs to me.
After watching the show, Eileene showed an interest in reading some of the Discworld books, and agreed that I should check a couple out for her from the library. This placed me in something of a dilemma.
I already mentioned the opinion that Pratchett improved as an author with practice. I share that opinion, as does Pratchett himself. I’d go so far as to say the first half dozen or so titles are pretty lame. The humor depends on a juvenile degradation of fantasy conventions—giving Conan the Barbarian false teeth and flatulence, for example. After this phase, Pratchett begins to find his own voice, instead of merely mocking someone else’s, but he still takes a few more books working past a thin repetition of the same plot, in which popular culture—films, rock music, shopping malls—threaten to open a rift to the dimension of unspeakable entities before he finally settles into a triumphant satirizing of human nature generally.
Like many readers, my first exposure to Discworld was The Color of Magic, and I didn’t bother reading any more. Also like many readers, it was only years later that I approached Discworld from the middle, picking up a different novel without realizing the connection, enjoying it, and becoming enthused about reading the rest. Eileene never got past The Color of Magic, which is hardly surprising: not a fantasy reader by nature, she didn’t even recognize the characters it satirized. Sensitive to such problems, I wanted to pick the best starting point for her to begin. The dilemma lay in the way that Pratchett recycles characters as running gags: the later, and generally more skillfully written, the book, the less readily a new reader will identify with the characters and appreciate the humor. And since, like any fan, I wanted Eileene to become as enthused about the books as I had, I needed to start where the optimum balance between these competing drives.
That decision is a judgment call: some fans would draw that dividing line a little earlier, others a little later. Coincidentally enough, I drew it at Hogfather, although I brought Reaper Man home as well, since Death, who Eileene liked so much in Hogfather, really begins his personal history there.
And so I wonder whether the BBC, in choosing to start with Hogfather, didn’t do so at least in part for much the same reason, in addition to a desire to cash in on the holiday season.

Posted by at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today’s New York Times reports that lawyers for the defense in terrorism cases across the country fear the Justice department is monitoring their dealings with their clients. Needless to say, this would be a gross violation of attorney-client privilege and of the Fourth Amendment if true—and it’s pretty safe to say it is, given the carefully-worded non-denial the Times quotes the Justice department offering and an actual logbook of such eavesdropping mistakenly sent to defense lawyers in one case. We can just toss it on the growing heap of constitutional violations our government has adopted as a matter of ongoing policy.

The article treats such violations primarily as problems in their own right, as indeed they are. Suspects cannot possibly get a fair trial if their conversations with their legal counsel is being tapped. The possibility that the defense’s strategy could be leaked to the prosecution is bad enough. (The DoJ denies that this happens. The DoJ has denied a lot of criminal behavior in the past seven years which have quickly proven to be the case.) On top of that are the difficulties that the defense will be sabotaged simply because lawyer and client may not be able to communicate effectively, for fear that an honest exchange will be mined for further material.

These are not just violations of the defendants’ rights, rights the DoJ and the White House no longer bother to acknowledge, preferring a presumption of guilt, or at least a conviction that “innocent until proven guilty” has somehow become a dangerous luxury in today’s dangerous world. They are violations of the lawyers’ own right to privacy, especially as information gained through tapping attorney-client discussions, and even of discussions between that attorney and other attorneys not directly involved in the case, are used to fuel prosecutions of the lawyers themselves, as they were used to prosecute and convict civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart on charges of passing information on behalf of imprisoned terrorists, earning her a 28-month sentence of her own. Simply defending a terrorism suspect has become de facto cause to pursue the defending lawyer as a suspected terrorist.

This, too, is unconscionable, and the article addresses such concerns. What the article fails to do is address what I consider the real problem of the reported monitoring of attorney-client conversations, apart from one quick sentence way down in the fourteenth paragraph, citing lawyer Sean M. Maher for a claim that “he knew talented private lawyers who were refusing to take on terrorism cases because of potential violations of their privacy, including monitoring communications with their clients,” after which it progresses on to more detail of the immediate harm done to clients and attorneys already subjected to illegal monitoring.

That citation, however, represents a far greater threat to our system of justice than any individual harm. It is representative of how a totalitarian state, or a nascent totalitarian movement, cows the population at large. A totalitarian government doesn’t have to jail all the dissidents to silence dissent. It doesn’t even have to secure convictions for all the dissidents. It doesn’t even have to secure a conviction for a single dissident. All it has to do is harass enough dissidents to make the rest decide that taking a principled stance isn’t worth the hassle they can expect to receive. Once people decide that fighting back is too dangerous, the authoritarians silence dissent without actually continuing to silence it.

The article reports that “the administration says it has shut down the security agency’s wiretapping program.” I don’t believe it simply because the White House says so, and neither should you. But even if we were to grant it were true, the damage has been done. If good lawyers, who might otherwise defend those accused of terrorism, decide they can’t risk the trouble it might bring them, then the legal defense has been sabotaged across the board, regardless of whether any individual defendant’s trial was compromised by illegal observation.

Mission accomplished.

Posted by at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, I started talking about “The Lost Room” with one point in mind, and before I got very far, had drifted into an entirely different point. Sometimes it happens that way.

So let me get back to what I wanted to say in the first place. “The Lost Room” wasn’t perfect; while it had some creative, deliciously weird moments, it sometimes fell into stupid tropes, too, like The Hero suddenly having sex with The Chick for no conceivable reason. The one that really got under my skin was the cabals, shadowy power groups that somehow always know what everyone else is doing, despite the fact that every individual you see on the show, including members of the competing cabals, are pretty clueless, operating on a mixture of panic, wild guesses, and the synchronistic way the Objects themselves are drawn to one another, with their owners in tow.

I think the show would have been more interesting if the people involved were just people, not “The Legion,” “The Order of Reunification,” “The Collectors,” and so on, along with a guy rich and amoral enough to make a powerful faction of one. I said as much to Eileene, who figured that it’s only natural that organizations of Object seekers, and especially Object owners, pool their efforts. She’s right, but such reasoning only goes so far. My problem is that the cabals should hold together long enough to become functional, especially since we see people in the cult of the Objects, including members of the Cabals, betray one another with frequent and casual indifference.

My first thought was of some of the penetrating analysis of the paradoxes of conspiracy theory, and especially of participating in the kind of conspiracies the real crazies imagine, offered in the monumental GURPS Illuminati rulebook. For example, the Illuminati (or similar all-powerful conspiracies) work (or are imagined to work) through a pyramid structure, each power group controlled by agents planted in key positions by groups higher in the structure, and everybody thinks they’re at the top of the pyramid. Given this, even the members of the innermost circle of the conspiracy have to doubt the fact. Once you admit that people can be made to believe anything through sufficiently sophisticated disinformation, and that the conspiracy can produce this level of disinformation, you have to accept that anything else you may know about the conspiracy may just be what someone wants you to think you know about it. Once you start accepting data that supports your wild theories about the conspiracy and dismissing data that undermines it as disinformation planted by the conspiracy, you can believe anything, and prove it, too, just as long as someone else accepts your categorization of what is true evidence and what is manufactured by the conspiracy. Once the conspiracy controls everything, there’s no power in the world to stop any one member from subverting the conspiracy to his own personal goals (which, given human nature, won’t quite match the conspiracy’s purpose)—except another member of the conspiracy. Conspiracies, including cabals trying to collect the Objects, are doomed by their very nature to split.

