Angry At Politics

After the election of 2000, Al Gore's role as an American leader seemed to be over. His credibility and capability as a leader were in great doubt, and it seemed clear that he would only be relevant in American politics as a historical lesson. But Al Gore has not gone quietly. And in the election of 2004, Al Gore has made himself newly relevant to the process. As the media is forced to re-assess him, a new picture of Al Gore as a man of ideas and integrity is emerging. Now, I'm not suggesting that this is an accurate portrayal of the man, but then, neither his portrayal by the media in 2000.

I recently saw a documentary about the 2000 election called Unprecedented. It's very interesting, and I'll probably write a bit more about it later on, but I specifically wanted to bring up a quote from Al Gore during the recount process. He said "What is at stake is the integrity of our democracy, making sure that the will of the American people is expressed." Amazing how true these words are. At the time, we perhaps did not understand the far-reaching effect and nature of this decision. Ralph Nader's opinion, that there wasn't much difference between Republicans and Democrats was a lot more believable. But ultimately Gore was right. The will of the American people was not done in November 2000, and for a while we thought that maybe it wouldn't matter that much. But today, we know exactly what Gore meant, because the integrity of our democracy was damaged in 2000. It enshrined the notion that you don't' actually have to win, you just have to have enough people be willing to pretend that you did.

We saw it in the election. Yes, there is some doubt about who won the electoral vote. Given all of the irregularities that plague any election, and given how close so many of the state races were, and even without judging whether any irregularities were intentional, the question of the true will of the American people by way of electoral vote remains an open question. However, there is no doubt that more people in this country voted for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. But Bush wins. And I'm not decrying the system, or railing against the inherent unfairness of the electoral college. I'm not here to assign blame. I'm just saying that Bush didn't win in the way that we generally mean it when we say that someone won. He somehow completed the victory conditions, but he didn't really win. And the will of America was not for George W. Bush to win. But he did, and today, our country makes choices and policies which do not reflect the will of the people. You can't win with faith alone, maybe you also need good works.

In November, when you are sealed within the voting cubicle, I wish to you that you can express your will for America, and that your vote will count. I'll be voting for Kerry, and I'm wondering if my vote will.

Here's a movie review that is the height of just-too-muchery. The Day After Tomorrow. The movie is about a sudden climate disaster in which global warming leads to an instant ice age with climate upheavals that essentially destroy the world. Good times. It's from the New York Times, so you have to register to see it, but I'll excerpt the best part for all you lazy schlubs who are too tired to register for free things online:

"Your first fear with a movie like this is that it's so spectacular it would nullify the idea," he said, as technicians from Snow Business, the company supplying about 10 truckloads of fake flakes, refilled the blowers with "medium snow" for the next blizzard shot. "People might just get back in their S.U.V.'s at the end." But as he learned more about the human role in climate change, Mr. Gyllenhaal said, he became more committed both to making the film and to trying to curb the emissions associated with his own lifestyle. "Hopefully we're getting the message out there," he said.

Critics of the movie, including Steven J. Milloy, a commentator for foxnews.com and the libertarian, industry-supported Cato Institute, have jumped on statements of this sort. Mr. Milloy recently wrote that the whole project smacks of "nauseating elitism."

And I couldn't resist one more excerpt.

Some environmentalists have expressed surprise that the film, with a budget topping $125 million, is coming from 20th Century Fox, a division of the News Corporation. That conservative media empire, run by Rupert Murdoch, regularly produces commentaries, like Mr. Milloy's, attacking global warming as an eco-alarmist fantasy. Mr. Milloy has called Mr. Emmerich a big-budget eco-extremist. "The movie's unmistakable purpose," he wrote recently, "is to scare us into submitting to the Greens' agenda: domination of society through control of energy resources."

The Greens?! THE GREENS!!!! AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Stay tuned for more good stuff, assuming my head doesn't just explode into chunky bits from the sheer insanity of it all.

