Land Day

The photo above clearly illustrates the utterly shameless brutality with which Zionist police and military met the peaceful Land Day protests in Occupied Palestine. The Palestinian man is injured and bleeding, firmly restrained by two burly soldiers, and being pepper-sprayed in the face at a range of about two inches.

I don't think further words from me would add anything to the picture.

Don't believe me? Want to see it from an MSM source? Here you go

Story at Desertpeace here.

A Wart on The Ass of San Diego

Yes, you read that right.

Mitt Romney bought a house here in San Diego. Well, in La Jolla, dahling, where the people of quality live, don't you know.

On the coast, of course. With a private beach, of course.

The price tag? Well, only twelve million dollars, scarcely pocket change for a rich Republican.

Now he's tearing that old house down, and replacing it with a mansion of 11,000 square feet. Needless to say, the local regulatory agencies are falling all over themselves to approve the necessary permits. In spite of the 1936 vintage of the current house, city planners decreed that there was no need to go before the Historic Resources Board, citing a "lack of continuity". The La Jolla Community Planning Group and the California Coastal Commission have already signaled their approval.

If you do not live here, you may not understand how odd this, but these agencies usually take years to approve such requests, if they ever approve them at all.

Isn't it wonderful how the patronage system works, for those of wealth and privilege who can take advantage of it?

It's enough to make a sea gull puke.

Welfare Piss Test

A little something on the lighter side today, dear reader.

I do not watch TV, at all, and I haven't for over a decade. In fact, my TV has been unplugged for over two years now, and I even discontinued the minimal cable TV service I once had.

But a fellow 99er in Florida, an all-around good person by the name of Ellen Turner, sent me this link to a Jon Stewart episode that is just too good not to share. It's even worth sitting through the obnoxious commercial that precedes it. Ugh.

But the best part of the issue isn't even mentioned in the video. You see, Florida governor Rick Scott, who has been busted for MediCare and MediCal fraud multiple times, owns the string of clinics where the piss tests are to be performed. Oh wait, excuse me, he recently transferred legal control of the clinics to his wife. Well, that makes it alright then, doesn't it?

Part of what's so scary today is the shamelessly blatant manner in which the elites engage in their corruption. With the elites controlling the MSM to the extent that they do, it seems they don't even bother to hide their dirty dealings anymore.

And so I ask you once again the question I asked in my first blog. Quo vadis, my friends, quo vadis? Where in the name of seven hells are we going from here?

Police Fire On Demonstrators At UC Riverside

Police at University of California Riverside opened fire upon demonstrators with so-called "pepper balls" yesterday, during a meeting of the Board of Regents. Press TV had reported yesterday that the police fired rubber bullets at protesters, but I am unable to find any corroboration of that, so I'm guessing it was just confusion of the moment.

Story with video here.

And another story with different video here.

This is the second time recently that we have seen California police, at UC campuses, going way overboard with use of force. At this rate, we are heading for another Kent State incident.

As a son of the Golden State, this is profoundly disturbing to me. The disconnect between community and law enforcement has been driven to such an extreme, mostly by the so-called "War on Drugs", that a serious potential for major disaster has been created.

Absit omen.

Caught Red-Handed

Watch the video below, my friends. Listen carefully.



(Open Salon readers can watch the video here)


Yes, a Jewish man was behind the string of so-called "Anti-Semitic Hate Crime" incidents.

This is not a unique happening. In fact, it's more like a typical pattern of behavior. Jews carrying out false-flag "attacks" upon their own community in an attempt to generate sympathy for themselves and Israel, and hatred against Muslims.

Now, ask yourself, is it more likely that this is just coincidence, just copy-cat syndrome? Or is it more likely that this is being coordinated through some central authority? In an election year. While the Zionists and their supporters are beating the war drums against Iran.

You make the call.

Peaceful Protest And Limits

Well, well, well. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

In response to the brutal attack by Oakland PD upon peaceful demonstrators at the Occupy Oakland site, Desertpeace has a lovely quote from Jack London, (of all authors!), specifically a largely-unknown work of his entitled "The Iron Heel" -

We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue of that power we shall remain in power…We have no words to waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched. We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words–Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.

