Snazel Blog

Riddle of Manhattan

2011-09-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

When you think about how utterly vast and random the universe is, it is pretty remarkable that a place like Manhattan exists.

Manhattan is a wondrous place, full of good food, great theater and a wide variety of culture and art. It features some of the world's greatest museums, architecture and music. It is vibrant, colorful and exciting. It is also cruel, because it persists with such infinite vigor and energy and alas, we do not.

I recently returned from Manhattan on a fabulous vacation. 5 nights at the center of Time Square, with the world's oyster at my beck and call. A cab could be hailed within a minute and from there my heart's desire was accessible, be it jazz, Broadway, punk rock or pizza baked in coal-fired ovens.

I reveled in my time there, surrounded myself with theater, music, dance and good food and drink. I shared it all with those I love most.

There are two incidents however that stick with me most post-vacation.

The first was a simple experiment. In 1991, I took my first visit to Manhattan. I arrived after a long stint in the Bahamas as a DJ. It was a trip that was unlike my recent vacation. The circumstances were different. Far from the world's oyster at my beck and call, I was quite broke. I was at the mercy of people I had met while working in the Bahamas, (relying on them for shelter and expenditures). I had a great time though and I took this photo of myself in front of the Radio City Music Hall (see below).

20 years later, in 2011 I went to the same spot to take the same photograph, eager to see what 20 years had done to me. I even wore the same hat. It was a very eye-opening contrast. I have aged so much and have truly become "old". I was 25 in the original photo and I am 45 now. Here's the contrast of the two photos:

So many questions arise from the photos. Will I make it another 20 years I wonder? How many times will I visit New York again in those 20 years? I feel the city, and this photo, makes a superb backdrop to reflect on it all. If New York is anything, it is this mirror into your heart and desire. It is a dangerous reflection too, because New York is so vast, so unknowable in its entirety (people who live there for their whole lives are still "discovering it"), that you can often look into this mirror and feel your life has come up short.

Did I really achieve everything I aspired to? Did my dreams and my reality find a happy compromise? New York's answer is always "no". Always. It's entire purpose is to goad you, coax you and inspire you to reach for more. All of the great art from New York is about aspiration. While hopes and dreams are vital and necessary they are also as infinite, vast and cold as the universe itself. In other words, our aspirations are a catalyst but can never be a destination. We never "arrive" in life, we simply keep moving on and with each step, Manhattan takes another bite out of our vigor and vitality.

I look at these photos, at the center of the world's most energetic and inspiring city and find myself humbled. I am such an insignificant part of the universe, I have achieved so little when measured against this metropolis. My life can't be measured against the yard stick of Manhattan, I will always fall short. It must be measured with a different scale, or perhaps, more importantly, shouldn't be measured at all.

The other incident that stuck with me was a visit to CBGB. Long ago, CBGBs was the apex of modern music. It rose from the heroin and dark alleyways of the Bowery, a sleazy slum perched on top of Little Italy. It produced a brand of music that was malformed, but beautiful. It featured music that could be learned in a garage or broken bachelor apartment. It was music that was angry, energetic and full of aspiration (there's that word again). Some called it "punk", but truly it evolved beyond labels, to me, the music is better just labeled as "New York".

Time passed and now CBGBs is dead. Replaced by a designer store, run and managed by a man who seems to despise the legacy he's inherited. He designs "rock n roll" fashion. I choose such a banal description on purpose, because it fits. It is so derivative, that it gives the word derivative an even worse reputation. For example, you can find desert boots here, a reflection of that cool suede shoe from the early 60's. Except these aren't the original Clarks of that great era, they are just replicas, sewn and constructed and China and then branded with the designer's name and repackaged to you for a mere 700 dollars. The originals can still be bought on King's Road in London for 50, but here, in the place that once created some of the world's greatest music out of artists who survived on a few hundred dollars a month, the shoes now cost you 14 times their actual value.

But perhaps the epitome of the lunacy was a simple leather necklace. It was just a few strands of black leather, with some 1-inch skulls made out of silver-coated metal. The skulls were just tied into the knots of the leather. It celebrated death, turned it into a tacky commodity with a few shiny objects and material cut from a cow skin. It was the kind of necklace a street artist might sell to you for 200 dollars. Here, it was a mere 8000 dollars. A month's salary on a leather "punk" necklace. "Punk" rock had officially become haute couture, it had become so bourgeois, that it ceased to be a mockery and became truly "vicious". Punk was angrier now than ever before, because, like me it had become middle-aged, comfortable, bloated and a reflection of broken dreams and promises. It wanted money now, lots of it and would scalp anyone to get it. Filthy lucre indeed.