This annoyed me today. I was watching Bob Novack (yes, the same Bob Novack who openly suggested that Bob Kerrey was so tough on Condi Rice because Kerrey is a racist) on CNN's Crossfire show. I've stopped watching the West Wing, but I like that I can still catch Josh Lyman, as played by Paul Begala.

In any case, they had their panel on to talk about oil and energy policy. Novack had a trap all ready. He showed that, adjusted for inflation, gas prices in 1981 were actually slightly more expensive than gas prices today. He then asked "do you know of any other commodity whose price has dropped over the last 20 years?" The implication being that oil can't be a problem if it's cheaper than it was 20 years ago.

There are two flaws (at least) in his logic. The first is not a logical flaw as much as a factual flaw. There's lots of commodities that are cheaper now than they were 20 years ago. Computers are cheaper, as are VCRs and other personal electronics. Novack was simply gambling that nobody at the table would be willing to go out on a limb without actual numbers in hand, and he was right. But the second flaw in his logic is that price is the only important measure. If oil costs about the same, but we're making much more of it, and using much more of it, our energy costs are much higher than they used to be. The fact that you can get a gallon for about the same amount of money doesn't matter if you need twice as many gallons.

I hate these guys so much.

Here's an article from the Walrus Magazine that blew my mind. Game Theories

It's all about the developing economics of Massively Multi-user Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). The article brings to light all sorts of incredible things, like that the virtual money in these games is often sold on Ebay for real money. Not only that, but that the per capita GNP of one particular game, EverQuest, is $2,266! The article points out that this makes EverQuest the 77th richest country in the world. Not only that, but the average player could generate virtual money at a rate that would translate to $3.42/hour.

It doesn't stop there though. There are companies that trade solely virtual goods, and who do business in the millions of dollars a year. Naturally, they trade not only items and currency in these MMORPGs, they trade entire inventories of goods, as well as characters who ahve already gained great pwoer, as measured in levels.

But there's another way to get powerful characters besides buying them. Some games sell pre-levelled characters, but for those that don't, there's an ingenious business providing a solution. They've hired Mexican workers across the border to play online computer games in 24/7 shifts! The workers play with the clients' characters until the character gains enough levels, and then control is turned back over to the client.

Two things strike me about this particular scenario. First off, it amazes me how mcuh value these game manufacturers have created that they've spawned an industry to sevice them. But additionally, I thought that I know lots of people in this country who would love to play games and get paid, but not many who do it for less than four bucks an hour. Just another example of how quickly our economy is changing, and how globalism is changing our world.

It also didn't escape my notice that all this value was generated to feed what is only a virtual appetite. But perhaps that's unkind - these online communities are just that, communities. In days when we wept over the death of social clubs in the United States, we dreamt that the internet would solve the problems of time and space that faced these groups.

What does scare me is that all of this value lies in the hands of the companies that created those worlds. If EverQuest were to increase the income players could earn, in essence printing more virtual money, it would cause inflation in prices, and the virtual currency would also drop in value. The actual value of the curency is based on the same thing that US currency is based on - 'full faith and credit.' Which is another way of saying that funny green paper is worth something because we all agree that it does. Should the US government somehow disappear, the money would not retain its value. Similarly, if EverQuest were to suffer from, say, a massive lawsuit that could threaten to close them, the value of its currency would drop. Basically, the companies making these games are now the government of economies and communties on the same scale as countries.

Still reeling from reading that article. Go check it out, and comment here.

I was watching CNN as part of my ongoing project to monitor what stories CNN, Fox News and MSNBC cover, and, in the interests of fairness, I have to say that what I saw on CNN was as bad as anything I've seen on Fox.

CNN was covering the Abu Ghraib tragedy, and the title graphic they used, which appeared on the bottom of the screen throughout the various segments was "Shame on Display." This title was particularly insidious because of the various segments that it was displayed on. At first, it seemed a reasonalbe title when the anchors were covering the prison and the pictures of abuse. However, the title was also showing throughout the President's comments regarding Donald Rumsfeld. In other words, as the President was pledging support for the embattled Defense Secretary, the words just underneath him were "Shame on Display." That's not cool.

More later, including some thoughts on war crimes in WWII by Allied troops versus prisoner abuse in Iraq by Americans today.