Certainly not what you think of when you hear the name Jack London, is it? In contrast, the rest of his works seem like books for children.

And just yesterday my own father emailed me in response to a video I'd sent him last week, showing a similar crackdown by our own local cops against the Occupy San Diego site. What did my Dad have to say? "It's too bad, but the 'occupy movement' or any other form of peaceful protest just doesn't do any good."

Uh huh. Do I really need to say that I agree?

And yet, in a certain coldly cynical sense, peaceful protest does serve a purpose. It demonstrates its own futility, so that all can see other measures are also necessary. And it provides a casus belli, to which The People may afterward point and say, "We tried".

For an interesting historical example, see the Boston Massacre of 1770, and the death of Crispus Attucks. Note that these events took place five years prior to the battles of Lexington and Concord, which are generally considered to have begun the American Revolution.



And on the other hand, Desertpeace, on a relentlessly optimistic note, also offers us this little homily to John Lennon

Trumpka as Hoffa?

My attention was directed to this raving right-wing excuse for a blog by some forum friends. Yes, I'm actually linking to a blog I adamantly disagree with. Not a clever thing to do in terms of traffic management, but who cares.

The author of this blog, apparently one Doug Ross, pretends to mistake Trumpka for Jimmy Hoffa Junior, saying "All these labor leaders look alike to me". Given that he'd just mentioned Frederica Wilson, Maxine Waters, and Jesse Jackson, I suspect that this was right-wing code-speak for "all black people look the same". Ahh, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

(Edit: Yes, I realize that that Trumpka and Hoffa, Jr are both white)

What we have here is transference, in which the the Right accuses the Left of the transgressions which the Right itself has instigated. The violent demonstrations of the Teabaggers are retroactively justified by pointing a finger at the Left and screaming "Violence! Commies! Revolution!" as soon as the Left dares to defend itself, and this while blithely ignoring the calls for revolution which have been coming from the Tea Party, (and other loathsome creatures of the Far Right), for over three years now.

I sometimes wonder if maybe I shouldn't avoid all discussion of the Left/Right divide on this blog, because it plays right into the divide-and-conquer game, and the last thing we need is to fight among ourselves. But on the other hand, how can I avoid this subject when the GOP has waged a war against the poor and the unemployed for over a decade now?

This is certainly not to say that the Democrats as a whole have been anything more than lukewarm friends to the unemployed and disadvantaged, and Obama might as well be a Republican for all he's done to help (which is, let's face it, more or less nothing).

From 1776 to 1861, the people of the USA managed to compromise, and built one of the greatest nations on earth. Then that willingness to compromise was sabotaged by powerful men who had a vested financial interest in seeing it destroyed, men who reaped huge profits from the chaos of war via fat government contracts.

And the nightmare of the War Between The States does not need to be explained to any of you, I'm sure.

Again today, we stand on the brink of chaos, our willingness to compromise and agree to disagree having been sabotaged by powerful men, (and women), who stand to profit from the resulting nightmare.

Lenin said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as farce.

I Got Nothing

Blame it on the heat, but my muse is on strike, and this morning my mind is a complete blank. Yes, even more so than usual. Here's an Onion video that sums it all up very well, complete with bullshit commercial for gas-guzzling, obsolete trash that nobody in their right mind would waste money on.

Open Salon readers can view the video here


Steve Jobs Resigns After Realizing Technology Has Gone As Far As It Can

A New Campaign For The 99ers

The problem we 99ers have is that we have become invisible. We get no attention from media or politicians, and ignoring us has become far cheaper and easier than helping us. Now, we cannot do anything about the cost of helping us. That is a fixed number, although it keeps creeping up as we grow in numbers.

So, the problem is that variable A (cost of helping us) is greater than variable Z, (cost of ignoring us).

We need to reverse that, so that Z, (cost of ignoring us), is greater than A, (cost of helping us).

And we cannot reduce the value of variable A, (cost of helping us).

Therefore the only way to achieve our goal is to increase the value of variable Z, the cost of ignoring us.