But after mulling it over for a while, I can find a simpler metaphor for why the cabals are implausible. If you’ve ever been in an MMO guild, you know that “drama”—petty politics fueled by ego and greed—is an inevitable part of the scenery. It doesn’t always get out of hand, but it usually does, sooner or later, for every group of forty or more gamers. Often, the drama leads to a splintering of the guild. Invariably, at least one side and probably both, exaggerate the affair out of all proportion. If otherwise decent, playful, friendly people can get so worked up over a +12 sword of butt-kicking—or, more accurately, a pixilated representation of said sword—that they refuse to talk to a couple dozen former friends ever again, and tend to reproduce these rows every year or two, how would the openly treacherous weasels of “The Lost Room” behave, while pursuing the Objects, and with them, the possibility of rewriting the whole of reality, or touching the mind of God, or other matters of cosmic import?

That’s right. They wouldn’t last a week together.

Posted by at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eileene periodically makes me watch shows that I should see. It’s good for me. Keeps the well-worn grooves in my brain from calcifying entirely.

Most recently, we watched a copy of “The Lost Room,” a three-episode show the Sci-Fi Channel aired a few years ago. In brief, “The Lost Room” plunges the protagonist into a dangerous subculture revolving around small, common, innocuous-looking things from a not-quite-real hotel room somehow involved in a strange, reality-defying event. These things have strange powers, some of them useful, others less so. A bus ticket, with a tap on the head, causes people to fall, painfully, face-down on a road near Gallup, NM. (Have fun getting home!) A wristwatch hard-boils any egg placed within it. A comb stops time for a few seconds, leaving the holder immune. People obsess about them, pursue them, collect lore about them, track rumors of their movements, try to figure out where the hotel room is and what happened there. Some work alone, some form cabals to pursue half-baked goals.

Uncharacteristically, I was already aware of the show from another source, in this case a newsgroup devoted to the Unknown Armies RPG. The game’s setting—or, more precisely, the default setting it envisions, since the themes at the heart of the game are universal—revolves around a subculture of mystical adepts competing for power, as measured by their decidedly skewed perspectives. The UA newsgroup, and UA fans generally, gravitate to the Fortean, and carry on a steady conversation calling one another’s attention to weird events, weird fiction, and even strikingly weird images which could be mined for useful adventure ideas.

The UA newsgroup was very excited about “The Lost Room” when it came out. Not familiar with the show, I didn’t pick much up from the conversation. Now that I am, I see why it was considered such a fertile ground for UA campaigns. The participants on the newsgroup had missed the entire point, as they so often do.

The newsgroup conversation focused on the weird things—the Objects—and what other Objects might exist without appearing on the show, and what they might do and how to use the Objects together in creative ways. This was interesting, as it was in the show itself, but weird stuff isn’t really the crux of UA.

Nobody talked much about the reason “The Lost Room” attracted all the attention on this particular newsgroup: the tone was right. UA can be adapted to a variety of settings and tones, but the default is one of small-time grifters and thugs preying upon one another as much as upon one another, stealing one another’s mojo out of greed or pre-emptive self-defense or just on general principle. A few make good on their ambition and achieve power and status, at least within the occult underground, but most remain small-time grifters and thugs, waiting for the Big Score. The opening scene of “The Lost Room” shows a sweaty, nervous exchange of a hotel key for $2,000,000 at gunpoint. It comes to no good for anyone involved. UA works hard to maintain a sense that wondrous powers have a price: magic is fueled by obsessive, transgressive, self-destructive behavior. Every form of power has its price, and in UA, the price usually includes a decent, normal lifestyle, not to mention a chance behave decently toward your fellow man. As Wally observes while enlightening Detective Miller on the nature of the Objects, “All that matters? Is the price. That’s what nobody gets. There’s always a price to pay when using the Objects. Whether you know it or not, there’s always a price.”

Like I said, the tone was right.

But even that isn’t the kernel of what made the show such a natural UA match, although it’s close. The bitter heart of both game and show, the irreducible diamond nugget at the center of the concept is obsession. We all have our obsessions, and our psychological triggers, and UA invites us to recognize our own by defining some for our characters. UA characters pay the price of power less because they make a rational decision that it’s worth the price than because they simply can’t be any other way. People who perform hate magic, or lust magic, or chaos magic, do so by embracing that obsession and leaping past rational bounds, but the obsession comes first. It’s there whether they take the plunge or not. In “The Lost Room,” anyone who is in contact with an Object for very long—or, in some cases, even before contact at all—becomes obsessed. They may want more, or they may want to employ their Objects for higher purposes, but it’s the having that’s most important. Several characters plead not to have their Object taken, especially if it’s the only one they have, and the show takes a moment to portray the pitiable “losers,” who once had one or more Objects but no longer do. Like Gollum and his lost Precious, they are the truly wretched.

UA has an occult underground, and weird mystical shit clouding the waters, and an edgy, post-modern noir feel, and they get all the attention, because fanboys like weird, cool stuff. But they aren’t what the game is about. Note: it’s not about magick. Or guns. Or blowing shit up. Or freaking the norms. As the authors themselves say, it’s about obsession, and the price you’ll pay to pursue it. And if the fanboys really want to capture the spirit of the game they adore so, they need to get back to these basics.

Posted by at 5:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The housecat caught in a tree is an old cliché. I came across a peculiar variation on the theme yesterday, when I went out to fetch a magazine from the car. The neighbor’s dog—possibly a Doberman—was perched up on the edge of the picket fence separating our yards, right along the upper brace, no more than a couple inches wide.

I don’t know how she got up there, but I suspect I know why: in almost the same moment as I spotted the dog, I spotted another neighbor’s cat stepping nonchalantly across our driveway towards one of our trash cans, which had been knocked over by some third animal I never saw. “Dog? What dog? Ohhhh, that dog. I dunno—I got nothing to do with it. Oh, hey, are those chicken bones? You don’t mind if I just take a closer look at those, do you? Okay, just carry on about your business.”

The dog, by contrast, looked decidedly uncomfortable, unhappy to be balancing on that narrow ledge, but not really sure she could make the leap down, either. Adding to her discomfort was the fact that she didn’t know whether to accept my help or to growl at me for approaching the property line.

I had good reason to help; the situation presented two dangers. The jump down to our side of the fence actually was a little dangerous; the tree bed at the corner of the lot is filled with large, rough rocks, and I was worried the dog might hurt herself hopping down on those. The jump back to her own brick-lined yard would have been a lot safer were it not for the length of makeshift leash dangling from her collar onto our side, an entirely awkward and inappropriate substitute for a leash composed of plastic-sheathed steel cable, too short to be convenient, but long enough to be hazardous—if the dog just hopped back down into her own yard, there was a chance of the knob on the end of that makeshift leash catching between pickets of the fence. The leash was probably long enough not to leave her dangling choking from the fence if that happened, but I didn’t particularly want to test it.

So we both faced dilemmas: she whether to jump down or try to stay up, me whether to encourage her down on our side or their side of the fence. The neighbors were nowhere to be seen, although the other four dogs in the yard—yappy little vermin belonging to our neighbor’s boyfriend—were barking their heads off, happy at last to have an excuse to bark at nothing at all.

In the end, neither of us orchestrated her rescue. I decided just to lift her down; she looked light enough. So I made soothing noises and walked gently up to her. But although the plea for human assistance was clear in her expression, and her tail wagged limply, she decided she didn’t quite trust me. With a soft growl, she tried to back up without losing her balance, and failed, toppling down into her own yard. Both the leash and her paw caught between pickets of the fence, which was alarming, although I was able to flick both paw and leash free with no apparent damage, apart from the poor dog’s slightly bruised ego. (Yes, dogs do, on occasion, feel embarrassed.) Yet the whole episode was somewhat unsettling.

A dog is in many ways similar to a small child. I’m told their intelligence is quantitatively if not qualitatively equivalent to a two-year-old human’s, and they show the same willingness to trust adult authority—which in turn causes any decent adult to want to protect them from danger, whether or not the dog or child is his own. I didn’t do much of a job with our neighbor’s dog, though even with hindsight, I don’t see how I could have done any better. And it’s upsetting not to be able to make everything all right…despite the fact that everything did turn out all right.