It was clear I was not welcome. I wanted the past and his store gladly sold a manufactured connection to it, but for a vicious price. This was nostalgia at a price only a Wall Street broker could afford. This was no longer the art of the garage, this was the art of car services, guest lists and expense accounts.

Like the photo on Time Square, time had changed the perspective. Look at what I had become as 20 years passed me by. Look at the what CBGB had become as 20 years passed by. I went from Sonic Youth to middle-aged malaise. CBGB had gone from Sonic Youth to tacky desperation at prices only Coco Chanel would dare to demand. Each of us had decayed, each had failed to truly conquer the impenetrable dream of Manhattan.

I stared at the necklace, I had failed. I had fallen short. I had stood before the giant of New York and was slain. Yet somehow, I felt superior to the bourgeois designer who had taken Manhattan's promise by the horn and wrestled the beast to its inevitable conclusion of greed and hypocrisy. Was I just a middle-aged man justifying his mediocre life and meager means? Perhaps, but if the evolution of punk rock was to sell hipsters an 8000 dollar leather necklace, then "evolving" into my middle-aged, middle-class malaise seemed rather genuine by comparison.

I was a failure, but maybe, just maybe I was a more honest failure than the 8000 dollar necklace?

The universe is a pretty vast, cold and unknowable thing. You can't conquer it. It will always conquer you. Always. Your dignity and to some extent, your limited happiness derives from confronting that reflection and smiling anyway. Once you do that, the tragedy of what CBGBs has become, (or what you have become), seems more amusing.

Time doesn't heal wounds, it inflicts them, the more you wear those scars with pride, the more you can laugh back at Manhattan's cruel reflection.

Of course, Manhattan will always laugh last. Those silver-coated skulls were just a warning. So were the photographs.

Manhattan will always win in the end.

Progress for Gay Right's Movement

2008-11-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

Gay rights are important, fight for them.

If there is anything that disturbs me about today’s protests it is that this is exactly the kind of grassroots/viral campaign that would have defeated Proposition 8 to begin with. As I said before, the original campaign ads were an embarrassment.

One more thing, the gay rights movement has the right idea as it moves towards a louder, prouder and fiercer campaign about rights and equality. On the other hand, singling out Mormons and African-Americans as scapegoats, is not only hypocritical it can hinder the movement’s progress. Rather than blaming those who campaign against you, simply state your own case louder and with more determination than ever before. It worked for the civil rights movement of the sixties, it will work again.

Gay marriage provides legal equality with straights. Any other compromise, (civil unions for example) is a “three-fifths” solution, a second-class solution and therefore they are unacceptable to anyone that treasures civil rights.

Gays deserve the same rights as straights, no more, no less. Period.

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Goodbye Nader, Goodbye Nader Supporters

2008-11-15T20:21:00.000-08:00

It's not often I agree with wacKOS, but today they hit it out of the park when they ridiculed the hypocrisy of the Ralph Nader movement:

I doubt "history" gives a rats ass about the "Nader/Gonzalez initiative" (they used to be called "campaigns"), and after I hit submit "post" on this little piece, neither will I.
-- Markos

Then of course, the Nader-heads, in their usual zealous and over-bearing way descended upon him like screeching vultures they are:

It is for this reason that I will no longer read the Daily Kos. If the Kos were to issue a retraction or apology, I would quickly reconsider my decision, as the Kos is one of my favorite sites to visit.

And Markos in his usual "my britches are bigger than yours" way simply responded:

Fuck Ralph Nader, and fuck his supporters. If the past eight years hasn't smacked any sense into their addled brains, then nothing will. This site caters to the reality-based community. No one else need apply.
-- Markos

On this point, I could not agree more. Nader supporters need to wake up and smell the gin on Ralph's breath. The man is an aging embarassment to political progress, and his recent comment on the historic election of Barack Obama, a disgusting epilogue to his career.

This was the last election Ralph Nader will even be an option on the ballot. For those of us who have seen Nader hinder progress for the sake of his own ego; for those of us who watched him take as much money as he could along the way (and from any source willing to donate it), it is indeed good riddance.

And Ralph, get yourself to a 12-step program and fast...

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A digital loop to "The Great Depression"

2008-11-15T09:09:00.000-08:00

We have been hearing about this for at least a year: just a couple of months away from now it will be time for older televisions to be upgraded to digital. Those with regular old rabbit ear antennas on their Panasonic, Sharp, or even Zenith TVs - who have not stepped into the digital television realm, could be the very ones who may have the hardest time affording it in this economy. I'm just saying. People who haven't upgraded whether their reason be fear of change, because they are clinging to the past, no access to cable/digital service or affordability, face the loss of staying in touch with "the World" at some level.