In summary,we have to make it prohibitively expensive to keep ignoring us. And, at least for now, we need to accomplish this without breaking the law.

So, here is a simple suggestion for a first little baby step in that direction.

I want to convince every 99er in America to re-apply for unemployment once a month. There is no rule against this, there is no prohibition whatsoever. We just fill out a new application every calendar month, telling the full and honest truth. And every month, the state unemployment machinery has to process all those applications, and send us a form letter saying "you have already received the full 99 weeks of blah blah blah, etc, etc".

The California EDD admits that there are 469,000+ of us in California alone. That means about 120,000 applications a week for them to process, deal with, and respond to.

There is also a secondary benefit to this idea. If and when something like HR 589 should ever be passed, all of us will still be active in the files of our state unemployment departments. Until today, Cal EDD hadn't heard from me in over a year. If HR 589 did pass, would they remember me?

Anyhow, I am truly fired up about this idea. It's something we can do, and do for free, and in most states we can do it online.

US Credit Rating Reduced; Geithner Eats Crow

Standard and Poor has followed through on its threat, and reduced the credit rating of the US Government from AAA to AA+, at the same time as the other two major credit rating agencies confirmed their AAA ratings.

Here's the story, just broken at The Hill about an hour and a half ago. Note that they did this late on a Friday, so that it will tend to fall into the "black hole" of the weekly news cycle.

Oh my!

Now, here's another story, from back in April of this year, in which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says there is "no risk" that the US will lose its top credit rating.

Ohhhhh, Timmy! What will you do now? Your record isn't looking very good, is it?

Dems Fold Again

Well, the news out of DC is grim as hell, but I cannot claim it's unexpected.

The Democrats are apparently set to bend us over and spread our cheeks for the Republicans, again. And this time, we're not even getting any Astroglide.

You can read the story at The Hill linked above, but the gist of it is $3 Trillion, (yes, Trillion), in cuts to things like Social Security and Medicare, with no additional revenue at all. None, zilch, zip, nada, bupkis. Not even closing any tax loopholes, let alone actually raising taxes rates on the ultra-rich, who are paying less taxes now than at any time in the last 75 years. Oh, no, the Republicans insist that we must not tax the "job creators".

But there's a problem with that label. Over 90% of the new wealth created in the last decade has gone to the uber-rich. Yet, at the same time, the US job market has seen its worst decade since the Great Depression. If the ultra-rich are the job creators, where are the jobs they should have created in the last decade, with all that new money they made? Obviously, those jobs were not created. So, clearly, labeling the ultra-wealthy as "job creators" is total bullshit.

And where is our Fearless Leader in all of this? Wringing his hands and playing the Peevish Professor, or scolding us like "Dad" in some 1950's black and white TV show. Gee, Mr President, I'm really sorry. Can I have a job now, please?

My "wishful thinking" side cannot help but imagine how different this could be if Hilary had won the Democratic nomination back in 2008. The woman is not a saint by any means; if anything she's a ball-busting bitch. But I doubt she'd have gotten herself into this ugly a budget mess in the first place, and if she did, I'm sure she'd have the courage to fight her way out of it.

Gods have mercy, but we are so well and truly screwed.

Bullshit Bomb Plot

Oh my, another bomb plot foiled. The world is safe for Democracy again, thanks to the vigilance of your Amerikan Law Enforsement. They can't spell for shit, but they have guns and badges and egos the size of Texas, yeehaw!

OK, to begin, a practical concession to the current environment of "security" paranoia. This scribble is not intended to encourage anyone to make things that go boom, or to teach anyone how. Demolitions is scary shit, even when working with good quality, commercially manufactured ordnance, and I discommend it. Demolitions of the improvised sort are an order of magnitude more unstable, and I strongly discommend it. Period, full stop, end of sentence.

This scribble is intended to highlight certain practical aspects of hypothetical construction of such improvised demolitions, in order to show how law enforcement and their tame media regularly distort the facts of such alleged cases.

There are two main things you need to know.

First, smokeless powder is not an explosive.

Second, the detonators are the issue.