Posted by at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone called my attention to the Gratitude Campaign website. The idea is to show appreciation for our troops by giving anyone you see in uniform a distinctive gesture of thanks: open palm, swiveling away from the heart.

It’s a measure of how cynical I’ve become of the national discourse that my first reaction to the “support our troops” message was to think it was a ploy to allow people to feel good about supporting the troops without actually, you know, supporting the troops.

Remember the outcry upon learning that returning troops were not receiving proper medical attention at the Walter Reed army hospital? Our commander-in-chief immediately expressed his indignation and promised to fix it up immediately. Heard anything lately on how that’s going—and even more importantly, how all the other, less visible military hospitals are being likewise improved? The military budget, and especially the portion of the military budget devoted to medical care for the troops hasn’t grown. Indeed, the whole Iraq was conspicuously left off the president’s proposed budget, to be funded by a string of “emergency spending” measures, to permit the president to claim he is keeping spending down. Predictably, treating our wounded veterans has not fallen under the heading of “emergency spending.”

A less reported scandal exposed how Pentagon officials began leaning on Fort Drum veterans’ groups to stop being so helpful towards veterans. The waters of the military bureaucracy are as treacherous and confusing as those of any bureaucracy, and veterans often have difficulty in applying properly for their benefits (which may be taken as an excuse not to provide them); often, they are not aware of all benefits for which they are eligible. One of the important functions of the VA is to help keep our returning soldiers aware of what they are entitled to, and to help them get it. But that can get expensive, so apparently the Pentagon has decided to “support our troops” by forming “tiger teams” to instruct the scattered offices in the Department of Veterans Affairs not to help veterans with their paperwork, and keeping the money for projects more glamorous than physical therapy.

This month, the President announced that tours of duty in Iraq will be reduced from 15 months to 12, and that we will begin drawing troops down. How very generous. Tours of duty were only to be 12 months in the first place, and were expanded simply because insufficient cannon fodder could be found, recruiters having a hard time getting fresh blood after stories about our how the Secretary of Defense chose to “support our troops” by going to war with the army he had, instead of the army he should have had. Body armor costs money, you know? And planning for a long occupation doesn’t look so good on a political resume. The presented draw-down is nothing more than the (late) expiration of the troop surge, planned as a short-term measure not because it would only be needed for the short term but because we can’t keep it up. Even the generals, historically vocal in their belief that the US military can take on any enemy, mutter that this little adventure is breaking the army.

They can’t speak up too loudly, of course. A general who complains that the president is not, in fact, supporting the troops gets to enjoy an early retirement. It is proper that officers who go to the press to complain of anything short of criminal negligence or treason in the president’s handling of our military be cashiered; our military is wholly subordinate to the civil authority for good and sufficient reasons. But, sadly, senior officers who opposed the invasion of Iraq quietly, within the halls of power, as they should, also found their careers sidelined into Alaskan air base paper clip inventory. Because, after all, you can’t “support our troops” by insisting they be endangered for real reasons, or insisting upon a plan designed to succeed; that might undermine confidence in a rapid, painless, and inexpensive, albeit fictitious, victory.

Consistently, the conservatives running the country—in the president’s staff, in Congress, in the press, and even the ordinary citizen with a yellow sticker on his car but a refusal to pay taxes to fund the war on his lips—have said “support our troops” when, in fact, they only mean “support our war.” To them, the troops are unimportant. The hypocrisy has been so thick and so consistent that I reflexively think anyone calling for us to support our troops doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them. That’s not entirely fair, but it’s hard to overcome.

It’s not fair to the Gratitude Campaign, which just asks that we thank our soldiers. There’s nothing wrong with thanking our troops, and plenty right with it. They deserve it for offering up their lives (both literally and in the broader sense of career, family, and hobbies), to serve national interests. And if they’ve offered their lives to serve petty, deceitful goals that are not actually in the national interest, the troops, at least, deserve our gratitude (and shame) all the more. It’s not fair of me to think reflexively that this is an excuse to shirk responsibility for supporting the troops in any meaningful, material fashion, just as “compassionate conservatism” was an excuse to abandon the working poor and hope charity would take care of it all. The Gratitude Campaign is probably just some genuine folks who, knowing a few soldiers, realize that soldiers like to be told once in a while that we appreciate their sacrifice. Hearing it from an ordinary citizen who doesn’t have to make the gesture might mean more than hearing it from a politician, who does, whether or not he actually supports the troops.

So my skepticism shouldn’t be directed at the campaign, and with effort, I turn it elsewhere: to any reader who buys into the campaign and begins waving from heart to soldier.

If you think it’s a good idea to participate in the Gratitude Campaign, ask yourself what you’re doing to support the troops besides a quick wave. If you thank a soldier in addition to writing your Congressman to make a stink about Walter Reed, calling for increased taxes to pay to equip them, and demanding government accountability for the war before it started, more power to you. If you merely thank a soldier instead of doing these things, after cheering them off to an unjustified war because it warmed your jingoistic little heart, it’s a bandaid to your conscience, another incarnation of “compassionate conservatism.” Shame on you.

Posted by at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Pope will shortly be making the rounds here in New York City. I haven’t paid much attention to his visit, but it so happens that Eileene will be going into town to keep her sister company at Comicon, a big, geeky convention anchored on comic books, but with sizable helpings of other kinds of geek culture, so she expressed concern over what two big events would do to the traffic.

Benedict has a tricky job keeping Americans in the fold. We’re so attached to our personal freedoms that US Catholics routinely treat Papal edicts as advice to consider, instead of the absolute and unquestionable edicts passed from the all-knowing and all-powerful to us, through his anointed vicar on earth, as Catholic teaching holds. To my mind, calling yourself a Catholic who practices birth control (or sees nothing wrong with homosexuality, or approved of going to war in Iraq, or whatever) sort of like calling yourself a vegetarian who eats eggs and milk and fish and maybe some chicken and occasionally a bit of steak.

But the Pope can’t very well just write off US Catholics, so I’m sure his visit is something of a recruitment drive. Like George Carlin says, it’s all about the warm bodies. All that remains to be seen is whether Benedict thinks he can get more people in the pews with a soft line that can tease back free-minded Americans turned off by an authoritarian church, or with the hard line the True Believers around the world secretly (or not-so-secretly) long for. Whichever tack he takes, it will raise attendance for a little while. Then the aura of celebrity will fade, and we’ll settle quickly back into our secular habits.

Because, despite the ugly Christian-American so prominent in the news since their rise to political power in the heyday of the Reagan era, and despite the continuing reports that the US has a far higher percentage of self-identified “very religious” than other developed nations, and disturbingly high poll results of people who insist evolution is a fraud and that gays are an abomination, despite a sharp rise in Catholics thanks to the current wave of Hispanic immigrants, despite alarmist news reports of skyrocketing interest in and conversion to Islam, the fastest growing religious denomination is “no religious affiliation.”

That’s not quite “atheism”—okay, it’s not atheism at all. That “fastest growing” status is due primarily to Americans who still believe in God, but have finally decided they want nothing more to do with organized religion. Some of their reasons are rooted in ugly stories of abuse; some of them grow from youthfully rebellious exploration of New Age/wicca/college secularism/whatever that never went back; some of them are reactions to the ugly streak of public religion so much alive in our country today.

Still, it fills me with hope. Parents with “no religious affiliation” is much more likely to let their children think critically about religion, and critical thought about anything is always helpful, even if the kids think it over and stick with theism. Even more promising, citizens with “no religious affiliation” are taking the country back to the religious freedom on which it was founded, where religion, no matter how intense, is a private affair, a matter between the believer and his God, and not a public one between the believer, his God, and everyone the believer things God wants him to hate.