I was going to write about Disney, Miramax, Jeb Bush, and Michael Moore, but events have run ahead of me. Suffice it to say that if Michael Moore was only a bit more clever, he would have generated a firestorm of publicity closer to the release date of his film. But enough about that. I want to talk about the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, and about Bob Rumsfeld's testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Some people I've spoken to have expressed outrage over the acts committed at Abu Ghraib, but have tempered their outrage with an understanding that terrible things inevitably occur during a war. While the temptation exists to respond rhetorically and question how they'd respond if the tables were turned, but ultimately, such speculation is neither helpful nor relevant. The greater issue presented by this kind of thinking is the question of why we go to war.

War is the most awful of humanity's practices, but history teaches us that it is sometimes inevitable. When war is justified, violation of human rights is the necessary result. While it is right and proper to attempt to minimize these violations, and to hold accountable its perpetrators, it is irresponsible and wishful thinking to believe that we will not commit them. America is no more immune than any other country to the horrors of war. That said, sometimes the necessity of war overshadows these concerns, and we willingly make the hard choice to go to war despite our certainty that some abuses will occur.

It is now clear that this war, though perhaps somewhat beneficial in certain ways to national and world security, was also unnecessary. It is also clear that whatever benefits this war has brought, it has come at great cost: an increase in hatred of the US, a further destabilization of the Middle East, a loss of goodwill among our allies, etc. Now we face disgrace in the eyes of the world. And we face this disgrace because of the way we entered into war.

Though WMDs were ostensibly an important justification for going to war, few of us in America believe any longer that WMDs exist in Iraq, and few of us believe that our administration went to war primarily because of an honest belief that WMDs existed. We now understand that the threat of WMDs was just the front end of a bait-and-switch operation. In fact, there were other goals, which the Bush administration has purposefully not made clear, that they were seeking to achieve. The way the war was sold to us was that we had good reason to believe that there were WMDs, and that Saddam couldn't be trusted, and that he was a brutal dictator, and that we could build a democracy in Iraq. Though none of these alone might have been sufficient for war, together they were a compelling case for many. Indeed, the idea that this would be a quick campaign that would be narrowly targeted at Saddam and his security apparatus and military, and which would be followed by a rebuilding process that would lift Iraq and bring it to the table of civilized, modern, free nations. This war was pitched to us as against Saddam Hussein, not against the people of Iraq.

What did we actually get? Well, there were no WMDs, there was no quick military campaign, and while we got Saddam, we did not rid the Iraqi people of his brand of brutality. And we certainly didn't get a new democracy in Iraq, though hope remains that this goal might still be achieved. So why are we in Iraq? What are our goals? It doesn't appear that there's any reason behind this war that could possibly temper my outrage that American troops are engaged in torture. Today, George Bush's America has been exposed. Around the world, people see America as hypocritical, arrogant, brutal, and morally astray. On the playground, those are the characteristics of a bully, and the only way to defeat a bully on the playground is to face him, fight him, and beat him. But in the America we love, there's another way to defeat a bully, and that's to vote him out of office.

In search for a permanent home for my rants, I've decided to go with Google. I do this primarily to salute them for bucking the status quo when it comes to dealing with Wall Street. While it's not clear to me whether their choices are actually going to be best for business, and while at first glance it appears that they are hiding more information from the public than other companies, I'm willing to trust them. Why? Well, companies like Enron and Tyco played by the rules of disclosure, and had traditional voting-rights structures, and it didn't stop them from lying. In fact, it appears that a great deal of their fanciful bookkeeping was driven by their disclosure policies, and the expectations of their public. Google has made it quite clear that what's most important to Google is Google. They're not interested in having institutional investors tell them how to run a business, they're not interested in playing the good news/bad news day-trader game, and they're not even interested in the normal IPO cronyism that enriches already wealthy investors who are able to buy at the tender price and then flip the stock on the same day. So Google, I salute you, and I choose you to host my blog. Stay tuned for a rant on Disney, Jeb Bush, and Michael Moore.