Point One - Gunpowder

The stuff of Hollywood. We all grow up thinking we know what it is. Well, with a helpless shrug of apology to Woody Allen, let me present to you, dear reader, "Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gunpowder, But Were Afraid To Ask". I will keep this short and simple, I promise.

Basically, there are two types of gunpowder.

The original gunpowder is called Black Powder, and was apparently devised by the Chinese, and used as far back as the Three Kingdoms period, circa the 3rd century AD. Black Powder is a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter.

Black Powder is a true explosive, albeit what is classified as a "low explosive".

In the mid-to-late 19th century, Smokeless Powder came into use. Smokeless Powder is a form of nitrocellulose; the first variety was made by pouring nitric acid on cotton, and was called guncotton. Later, nitroglycerin was added to the process.

Smokeless Powder is not an explosive.

Let me say that again. Smokeless Powder is not an explosive.

There are immense quantities of detail which I have omitted for purposes of brevity, but that is the gist of the issue.


Point Two - Detonators Are The Issue.

Every time a story like this breaks, the media breathlessly inform us that "bomb-making materials" were found in the suspect's car/home/backpack/rectum/whatever.

Take a deep breath. You have "bomb-making materials" in your home. So do your neighbours. So does your minister, (rabbi, priest, high priestess, imam, prayer leader, church elder, whatever). "Bomb-making materials" are everywhere. If you don't believe me, root around and find a copy of the old Anarchists Cookbook. Yes, yes, it's verboten reading material these days, but there are still copies floating around out there. FFS, do not, repeat not, try any of the recipes in there, because half of them are likely to blow up in your face, but the point remains the same.

Bomb-making materials are everywhere.

Timmy McVeigh (allegedly) blew up the OKC Federal building with a bomb improvised from lawn fertilizer. In actual point of fact, there were obviously demolitions planted inside the building as well, as attested to by the fact that the broken ends of the concrete beams were rounded rather than jagged, but the point remains, he made a hell of a big boom with explosive improvised from materials you can buy at Home Depot.

The issue is detonators.

It is not possible to improvise an effective and reliable remote detonator, using readily available materials. It cannot be done. The only practical solution is to use commercially produced electrical detonators, what are commonly called "blasting caps".

And those cannot be bought. The only way to obtain them is to steal them, usually from a construction company. And if you're going to break in and steal detonators, why not steal the commercially produced explosives stored nearby (yes, they really do that), at the same time?

So, next time you read another breathless announcement about "bomb-making materials", stop and think about this. Are you getting facts, or a ration of shit?

The Buchanan Paradox

Al Jazeera English has just posted an interview by Riz Khan, another in his One on One series. The subject of this particular interview is none other than Pat Buchanan.

Pat is an old man these days, being well into his eighth decade, and the years have taken a visible toll. He wanders a bit at times, as old men will, and gets a bit long-winded with stories that could interest only a historian.

But in the 25 minute interview, there are about eight minutes of material that are very worth watching.



For example, drag the slider on the video to 1:40 and listen to Riz Khan ask Pat about the rise of the Neo-Cons, and listen carefully to the answer he gives.

Then drag the slider to 18:20 and listen to Pat answer a question about what caused him to become disillusioned with the Republican Party. He talks again about the end of the cold war and the beginning of the current interventionist foreign policy, and how that was a Neo-Con policy not at all in line with traditional Conservative thinking. Then he talks about the exodus of good jobs, and admits he was wrong about Free Trade. "But American workers cannot be made to compete with workers in Singapore and Malaysia who are making one dollar or two dollars an hour"

In fact, if you have the patience to suffer through a brief bit about the Reform Party bid in 2000, the rest of the interview from that point is worth watching.

There are many people who loathe Pat as simply one more Conservative asshole, but that opinion does the man a serious injustice.

When Pat Buchanan talks about being against an interventionist foreign policy, that's not a typically conservative opinion. In fact, it's very much the opposite.

When he speaks against Free Trade, and against the outsourcing of jobs, and says that US workers cannot be made to compete with the cheap labor markets in Asia, that's not a typically Conservative opinion. In fact, it's very much the opposite.