I don’t think it’s too much to hope that the zeal of today’s politico-religious movements are less a sign of strength than of weakness, a fervor born of a sense that secularism really is leaving hard-line theism behind in modern society. Too much to expect, perhaps, but not too much to hope.

Posted by at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am a lucky, lucky fellow. Somewhere, a woman I’ve never heard of is dying of cancer, and she has resolved to give me two million, two hundred fifty thousand dollars because she doesn’t trust her relatives but feels she can trust me or my church to use the money to continue to do the Lord’s work. All I have to do is send her my contact information, along with a bank account number to which she can send the money. Because she is suspicious of her greedy relatives, she urges me to tell no one of our arrangement, but to respond immediately and sincerely. God bless. Although she cannot manage subject-verb agreement, she can perform compound interest calculations and single-handedly work out how to circumvent inheritance law.

But wait! Not only was I offered these millions last Monday, but a second wealthy woman on her deathbed has offered me seven and a half million dollars for pretty much the same reasons. Wow! (Technically, the money is offered to “you/ church,” but, being an atheist, “/ church” isn’t an actual entity, so it all has to go to me.)

Anyone with an IQ above that of gravel would recognize these as scams, of course. The son of the Nigerian finance minister is too well known, so now I’m getting cancer inheritances, windfalls from the Netherlands national lottery, and offers to participate in some shady deal with a Hong Kong millionaire who wants to launder money through my bank account. (My mail server’s spam filter is not working as well as it did a year ago.) Which gets me to thinking.

Authorities shrug their shoulders and admit there is little they can do to chase down ordinary ad spammers, who distribute their rubbish under cover of a layer of false IDs and addresses so thick that sifting through them all to the original source takes longer than it does for spammers to pack up and move, either literally to a new office or even country, or more often metaphorically by deleting spurious accounts and creating entirely new ones. Well, okay. But how hard can it be to chase down bank accounts—which, thanks to the banks’ own security checks, take some time and effort to set up?

The scenario I have in mind is for the Treasury Department or similar entity to set up a few bank accounts specifically to attach these scam offers to. Create an email account and put it somewhere visible on the web, and turn off its spam filter. It wouldn’t have to be particularly prominent, just visible to the public. Within seconds, it would receive dozens of offers of no-strings-attached fortunes, just as soon as it provides a bank account. Some poor agent given the assignment of combing through the spam would send account information for one of the prepared bank accounts to the scam…“artist,” for lack of a better term. And when the scam artist tells the bank where to send the money, the fed just jumps on that account and rounds up the owners. Simple. Even if you don’t catch the creeps, you could make shutting down and restarting the operation, passing a new round of bank handlers each time, more trouble than it’s worth.

So what’s stopping the authorities? The Treasury Department and its relatives in other departments and other countries has some very clever fellows, and employs them to think about stuff like this all the time. Given that the idea has occurred independently to me and Eileene, I’m sure it’s occurred to the T-men. Is it simply a matter of jurisdiction, that the scamspammers all operate out of some tiny kleptocratic dictatorship who actually likes flouting international ethics because it makes him look strong? Or are bank accounts so complex and opaque that the bankers themselves can’t trace who owns them any faster than we can trace email accounts?

Because if that’s the case, we’re all in trouble. Small wonder we keep finding ourselves in Milken-Mattell-Enron-BearStearns-style financial meltdowns. And if it is the case, how could anyone possibly think less regulation of such a broken system be helpful? Unless, of course, they’re profiting off the scam. Campaign donation, anyone?

Posted by at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday morning, I watched over Eileene’s figurative shoulder a CNN clip of Anderson Cooper interviewing a woman from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the cult in the news since its “retreat” was raided on allegations of child abuse, polygamy, and rape posing as forcible marriage—allegations which look increasingly likely to be vindicated.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole thing, nor do I feel even now that I’ve missed anything. I stayed only long enough to learn that she was angry about the state taking children from the ranch, and that she grounded her complaint on freedom of religion: the guv’mint ain’t got no right to seize our children; we’re religious. It put me immediately in mind of Abraham Lincoln’s dead-on description of a slavery advocate’s attitude toward universal freedom: “That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”

Such an attitude is indefensible, of course, and anyone embracing it will weasel as best they can from being confronted with that bald formulation. Predictably, the woman on TV was evasive, too. When Cooper observed that several women had made almost word-for-word identical statements and asked, “At the risk of sounding cynical, were you coached in what to say?” she replied only “Well, what would you do?” Whatever that means.

But I didn’t have to wait even long enough to hear three or four sentences to distrust whatever she had to say; even for an empathy-challenged guy like me, it was obvious.

She never looked at the camera. It made her look shifty. Later, I considered that she may have failed to look in to the camera for a reason. Maybe there was a little live-feed screen off camera, designed to let her check her own appearance, but on further reflection, someone absorbed by their own camera image probably isn’t speaking from the heart when they cite Constitutional freedoms. Maybe the fundamentalists trained her to avert her eyes from men, or from strangers. If so, the way her sense of identity has been twisted is pathetic, but hardly reason to trust what she may say as her own.

She had a stupid look to her. I can’t tell you what “stupid” looks like, but sometimes you can see it in a person—a vague, vacant look is part of it, as is a look of intense concentration over small tasks like tying shoes or listening to big words. She stumbled over words in a way that confirmed a sense that they were not her own; she seemed not to understand them all. I don’t know why such a dim bulb was chosen to speak to the cameras. Maybe she’d had critical thought beaten from her; maybe people who could think for themselves had already left the FLDS; maybe the church leaders specifically selected mothers who could be made to repeat the elders’ message for the interview, or they had been isolated so long that they couldn’t see how badly she would reflect on their church. But again, whether she had trouble speaking because she was, in fact, as stupid as she looked, or because she was parroting someone else’s words, or because she was distracted by being on camera, I don’t see much reason to think she was speaking from the heart, with the sense of concern for the children she professed.

But above all, what dominated my instantaneous impression of the woman was the grimace of hatred on her face. It was utterly unmistakable, and remained in place through the entire segment, whether she was listening or speaking, and independent of the immediate topic of the sentence. However questionable her concern for the children might be, her fury for the government, the larger community, and even for the news crew she felt compelled to address was genuine. No devotion to truth could survive in conflict with hatred that deep, deep enough that she could not be bothered to conceal it even momentarily when the whole purpose of her appearance was to garner public sympathy.

Never trust a Christian church that inculcates a notion that its own agenda are more important than Jesus’s injuction to love.

Posted by at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Friday, NPR reported on “All Things Considered” that Congress is looking at a bill with sweeping changes to how tobacco is regulated; in particular, it will make tobacco subject to FDA oversight.

Curiously, Phillip-Morris is behind the bill, which may be critical to its passage; without that heavy hitter pulling its pet congresscritters’ strings, anti-tobacco legislation just might go through. Phillip-Morris is probably behind the bill due to a curious provision or three. For example, magazine ads would be limited to a black-and-white block format called (ironically enough) “tombstone.” While such ads could be expected to be hard on the tobacco industry as a whole, advertising research has determined that such ads strongly favor the largest player in the market…which just so happens to be Phillip-Morris. It hopes to gain in market share more than it loses to a general industry-wide decline in sales.