Even though the digital set top box converter is a reasonable price, and the coming of this conversion has been widely promoted, I still believe there are at least a couple of things to take into consideration, the first being the procrastinators who live in this country. Most likely those who do not have a digital TV or converter will go without for a while and then realize they do not miss the majority of the trivial drivel they have been been exposed to (as referred to in previous posts seen below).

Others will just simply have to put their money elsewhere as there are many people losing their jobs and homes daily. It brings to mind the old days of The Depression when there was no TV; when families gathered around their radios to hear about current events. This may be an extreme comparison, though more and more families are being forced out of their homes, most likely having to move in with relatives. Our country could now begin to resemble the days of "way back when" that our grandparents have been telling us about for years.

Is this such a bad thing? That era was certainly not perfect (are any of them?), but we do have the ability to learn from those days, take what we like from them, add our accomplishments, and leave the rest.

Genetic Breakthrough with AIDS?

2008-11-08T21:04:00.001-08:00

I discovered this wonderful piece of news while browsing Andrew Sullivan's blog.

I work in medical research myself, and I tell you, the amount of science and discovery that will be gained in the decades ahead because of increased understanding of genetics will astound us.

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Dogs and Seances Instead of Corporate Welfare Investigation?

2008-11-08T20:57:00.000-08:00

The amount of analysis over Obama's brief and rather inconsequential press conference yesteday is rather annoying.

Annoying because there was more focus on a marginal PR event, than there was about the strange situation going on with the American car companies. We just handed 25 billion dollars to the American car industry, and a mere 30 days later, all three companies are crying they are already broke again and require more welfare?

Can a qualified journalist please investigate this kind of chicanery? Isn't it possible these bailout packages are rewarding companies who continue to cry the loudest? What is this? Anti-capitalism, where the poorest most inefficient companies on the block get the most money and capital?

And why was this kind of question not asked, instead of questions about dogs, mutts or strange jokes about seances?

Look, I thought Obama handled his press conference well, but the left blogs are proclaiming the conference as some kind of political triumph, and the right blogs are claiming it is proof that our president-elect is a disaster. Michelle Malkin claimed the press conference was proof we just elected Homer Simpson president.

Can someone please shut up the whackos and wing-nuts and find out why all these companies are suddenly so cash poor, that they require a second bail out just 30 days after receiving the first?

Somewhere in the middle of this partisan-cacophony lies a possibility that companies are getting rewarded for squandering their bailout money, and then turning around asking for more. A little less opinion, and a lot more journalism from our media and blogs would be nice.

Does anyone have additional blogs, sites or data on the current situation with the auto-industry?

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Minnesota Recount Chicanery Starts Soon

2008-11-08T20:49:00.000-08:00

Recounts are just so ugly. Here in Washington, State our "recount" crisis during the Governor race just a few years ago, ended in chicanery and a lot of meddling by both parties to incluence the recount.

Now Minnesota is about to have their own recount debacle, this one over a senatorial seat.

Let me be clear: I loathe Al Franken.

I've listened to his radio show, I read his book and he's a jerk. He hides behind the "satire" to say irresponsible things about his opponents, or indeed anyone who dares contradict his narrow point of view. He's the kind of liberal, many of us independents loathe, because he's more focused on demonizing the other side of the political spectrum, than he is about offering solutions, researching facts, or providing real leadership.

His opponent in Minnesota is a very weak counter-proposal to be honest, and really the independent candidate that is running in this race, would have probably received my vote.

However, despite all this, Franken is right, in that he deserves to have the ballots recounted. In fact, he doesn't just deserve it, the law demands he gets a recount. So on this issue, Franken and I agree.

My only word of warning is, watch how quickly the recount is politicized, and watch how much the recount skews the current totals. Recounts are a huge mess, and all kinds of tricks and games come into play, and both the left and right make no apologies in warping, skewing and altering the final totals for their cause.

When a recount triggers, I wonder if it would behoove us all, to simply have an entirely new vote instead? Perhaps, the candidate list should be trimmed to the top 2, so that those who voted for the third and fourth candidates are now forced to choose, similar to the "run off" vote that Georgia will go through in a few weeks.

This would seem to me, to be a more fair way to resolving a race this tight, otherwise ballots suddenly go missing, or suddenly appear (as they have already), or suddenly polling officials claim they "mistyped" their results; and what we get is more about legal manuevering and tricks, than actually determining who the people voted for.

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Fiddler on the Blogosphere

2008-11-07T09:10:00.000-08:00

The problem with the right and left in this country is they are intellectual bullies. They rally together, form online packs and then assault everyone who dares to stray from their collective philosophy. This produces a dialog that is more about attacks than resolution and contains more sarcasm, ridicule and antagonism than fact and fresh ideas.