I disagree vehemently with Pat Buchanan on a very great number off issues. But I do not dismiss him as simply one more Conservative asshole. Like it or not, for better or for worse, he is a unique American.

But he can be an asshole at times.

One Year

Well, well, how time flies when you're having fun. It was one year ago today that I published my first blog at Blogger.com; the cross-post at Open Salon came about somewhat later.

Three hundred sixty-five days, and one hundred fifty-three scribbles later, here we are.

In all sincerity, I want to thank my dear old dad, whom we will refer to simply as "George", in order to protect his privacy. Without you pushing me to do this, father of mine, I'd never have gotten started. Thank you, with all my heart.

And so, dear reader, l'll spare you the tedious year-in-retrospect bullshit. But ask yourself, are you better off than you were a year ago? Are we, the human race, better off than we were a year ago?

I don't think so...

One Wife Not Enough

Ah, marriage, domestic bliss. Hey, what are you laughing about?

Two stories here.

Michelle Bachmann, the Great White Hope of the Clueless Right, has signed a 14-point pledge, (hey, she can count to 14, that makes her smarter than Sarah Palin), eschewing things like "polygamy, adultery, and polyandry", along with a few minor points like homosexuality, (no Bachmann-Palin slash fanfic), and Sharia Islam. Just, you know, in case she felt the urge to suddenly recite the Shahadah...

And it's interesting that she didn't include polygyny.

You can check the links above, but here's a summary.

Polygyny is a man with two or more wives, in which there is no direct marriage bond between the wives. This is what Islam endorses. This is typical of the patriarchs in the Old Testament of the Christian bible. This is also what Fundamentalist Mormons practice, although neither LDS nor RLDS endorse it.

Polyandry is a woman with two or more husbands, in which there is no direct marriage bond between the husbands. This is rare.

Polygamy is a marriage with more than two partners, in which each partner is married to each of the others. In the USA, we usually call this group marriage.

Meanwhile, back in Jordan, land of the last Hashemite king, the "Committee For Supporting Polygamy" has been launched to promote polygyny, although they call it polygamy. Confused yet? No? Well then, read on by all means. It only gets better. "Spinsterhood," says the founder, "is a dangerous social phenomenon that, if unabated through marriage, would lead to social and ethical degeneration."

Now, those of you who read this blog regularly, know by now that I am a staunch opponent of Islamophobia. I'm no Arab-basher. And I grant you that my North American perspective on society is not well-suited to judge social phenomena in the Middle East. But...

Back to the story. It seems that in Jordan, the number of unmarried women over thirty is 15 times what it was in 1981.

Now, if you want to hear a calm, reasonable Jordanian, from a charity that pays for weddings for those who cannot afford them, explain why he thinks "polygamy" (polyandry, dammit) is not a good idea, read the story and watch the video. The gentleman in question comes on about 1:15

So, the other man, at the beginning of the video, who just married his third wife. Islam allows him a total of four, do you think we could get him to marry Michelle Bachmann?

There exist a number of related posts on polyandry among the Jewish community over at the Mostly Kosher blog, much to my surprise. Life educates us every day.

Porn Crazy On A Bitter 4th

Happy 4th of July, we say.

Just what's so fucking happy about it?

At least 20 million Americans are unemployed. At least 10 million more are underemployed. At least 7 million of the unemployed, the 99ers, have completely exhausted their unemployment benefits, and have nothing at all, since they still cannot find a job.

14% of the population of the USA is now receiving Food Stamps.

And meanwhile, we are on track to break the barrier of Four Trillion US dollars spent thus far on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Oh, but don't worry, it's only about 3 and a half Trillion so far.

Our constitutional rights have been raped away by the bitterly misnamed Patriot Act. The President has murdered Habeas Corpus. And the US Supreme Court is dominated by reactionaries who have declared corporations to have the same rights as people.

The Gulf of Mexico is dying, we still haven't been told the brutal truth about radiation leakage from the Fukushima plant in Japan, and our President is the most painfully inadequate eunuch to sit his unworthy fundament in the Oval Office since Warren G Harding.

Oh, but hey, Happy 4th of July, everyone!