That doesn’t mean the bill faces no resistance, of course; other cigarette manufacturers, and tobacco farmers, and states dependent on large tobacco crops are all dead against it. Arguing that nicotine is not a drug, is a tough act, though, especially after documents exposing that cigarette makers knew nicotine was addictive and set the nicotine content of cigarettes to keep people hooked, and embracing candy-flavored cigarettes looks a little too creepy to be politically safe, so legislators are going through some strange contortions to justify their opposition: the bill would create obstacles for finding a way to make cigarettes safer, or the FDA is already too busy with its other duties to look into cigarettes. Despite such persuasive weaseling, however, the bill still has bipartisan support, so friends of tobacco would be in trouble if it weren’t for the veto power of the president.

Ah, yes. The president is against the bill, too, although it’s not clear to me whether it’s because he owes tobacco lobbyists a few favors or simply out of a reflexive belief that business regulation, any kind of business regulation, is inherently wrong. It’s a matter of faith. But like Congressional hold-outs, the White House won’t simply come out and say that nicotine isn’t dangerous enough to deserve regulation. That would be laughable. No, the problem is that cigarettes are too dangerous: “FDA jurisdiction might create a false impression that regulated tobacco products are safe.”

No amount of reasoning is ever going to change that level of block-headedness. (Lord knows reason has yet to make a dent in the White House’s tax policy, foreign policy, Iraq strategy, and Constitutional theory.) If the law is to be passed, it will have to be with a majority large enough to override a veto—which in turn would require a demonstration of political division among the Republicans which even torture and a very, very unpopular war have been unable to trigger. Compared to these, tobacco is nothing to embarrass the party over. So, while the law could still pass in theory, don’t hold your breath. At least try not to inhale.

Posted by at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Friday, NPR reported on “All Things Considered” that Congress is looking at a bill with sweeping changes to how tobacco is regulated; in particular, it will make tobacco subject to FDA oversight.

Curiously, Phillip-Morris is behind the bill, which may be critical to its passage; without that heavy hitter pulling its pet congresscritters’ strings, anti-tobacco legislation just might go through. Phillip-Morris is probably behind the bill due to a curious provision or three. For example, magazine ads would be limited to a black-and-white block format called (ironically enough) “tombstone.” While such ads could be expected to be hard on the tobacco industry as a whole, advertising research has determined that such ads strongly favor the largest player in the market…which just so happens to be Phillip-Morris. It hopes to gain in market share more than it loses to a general industry-wide decline in sales.

That doesn’t mean the bill faces no resistance, of course; other cigarette manufacturers, and tobacco farmers, and states dependent on large tobacco crops are all dead against it. Arguing that nicotine is not a drug, is a tough act, though, especially after documents exposing that cigarette makers knew nicotine was addictive and set the nicotine content of cigarettes to keep people hooked, and embracing candy-flavored cigarettes looks a little too creepy to be politically safe, so legislators are going through some strange contortions to justify their opposition: the bill would create obstacles for finding a way to make cigarettes safer, or the FDA is already too busy with its other duties to look into cigarettes. Despite such persuasive weaseling, however, the bill still has bipartisan support, so friends of tobacco would be in trouble if it weren’t for the veto power of the president.

Ah, yes. The president is against the bill, too, although it’s not clear to me whether it’s because he owes tobacco lobbyists a few favors or simply out of a reflexive belief that business regulation, any kind of business regulation, is inherently wrong. It’s a matter of faith. But like Congressional hold-outs, the White House won’t simply come out and say that nicotine isn’t dangerous enough to deserve regulation. That would be laughable. No, the problem is that cigarettes are too dangerous: “FDA jurisdiction might create a false impression that regulated tobacco products are safe.”

No amount of reasoning is ever going to change that level of block-headedness. (Lord knows reason has yet to make a dent in the White House’s tax policy, foreign policy, Iraq strategy, and Constitutional theory.) If the law is to be passed, it will have to be with a majority large enough to override a veto—which in turn would require a demonstration of political division among the Republicans which even torture and a very, very unpopular war have been unable to trigger. Compared to these, tobacco is nothing to embarrass the party over. So, while the law could still pass in theory, don’t hold your breath. At least try not to inhale.

Posted by at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the political bands that have tied it to another, and to assume among the powers of earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should provide reasons that impel them to separation.”

So begins the Declaration of Independence. There is a strangely conversational tone to the Declaration, out of place, to modern sensibilities, in a document of such historical significance. (And Jefferson and the signers knew perfectly well they were making history, in contrast to some writings that only take on their historical significance in hindsight. The opening sentence is a long one, and verbose, but no more so than what we can read in personal letters of the later eighteenth century. That was just the way a well-educated man of the Age of Reason spoke. Eventually, it gets down to a formal list of grievances, anticipating the bullet format of many a power point presentation, but the opening is quite conversational, with an almost apologetic tone: “Look, we know we’re engaged in an extreme reaction here. Give us a minute to explain why we think we’re justified, okay?”

How very different from the manifestos of other revolutions! How different, too, the appeal to the common British citizen, as distinct from His Majesty’s government! “We don’t want to make this any harder than it has to be. We can still be friends.” This appeal was written more to a powerful opposition in Parliament, with leaders like Burke speaking out in behalf of the colonies, but it’s addressed to the British citizen at large, and comes across like an attempt at gently dumping an unwanted boyfriend.

Lends new meaning to the idea of a painful separation.

Posted by at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although it’s a matter of no material significance, I listen with interest to news reports of the Olympic torch and its encounters with protestors as they demonstrate in sympathy for Tibet’s condition under Chinese rule. And curiously, I find myself cheering for both sides.

Or rather, elements of both sides. I exclude China, and especially the Chinese government from my sympathies. Communist rulers have a long history of treating gross abuse of peripheral nations conquered by China, and even of wholly assimilated Chinese subjects, as “purely an internal affair.” Murder and corruption on a grand scale are considered above not only foreign interference, but above foreign comment; simply observing aloud that China treats its dissidents cruelly has been taken as grounds to break off diplomatic initiatives.

This attitude of splendid isolation is no innovation of Mao. Despite occasional fits of internationalism, like Cheng He’s expeditionary fleet, China has never really escaped its ancient self-conception as “the Middle Kingdom,” ultimately immune to external threat, any more than it has escaped a heritage of dreadful cruelty toward its subjects beginning with the Legalist movement of the Qin.

China’s recent emergence into proto-capitalism may be merely another such fit of internationalism, or it may be a lasting trend; we shall see. But for the time being, it cares about its reputation in the world—not just its status as a sovereign state, but as a decent government respectful of individual rights. In short, someone you can do business with. This makes the central government unusually sensitive about how the Olympics come off, and especially to how human rights protestors are using the occasion to focus attention on subjects China would rather not address. It can’t simply say, “Shut up, go away, you can’t look,” when it wants people to come and look at the flowering of a modern, international China.

So I really enjoy seeing organized protests interfering with the passage of the Olympic torch around the world. I’m under no illusions that such interference will change anything. The Olympics certainly won’t be cancelled just because the torch goes out—as I understand it, the torch occasionally goes out even without interference—nor will China grant Tibet autonomy over the Olympics, but it would look bad in a way that China cares about, even if that concern is puffed up out of proportion. So far, crowds have failed to sabotage the passage of the torch, although they have manage the torch procession to alter its route, and even hide the torch entirely from news coverage in several cities, with more such incidents likely. If protestors actually get close enough to snuff the torch as a gesture of disapproval towards China, I’ll cheer them for their stand, and for the organization necessary to pull off such a pointed and nonviolent gesture.

And yet…I also find myself cheering the police and the Olympic staff working to keep the torch alight. The torch is a powerful symbol of hope, knowledge, any virtue that survives the evils of the world by being passed between generations, or between cultures. The staff trying to keep the torch lit in its journey around the world are working to preserve that symbol, and not to help China conceal its tyranny. So from an entirely different perspective, I can watch the torch procession as the work of daring and clever idealists, adapting on the fly to threats of an angry (if nonviolent) mob to see the symbol of enlightenment safely to its brazier on the Olympics’ opening day.