Then again, (gasp!) perhaps my brain has been re-wired by pornography. That is the breathtakingly unoriginal assertion of Naomi Wolf in a recent article at AJE.

If you really have nothing better to do than read her regurgitated drivel, you will find that it's a tired recycling of old and discredited theories from the grossly-misnamed "War on Drugs", just re-targeted on pr0n instead. "They need more and more powerful drugs to get them off" has become, "They need more and more hardcore porn to get them off".

Oh, and to justify that breathless exclamation about "rewiring the male brain", she then solemnly invokes the word "dopamine", ooooooooh, Naomi, that's science! The whole article is a series of sloppy assertions, pseudo-validated by phrases like "we now know" and "there is an increasing body of evidence to support". And yet, not once in the whole article does she cite a single reference to back up any of these assertions. In fact the only reference in the whole article, and a half-assed one at that, is in support of a passing reference to the alleged effects of porn upon women.

If dear Naomi knew anything at all about pr0n, she'd know that while addictive personalities and those who have been raised in a sexually-repressive atmosphere may go crazy with it, most men simply get incredibly bored with it in fairly short order.

In short, this is nothing more than a socio-political hit piece, targeting 49% of the human race.

If you want to argue against porn, there are far more credible ways to approach the subject. My mother, late in her life, changed her position on pr0n, and decided that she was against it, simply upon the pragmatic grounds that, (in her opinion), it leads men to have unreasonable expectations of women. Now, you may or may not agree with that, but we can at least discuss the assertion, although it doesn't do anything to address the First Amendment aspects of the debate.

Bachmann Needs A Boobjob

So I woke up this morning, had a shower, and made myself a substantial breakfast of chicken Parmesan sausage, ($3.99 a pound at Henry's, nomnomnom!), hash browns with onions, and eggs. This turned out to be a good thing, because I needed all the fortification I could get before discovering that Michelle Bachmann (brief pause while the clouds part, the sun shines down, and the angels sing Hosanna), has felt a calling to run for President of these here Yoonited States of Amerika.

Of course, we all knew it was coming. But there's a difference between abstract knowledge of impending disaster, and actually getting kicked in the nuts.

Given that Obama is going to be a one-term President, there is a grim inevitability to the whole thing. Oh, I suppose if the Archangel Michael came down from Heaven with a flaming sword and announced in a voice of thunder that it was the Will of God that Obama be re-elected, it might happen. But short of that, he's almost certain to be kicked out on his worthless ass.

And the sad part is that everyone knows this. The Republicans know it, the Democrats know it, my cousin's dog in Shawnee Mission knows it. But the Democrats will nominate him anyhow, simply because that's what they have always done, and the Amerikan political machine worships at the anus of business-as-usual.

So, whatever, we're fucked, and there's really nothing to be done about it until people are desperate enough to start listening to the Anarchists; then the real party will begin. But until then, we might as well have fun with it, no?

So I put on some Wagner, as I often do when in an Gotterdammerung sort of mood, and all at once it came to me. Bachmann needs a boob job!

I mean, come on now, Palin has the rack, and it does get attention. After all, never forget Rule One.

(Possum's Guide To Understanding The Male Of The Species, Chapter 2-Axioms, Rule One - "Men are pigs".)

Yes, pigs. Grunting, oinking, squealing, rude, inconsiderate, farting, belching, perpetually horny animals. And most of us here in the USA have a raging obsession with boobs. Big boobs. So, clearly, the smart move for A-cup Michelle Bachmann is an expensive set of first-class implants. Now, if she's going to do this, it's going to be obvious. After all, that's the whole idea. So what point in subtlety?

No, no, they hang you for a sheep, they hang you for a lamb, may as well steal the whole buggering flock. Our dear Michelle should clearly throw caution to the winds and go for the Godzilla-does-Tokyo broke with a set of the Hitomi Tanaka-style monsters. (Be aware that any search you do on that name will very probably yield results which are decidedly NSFW, but check Jlist-dot-com if you're curious. And at home.)

Now picture her doing a campaign ad, with the winged helmet and the iron bra, with Ride of the Valkyrie playing in the background, shaking her spear in the air and displaying The Twins for all those anal-retentive, mother-fixated, closet Nazis that are the stalwarts of the Republican party.

Tell me that's too crazy for US politics. Tell me it would never happen. Go ahead.

Hamlet Online

While enormous volumes have been written in recent years on the subject of online games, the vast majority, (if not the entirety), of that work has been written by those who are not themselves gamers. This is the equivalent of a treatise on rainbows written by a blind woman.

While I seldom venture upon this subject, preferring for the most part to focus upon international affairs, I have been a gamer since 1971. Now, "games", in that long-distant age we call "The 70's", consisted of half-inch square cardboard counters moved upon a paper map, usually regulated in hexagons. It would not be until the following year that I would encounter the first electronic game, as such, in the form of an arcade game called "Pong", right there next to the Foosball tables in the old Parkway Bowl.

Forty years later, a bright-eyed 11 has become a somewhat-world-weary 51, and the world of games is dominated by computers. Unfortunately, the games industry is dominated by corporations. Virtually all the big names from the early days of computer games are long gone, and the few that survive do so as naught but an empty shell, a shambling zombie corpse animated by the necromantic marketing of their soulless corporate masters.

The perhaps inevitable effect of this corporate domination has been catastrophically devastating to originality and innovation. This is bad enough in PC games, but the console is the ultimate expression of corporate slavery. Everything about a console is completely proprietary; it is capable of doing nothing other than playing the games approved by the corporation which controls it. And this leaves the gamer utterly at the mercy of that corporation.

Fortunately for the game geeks of the world, this bleak situation within the USA is somewhat balanced out by the availability of games from abroad.

If you'd like to try something really different in turn-based gaming, check out Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI from Koei. The game is based upon the oldest novel in the world, a 14th-century account of the end of the Han Dynasty, which actually took place in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Gameplay and all, this is a real gem, and something enormously different from western games. In a cruel irony, RTK XI is actually a PC port of what was originally a console game. What can I say?

But the game I mostly want to talk about today is something older, and amazingly successful in spite of relatively primitive graphics. Yes, I'm talking about Mabinogi, a free (yeah, right) online game played in large part by those 1/3 my age. And they're doing Shakespeare.

That's right, Shakespeare. In a move of staggering audacity, the folks at Nexon, the Korean company that owns Mabinogi, have actually translated Shakespeare into a playable "generation" of the ongoing campaign storyline.

They started with Hamlet back in January. Now, those of you that know your Shakespeare will realize that Hamlet is a very mutable play, since the three surviving "earliest" versions of the play, (referred to as Q1, Q2, and F1), are each so different from the other two, and Q1 much shorter.

Hamlet worked very well. I've played it all the way through with three different characters, and it was quite enjoyable. That wasn't what surprised me. What really surprised me was how well they managed to capture the spirit and essence of the story. I've seen stage productions of Hamlet which did not accomplish that goal so well. Let the purists scream in outrage.

Next they tackled Romeo and Juliet. This is a somewhat more difficult campaign, and I've only played this all the way through with one character so far, but again I would call it a success. They have managed to capture the essence and the feel of the story. All the major scenes are there, including one in which you have to sneak past the guards to serenade Juliet on her balcony. And another in which you play Romeo, and are forced to fight Tybalt.

I admit I felt guilty when Mercutio died, and I admit I was choked up at the very end when Juliet awakened to find Romeo dead and...yeah, well, you know what happens. If they can make the audience, (that's me, the gamer), feel what the Bard meant an audience to feel, I call that success.

Now, Nexon said at the start that they meant to do four Shakespeare plays, and they showed a teaser with four little icons. We have seen the first two. The third was something unrecognizable, at least to me, but others have suggested Othello or the Merchant of Venice. The fourth icon was clearly of three witches.

Oh my. The Scottish Play. Talk about mixed feelings.

US Infant Mortality

I've known I should write about this for a year now, but I keep putting it off because it's such a grim subject. Well, I said in my last entry that I'd deal with this, and here it is.