The contest between protestors and ceremonialists is thus really engaging: rich with symbolism if not empirical significance, pitting two honorable factions against one another in gestures of national pride that don’t involve soldiers and similar ugliness. A contest not unlike the Olympics themselves.

Posted by at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comedy gets no respect. We know this of the movies, where dramas perennially win the Academy Award for best picture, despite a general consensus among actors who have tried both that comedy is harder. Comedy is set aside in a lesser category, as are animation or foreign language films or documentaries, while drama is not. Comedy is not found in the “literature” section of your local bookstore. Yes, capital-L literature often slips in a comic character, or lingers over a bittersweet moment before returning to its regularly scheduled soul-wrenching, but Dostoyevsky still crowds out Swift on the shelves, and on approved reading lists for book reports. Art is drama, to the mind of the art society. Comedy is good as far as it goes, but roughly as important to art as dessert is to nutrition. Such people confuse taking the subject material seriously with taking the art form seriously.

RPGs are no exception. You can find comedy games, usually small press…sometimes very small press, like Kobolds Ate My Baby or Macho Women With Guns. Paranoia and Toon have earned well-deserved praise, but they’re about it for titles to make it past their first supplement.

One player in my group shares this world view. He has unilaterally refused comedy games and silly campaigns at our table. He must suffer a troublesome commute to join us, and can’t be bothered to participate for a mere humorous game. I can sympathize with the commute, but not so much for his attitude toward a comedy game, even a short one. If, as we keep reminding ourselves, RPGs are essentially social activities, maybe we should rate how they perform according to how socially rewarding they are. On this scale, comedy games are the apex of the genre.

Tragedy has its moments in RPGs. I well remember a young priestess turning to dark gods in frustration over an unrequited love for a rather oblivious warrior—good times, a bonding experience. But when it comes to swapping war stories, it’s always the funny scenarios that come to mind first, and the first ones anyone else tells me. Plus, we can remember so many more of them.

I’d like to see the snobbishness towards humor games vanish, as I’d like to see the prejudice against comedy cinema as artistically unworthy vanish—not that it’s going to happen any time soon. But be honest now: can you really make a compelling case that Star Wars is any more rewarding and re-watchable and quotable than Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail? And don’t forget the Ewoks as you do. Yeah, didn’t think so. Why should RPGs be any different?

Posted by at 8:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning, I let the radio run on into the BBC news hour. Once they’d got past the actual news for the day, they pulled out a story about an Israeli who is upset that speakers are corrupting modern Hebrew, borrowing terms and grammar from other languages. (I didn’t catch his credentials. He might be a linguist, but I couldn’t chase down the BBC story to listen to it more closely. Casting about the internet, it looks like he might be in the Israeli Parliament. Or he might just be some guy with a bug up his butt.) To some degree, I can sympathize; while language drift is inescapable, we can still be inconvenienced by, and complain about, its ongoing blurring of meaning.

The linguistic purist featured on the show takes things a little too far, however. His solution? Israel should restrict itself purely to ancient Hebrew. When the BBC intereviewer skeptically asked how ancient Hebrew—which he perversely kept calling “biblical” Hebrew—could function adequately in the modern world, the scholar smugly replied that classical Hebrew is a “very rich” language. He did not elaborate.

Color me unconvinced. Linguistically rich as it may be, I have a hard time thinking the Talmud can supply us directly with the vocabulary we need to discuss radiation, microbes, representative democracy, penguins, longitude, chopsticks, surrealism, and countless other examples of things unknown to the ancient Israelites. It can, of course, provide us indirectly with such a vocabulary, with a little finagling. Modern Hebrew was constructed just so: there was no word for “satellite” at the launching of Sputnik, but a satellite is something that circles the earth; the moon circles the earth; so the word for satellite becomes “moon,” or “moonlet,” or “signal-moon” or some such. If, in the name of preserving essential culture, you don’t want to import a foreign word, this method of creating its equivalent is perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, this too would not satisfy our would-be language policeman.

By way of example as to why ancient Hebrew is all the language anybody needs, he referred to a speech given by George Bush to the Israeli Parliament. In that bastard tongue known as English, the word “intelligence” can mean either mental capacity or military information (and a few other things, besides), so nobody had the slightest idea what Bush was talking about. If Bush stuck to proper Hebrew, which uses distinct words for brains and data, everything would have been clear—an argument unfairly presupposing both that our president makes sense generally, and that his audience was too dim-witted to understand words from their context. Regardless, the satellite-moon method of vocabulary invention creates precisely that kind of ambiguity; if you force words to mean two things, you get words that mean two things…so that, too, would be right out of the ideal version of Hebrew.

The only way to avoid both adopting foreign words and distorting the original meanings of Hebrew words is to ignore anything not found in the Talmud, to discuss only what the ancient Israelites discussed, to think only what the ancient Israelites thought, and to speak to no one who does not himself speak as the ancient Israelites did.

Which, I suspect, is the would-be linguist’s fondest wish, and the real purpose behind his suggestion.

Posted by at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time marches on, and the race for the Democratic nomination grinds on toward Pennsylvania. Obama’s lead in the delegate count is narrow when comparing the numbers alone, but seems insuperable when the numbers are measured against the delegates to come, and their likely distribution. Mathematically, Clinton is not out; by CNN’s calculation, she could theoretically sail to victory with a whopping 60% of the delegates, if she were to win every remaining uncommitted delegate, win every vote in every primary, and persuade the party to count at full value all those who voted for her in Florida and Michigan. Of course, that kind of imbalance would be deeply unlikely for a candidate of messianic popularity; for a divisive candidate trailing slightly in the polls and disfavored by the press, the chances are effectively nil. It’s more likely Clinton might twist just enough superdelegates’ arms to swing the vote her way, but don’t hold your breath—the superdelegates are answerable to their constituents, and many realize the kind of fallout the party would endure if the general public felt they were overruled in a back-room deal among party insiders.

So Clinton’s chances are slim, despite the narrow margin and diminishing but real hopes for a big Pennsylvania win. Slim enough that some major party figures, like Dean, Dodd, and Pelosi, have been hinting that she should bow out of the campaign. These party notables loudly deny any such pressure, since the appearance of insiders forcing a candidate to quit could also create a fair bit of fallout, but their public statements include some fairly broad hints, and we can only guess what they’ve said behind closed doors.

The presumption behind such hints is that the way the Democratic primaries are dragging on, twisting early enthusiasm into partisan bitterness, hurt the party’s chances in the general election. Perhaps so, but I’m not convinced. A late resolution carries some benefits for the party, as well: dirt exposed now is defused as a weapon for McCain; cameras pointed at the dems are not pointed at McCain; and McCain must wait to find who his opponent will be before attacking. Seven months is a long time to maintain political enthusiasm among the vast majority of casual voters in the absence of the exciting horse race we’ve enjoyed so far. And, of course, she might still win, in which case, she will prove to have been fighting to preserve the party’s choice.

But, for the sake of argument, let us assume that Clinton is hurting the party’s chances, and should step aside gracefully and let the party machine begin gearing up for the real showdown in November. Let us further presume that she has the political smarts to realize it, because she is after all a very smart gal. Let us further presume that she doesn’t really want to sabotage the party just for a fractionally greater shot at moving up from the Senate to the presidency. If you like her, you can credit her devotion to principles and loyalty to her party; if you don’t like her, you can credit her own recognition of how much her political future depends on the continued good will of her colleagues and a keen appreciation of her vanishing campaign chest. Either way, this scenario paints Clinton as willing to do the right thing, and less blinded by ambition than running on momentum and emotional investment. That’s a lot of “if”s, but it’s plausible; I’ve seen this very picture proposed by her supporters and her detractors alike. Maybe we can even throw in a campaign gone sour on bad advice from her managers, and not Clinton’s fault at all, but that’s pushing it.

The question then becomes how to give her a way out of a campaign that’s spun out of her control. It has to satisfy her ambition, for which pundits like to suggest a Supreme Court seat or the role of Senate majority leader, but it also has to save face. If Clinton is indeed too emotionally invested to step away, she needs to be given a way out that looks good to her supporters, but even more importantly to her reflection in the mirror.

That’s tricky. I haven’t seen any serious suggestions, neither in major news outlets nor in the political forums which I haunt. But perhaps I have the solution:

Broker her departure from the primaries with an agreement to count Michigan and Florida voters in a manner very favorable to her campaign, but not enough to tip the election.

As I’ve written before, I don't have much sympathy for FL/MI, but at this point, where no loaf at all has become a distinct possibility, half a loaf might seem much more generous, and may solve the larger problem. If the party credits the generosity to Clinton’s tireless efforts, this would be the exit she needs, as described in the scenario above. She has been posing, rather disingenuously, as the champion of the disenfranchised in Michigan and Florida. Letting her take the credit for giving Michigan and Florida (cough) “fair” treatment would allow her bow out, claiming that she knew she needed to for a while now, but just couldn’t quit in good conscience while she still had to fight in Michigan and Florida’s behalf. (She might come to believe that one, too.) As long as we could trust her to honor the agreement, instead of turning around and breaking it after the numbers are publicly added to her total—a distinct possibility, given that she broke her pledge not to campaign in Michigan and Florida in the first place, nor to count their votes, until they turned out to be for her—it could work.

And then she could wave good-bye, return to the business of the Senate, and we could let the 2008 election enter its final, bloody, hate-filled, one-on-one final stretch.

Posted by at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I’ve put out three articles on my experiences with Sins of a Solar Empire, and all three have been negative in tone. Surely, you must be thinking, there must be something good about the game, or he would stop playing, and stop grousing about it. Just call me a curmudgeon. Yes, SoaSE has some big, shiny good parts; it’s just in my nature to find fault first.

What’s so cool about SoaSE? Well, as noted earlier, it’s not, technically, a wedding of the RTS to the turn-based 4X game; it’s just a very slow RTS, but that simple change is very important. Reducing the speed that dramatically from the clickfests that define the genre manages to capture the feel of 4X games; the turn-based feel is an illusion, but it’s a wholly convincing one. Production speeds are slow enough that you have time to consider your options: expand the fleet, expand the resource production on which it depends, or improve what you have through technology? Between human players, stopping to think about what you’re doing may be suicide, as it is in more traditional RTS games, but against computer opponents, he who hesitates may not be lost. There is time to read in-game information provided by rolling over technological advances and production queues, which is much appreciated by this newbie. While keeping the initiative is important, there is time to choose where and when to strike, instead of flinging your units at the first target you see, hoping to throw your opponent on the defensive before he does it to you. There is time to oversee your battles, instead of abandoning your fleets to their fate because you’re too busy rushing back to base to produce replacements. (The AI is fairly good at selecting targets for your ships, setting priority according to where they can do the most damage, but they do tend to overlook fixed defensive satellites, so you have to keep an eye on your forces. Either they fly blindly into enemy killing zones, or fail to lure enemy ships into your own.) As players grow more used to the engine, reactions will become more valuable in relation to strategy, but they will never become the sole measure of victory, as they are for, say, Starcraft; adaptive strategic thinking will remain eternal king in SoaSE, for which I will remain eternally grateful.

As best I can tell in these early learning stages, the developers took great pains to make a variety of strategies viable, and especially to provide viable alternatives to the “rush” strategy of building a swarm of cheap units quickly and overwhelming the foe before he’s ready to fight. This is not unique among RTS games—the Age of Empires series does an excellent job of it—but it is unusual. Most popular RTS titles—notably Starcraft and Command and Conquer are unabashedly rush games, favoring a skilled rush almost to the exclusion of any other approach among opponents of comparable skill. Just as Civilization, the gold standard of turn-based 4X games, pays huge benefits to players who shepherd their early resources and improve their productivity instead of building the biggest stone-age army they can, SoaSE’s slow pace allows you to time your military expansion to a technological level of your choosing. If you manage your economy well, you can survive a rush just fine, although I should note that the official boards are full of claims of nigh-unbeatable rush strategies; the TEC missile frigate features heavily in these.) It could be better: victory remains military, a matter of timing a knockout fleet strike, which is a shame. The economic victory of AoE (build a wonder), the scientific victory of GalCiv (advance to a transcendental state of scientific understanding), and the social victory of Civ4 (produce sufficient culture to achieve a cultural hegemony, no matter who happens to have the biggest guns) either do not exist at all, or are effectively impossible.

The ancient guns-or-butter dilemma is huge in SoaSE. It’s not exactly better than other games in this respect, but it is refreshingly different. You must contend not only with the cost of various improvements, but some severe caps on how many you can have, as well. At times, the productive resources of credits, metal, and crystals will be your limiting factor. At others, you may have all the cash and materials you need, but your planets may not be able to support the improvements you want to spend them on. These caps can be improved, but only slowly, and time is the ultimate limiting resource in a real-time game. An ordinary player will collect his materials, and only then look to where he can spend them; a more skilled player will anticipate his resource gluts, and spend some resources to improve his production caps before they become an issue. And building caps can only be improved so far. A large, fertile world can support a lot of buildings, but a loose asteroid might only support one or two, even after you raise this cap. Unlike, say, Civilization, where you want every improvement in every city, and you only have to decide which to build first, SoaSE forces you to choose which improvements to build on a given planet and which to go entirely without.

Caps affect your fleet, too, in a dilemma even sharper than that of planetary improvements. You can support only a limited number of ships, and larger ships eat into this cap faster than small ones. A second cap applies to capital ships alone; no matter how many ships you can support, you must invest in crews for your capital ships separately, and if you want lots of capital ships, you’ll need to raise both caps. But! Each improvement in your ship support capacity slaps another persistent reduction of 9% or so in your production of all three resources, which is pretty steep, and once you commit to this level of support, you cannot take it back. Note: it is the cap itself that imposes this tax, not the ships themselves! If you raise your cap while owning only a small number of ships, you’ll still suffer a huge production penalty. This is unlikely to happen directly, but if you raise your cap to a 45% production cost in order to support a huge fleet, and that fleet is later destroyed, you are going to have a hard time replacing it, because you still suffer that 45% production cost. Ouch. The dynamic between increasing your current power and its cost to your future power is very sharp indeed in SoaSE, much sharper than a simple choice between a 1% increase in production and a 1% increase in standing forces.

Another thing I appreciate about SoaSE is its maps. Your fleets can’t just go directly wherever they want; they can only travel along a web of jump lines connecting specific “planets” (including asteroids, wormholes, suns, and other special features), which creates the potential for great geography. Traditional RTS games also have geographical features, but they tend to be considerably more limited: an open field, islands separated by bodies of water, or regions connected by clearly defined choke points, with vital resources scattered more or less evenly about. SoaSE has all those options, but the quality of planets in a region have a huge impact on that region’s strategic value, adding strategic depth. A choke point with a planet that can host a swarm of defensive platforms is very different from a choke point that cannot support any. A wide-open region with an even mix of planets is very different from a wide-open field of empty jump points and minor satellites containing one lone crystal-rich planet. Maps can have fixed arrangements of planets and jump lanes, random planets and jump lanes, or fixed jump lanes and random types of planet at each location. This helps keep maps fresh. A given layout with a symmetric distribution of planets produces a very different game from the same layout with all the crystal-rich planets on one side and the metal-rich planets on the other. What the game needs is a robust map generator; right now, it only provides a random map generator that allows you to select a variety of variables—how many planets, how dense a network of jump lanes, how many stars, what kinds of planets can orbit every star, and so on—and allows you to begin play immediately on that map. What the game does not provide is a tool that lets you lay out precisely the map you want, or to go back and tweak a random map that doesn’t quite match your desires. Hopefully, a proper editor will be made available soon in a patch.