Infant Mortality is defined as the number of deaths of babies under one year of age, per 1,000 live births. The infant mortality rate correlates very strongly with, and is among the best predictors of, state failure. IMR is therefore also a useful indicator of a country's level of health or development, and is a component of the physical quality of life index.

The CIA World Fact Book has a list here of Infant Mortality Rates for the nations of the world. There are 46 nations with lower IMR than that of the United States. Let's look at a few highlights from the roll call of shame.

USA has an IMR of 6.06

Greece, for all its troubles, has an IMR of 5.00
Canada has an IMR of 4.92
Cuba, (FFS!), has an IMR of 4.90

"Possum", you say, "one measly point doesn't impress me". OK, fine, let's move down the list a bit further.

Slovenia, for the love of god, has an IMR of 4.17
Ireland has an IMR of 3.85
Czech Republic has an IMR of 3.73
Italy has an IMR of 3.38
France is at 3.28
Hong Kong has an IMR of 2.90, less than half that of the USA. Are you disgusted yet?
Japan 2.78
Sweden 2.74
Bermuda 2.47
Singapore 2.32
Monaco tops the list, with the lowest Infant Mortality Rate in the world, at 1.79

Now, the naysayers will jump in with frantic denials founded on alleged inconsistencies in the manner of reporting data. That was a valid point prior to 2008, but no longer.

The only remaining inconsistency of any note is that Hong Kong and Japan still sometimes report deaths within the first 24 hours as still births rather than infant deaths. But in evaluating this, remember that IMR is deaths within the first year. And even if we totally discard the statistics from those two areas, that does nothing to invalidate the data from the other nations, such as Sweden, with IMR less than half of our own.

The USA has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and the quality of the services we receive, (for those who even have access to healthcare), is for shit, by the standards of a first-world nation.

Fine, and now I've spent half a page giving you bad news on a thoroughly depressing subject. Now do you understand why I didn't want to write this?

So WTF are we going to do about it?

The Moral Police

Demonstrating once again a positive genius for shooting himself in the foot, the Supreme Leader (*snicker*) of Iran has ordered that 70,000 Moral Police are to be deployed on the streets of Tehran this summer. The stated targets of this deployment are women who fail to fully cover their hair or who wear revealing clothes, and also men with "inappropriate hairstyles". It should be noted that many Tehrani women wear a scarf over only the back half of their hair, rather than covering all of it.

If this seems utterly ridiculous to you, then we have that much in common. Especially considering that summer in Tehran is not quite as nasty as summer in New Jersey or Kansas City, but it's close. 90F degrees outside, 90% humidity, so by all means, let's require women to swathe themselves in yards of black cloth before going out in public, that's perfectly reasonable.

Politics in Iran right now is a three-way struggle between the zealots under the Supreme Leader, the moderates under President Ahmedinejad, and the largely-powerless opposition under whatever leaders haven't been thrown in jail yet. Yes, I called Ahmedinejad a moderate; in this context, he is. In previous summers, Ahmedinejad has publicly and vocally opposed any such dress-code crackdown, and largely prevented it from happening. This year, Ahmedinejad has just lost a spat with the Supreme Leader and been forced to eat crow, which leaves him in no position to help.

The other thing to remember about Iranian politics is that much of what is said, is only said for consumption. (Of course, that never happens in US politics, our elected leaders are always completely sincere in their public pronouncements). This seems to be more of the same, as the video below will show you. The people of Tehran, men and women both, seem to be dressing as they did last summer, and happily ignoring the Moral Police. And listen to the answers that AJE gets when they ask Tehranis about their reaction to this latest pronouncement. The replies are calm, thoughtful, moderate, and more or less what you might expect from a group of college-educated US citizens. Note that no-one even mentions God, or refers to religion at all, except in the phrase "Islamic Republic", which is how Iranians refer to their nation.

Some Iranian leaders may be loony tunes, (but of course you could never say the same about any of our leaders, right? Michele Bachmann is the soul of moderation, after all), but the Iranian people are as ordinary as can be. They're not crazy, they're not fanatics, and they're not blood-thirsty killers. They are, in fact, very much like us.



(Open Salon readers can view the video here)