This is a big, complicated game, and one that requires you to pay attention to many widely scattered elements at once, and it would all fall apart without a good interface. Here the game comes through in spades. The left bar, which displays all your planets and icons of what can be found there all at once in an easily digestible tree format, has received all the attention, and probably deserves it. I haven’t used it much, but then, I’ve kept to small maps so far—no more than 18 stars total, and only six to twelve of them might be under my control for most of the game. Already I can imagine why players who prefer large maps are deeply grateful for this simple-yet-original tool. (I speculate we haven’t seen it before because it depends on the compartmentalization of units into planetary nodes; most RTS games operate on open terrain.) But apart from the celebrated unit catalog, I’d like to offer a little cheer for the zoom function. The game seamlessly rolls between three views: a galactic, where you can see the planets and jump lanes, and fleet strengths are represented as colored pips on bars circling the planets; a planetary view, where you can see everything in a solar system, and ships and constructions are represented as distinct icons; and a close-up view, for the sheer pleasure of enjoying the graphics. And you can zoom anywhere along this continuum. Traveling about the map with the zoom function is beautifully simple: select a unit, planet, building, or any other feature to anchor the zoom point wherever it is, or click empty space to anchor the zoom to the mouse cursor. When you hover your cursor over something only to find the resolution is too small, the camera elegantly focuses on the item of your interest when you zoom in. You can move your camera across the galaxy by double-clicking on any item in the unit tree, but I find the zoom function to be all I need.

Commenting on the close-in zoom reminds me: the graphics are gorgeously detailed. Most of your game will be spent at the planetary zoom level, but you owe it to yourself to zoom way in on occasion, just to see targets zip around and explode. (And, since the game is slow-paced, you can afford to.) The game includes carrier-style ships and airbase satellite platforms. Not content to illustrate the individual fighter and bomber units, which are essentially big ammunition for the carriers and platforms, the developers illustrate the individual missles and beams shooting off the fighters and bombers—displaying the ammunition fired by the ammunition. Zowie! Graphics don’t make a game good, but they’re nice when you get them. If only the voices and back story, the other elements of fluff that accompany the graphics, matched that quality. The back story is vague and terribly, terribly trite. The voices your ships emit to let you know you’ve selected them are grating. You have your choice of good old boys in their gun-totin’, space-farin’ pickup trucks, robotic women in echo chambers, or a hissing alien that sounds like every third-rate villainous mastermind from Saturday morning cartoons. Ah, well, can’t have everything. Just as the graphics don’t make the game, the voices don’t ruin it.

‘Cause when you get right down to it, this is a strategy game. As long as you get a raft of interesting strategic choices and the interface works reasonably well, you’ve got a decent game. SoaSE delivers on both counts, with enough extra innovations and design balance to turn a decent game into a compelling one. Twitchy twelve-year-olds and South Koreans who excel at Starcraft and Counterstrike might wonder what the big deal is, but for middle-aged guys like me, looking for a more cerebral experience, this is just about all an RTS should be.

Posted by at 3:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are you familiar with the DLC? Don’t feel bad if you aren’t; while the Democratic Leadership Committee is a major force in US government, they’re not an official party, just a special interest group. There’s too many special interest groups out there to keep track of without a scorecard, so for anyone but political junkies, they’re just another semi-anonymous group that surfaces and submerges in the news almost too quickly to notice.

I wasn’t really aware of them, myself, until this CNN article brought them up. In short, the article is about a veiled threat from the DLC to Nancy Pelosi suggesting she retract her call for superdelegates to be mindful of popular opinion in the Democratic primaries, and that voters might react badly if the superdelegates are seen to overturn what is perceived as the popular choice. Pelosi’s advice would hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances, since Obama currently leads in popular and by-state vote. “We have been strong supporters of the DCCC….” begins the relevant segment of the DLC’s letter. (The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is an arm of the national Democrats assisting Democratic House candidates.) And if you don’t turn a blind eye to gaming the election, reads the subtext, we’ll stop donating to all the Democrats.

The maneuver isn’t illegal; nobody can dictate whether or to whom you give political financial support. It’s not even surprising in Washington: politicians in both parties have been bought for generations at all levels of government. The Republicans under Delay’s leadership practically made selling government favors their raison d’etre.

Buying elections remains an ugly practice, no matter how technically legal, and no matter who does it on whose behalf. Curious, and uninformed, I decided to look into the DLC and figure out what they’re all about. Turns out they’re the same billionaires who backed Bill Clinton’s successful run in ’92, and the very people the Democrats’ once-populist ideals were jettisoned to accommodate in a desperate bid to compete with Republicans on their home turf of selling political favors to the very wealthy, which explains a lot of Clinton’s presidency. Now the DLC backs Hillary Clinton, who they figure they can trust to bring home the bacon, even at the expense of the working class that forms the backbone of the party. If the DLC’s letter to Pelosi is not a bluff, and Pelosi et al stick to their principles, then doing so will carry a stiff price. Principles often do.

I cast this as a power-versus-principles issue because more is at stake than allowing a heavy-hitting plutocracy to dictate its choices to the Democratic party. Looking over the DLC’s own website, it seems they’re all in favor of cutting taxes. Lots of taxes. Also of doing what is necessary to appeal to right-wing Christians, on the grounds that they’re breeding faster than NPR listeners. Also “taking on” the cultural forces that make it so hard to raise our kids decent—you know, censoring media content. They’re big on crime prevention, heavy on the punishment-deterrence side, with a side of neighborhood watch groups, light on the social justice side. They urge Democrats to support military adventurism, so as not to lose elections by looking “soft.” They like free trade. They like school vouchers, allowing parents to abandon failing schools to families who may have no other choice. In short, they’re right-wingers posing as Democrats, farther right than Nixon would have dared. And that’s what the DLC has to say about itself.

Mindful that I shouldn’t let other sources speak for the DLC, but equally aware that the DLC’s public image might suffer some heavy spin, in much the same way that ultra-right wing groups speak through euphemism and code, I picked up a few outside opinions, too. Many of these were unkind. The wiki entry cites criticism that the DLC’s strategy of “triangulation”—appealing to the middle ground—merely consists of endless concessions, which have still somehow failed to win elections; apparently, such concessions merely move the line of what people think to be the center. Howard Dean cast himself as coming “from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” in contrast to the DLC, which was behind intra-party efforts to destroy his 2004 presidential bid. The triangulation strategy dictated Kerry; you remember how successful that was. Some fellow Well members treated the DLC as a conspiracy (already fairly successful) on the part of plutocrats to infiltrate and subvert the populist party as well as the aristocratic one, turning our democracy into one great fraud.

I’m not sure I’d go that far. A deliberate attempt to subvert the party sounds a little too “conspiracy theory” for me, despite the backing the DLC receives from ultra-right organizations like the Bradley Foundation and seating a director from the Christian Coalition. But when you get right down to it, what’s the difference between saboteurs trying to destroy populism from within and a misguided faction abandoning populism on its own initiative. Think about it.

The DLC hopes Democrats will sell their ideals for the promise of victory, the way the Republicans sold their ideals in the neocon takeover, with disastrous consequences. If the Democrats abandon their populist base in order to win at any cost, there is no longer any reason to hope they will.

Posted by at 7:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)