What a sad state the political dialog in this country has become, when the left is spending the majority of their online real estate ridiculing a defeated vice-presidential candidate, and the right meanwhile is already condemning a new president-elect over one cabinet appointment.

Both threads, are so stratified and ironically so distant from one another, and both come at a time when the three major American car companies are screaming for billions of dollars of welfare.

This is an industry that was handed 25 billion dollars just 30 days ago, and now all three are saying they are so cash-poor that they can only stay in business until the end of the year, or they will collapse. In short, these companies are holding our own government ransom for more cash-injection. This is the same industry that spends millions of dollars lobbying our government to avoid regulation on fuel and safety standards.

Yet, our blogosphere is still screaming at the opposite side of their spectrum, vilifying them, demonizing them and mocking them from afar.

It would make Nero proud. Let’s send Markos, Rush, Hewitt and Huffington each a fiddle shall we?

Here's what I intend to do: I am going to spend this weekend, scouring newer, fresher and less-known blogs that are talking about facts and solutions, rather than just "rallying the troops" of the left or right. I will report those sites here.

It's not much, but we need newer, fresher voices out there, that look beyond their own bias, and political party and start dealing with the difficult times ahead.

Jindal vs. Palin?

2008-11-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

In this candid, and entertaining blog call Dynamist, a woman named Virginia writes:

Now I may have to go back to being a Republican, to gear up for the struggle between the Jindal-Daniels wing and the Palin-Huckabee wing of the party.

What a great quote, and what a fascinating race that would be to watch develop. A Jindal vs. Obama election would be epic, and truly fascinating to watch.

I would never join the Republicans, but I admit, it would be tempting to actively participate in the debates they will surely have in the next year or two.

Meanwhile, we can enjoy the infancy of Obama's presidency, and see if he can resist the tug-of-war with his own party to drag him far to the left. I predict Obama shows Democrats how to truly govern with wisdom, pragmatic tactics and careful consideration of all points of view.

A lesson the Clintons didn't learn at first, and suffered in congress shortly afterward because of it.

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Rachel Maddow is Wrong

2008-11-05T18:49:00.001-08:00

I know she's a liberal super-heroine, and the latest "talking head" on MSNBC to be worshipped by the partisan left, and although liberals often don't see the hypocrisy of denouncing FOX NEWS, but then subscribing to MSNBC, the rest of the country does.

If we must reject hacks like Kristol and O'Reilly, let us please slap Maddow with the same rejection of narrow-minded and partisan media "stars". Rachel, your sarcarstic rant today on your show, that Obama should not govern from the center, because Democrats won, which means your left-of-center philosophy is now vindicated and self-righteous, is the last kind of editorial we need right now.

If partisan Democrats are going to make the same arrogant mistakes George W. Bush did, and interpret an election victory, as a mandate for extremism, the American people will vote you out. You critisized Bush for that kind of thinking just a few years ago, now suddenly because the same argument is being offered by the left it is justified? Isn't that called hypocrisy, and isn't America so very, very tired of these partisan games?

We didn't vote for Obama to get "revenge" on Republicans, or to fire up a new chapter of the culture war that MSNBC and FOX news delight in stoking daily. We voted for Obama to solve difficult problems, not to ratify an agenda that narrowly clings to a single side of the spectrum.

Thankfully, Obama is more pragmatic, and less dogmatic than the cheerleaders at MSNBC.

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Partisan Blogs Will Try to "Spin" Obama's Mandate

2008-11-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

Watch what happens in the next few days.

To begin with, watch who Obama picks for his team. He’s made very strong overtures to the Democratic elite, in his first few picks. Guys like Emanuel are Washington insiders, and are as staunchly liberal and partisan as you get in the Democratic Party.

However there are rumors that Chuck Hagel, Colin Powell and possibly other Republicans will also be invited. Indeed, Doris Kearns Goodwin confirmed last night, that not only is Obama reading her book about the Lincoln cabinet (that was very bi-partisan), he also called her to ask her questions about it.

If you are like me, and believe the poisonous partisanship of the last twenty years is hurting this country, this is really welcomed news.

However, when you read the highly-partisan blogs the next few days, guard against their interpretation that their party alone truly represents the country as a whole.

Don’t let the left tell you they “own” Obama’s mandate, and don’t let the right tell you that Obama’s victory means nothing, that the country is still mostly on their side.

Remember, if you are an independent, or if you are a younger voter, *you* were the one that gave Obama his victory. Obama's legacy begins with listening and empowering all voices in America, not just one firmly entrenched in one political party or the other. If he has a clear mandate to do anything, it is simply to unite this country, rather than divide it.

America isn't liberal, it isn't conservative, rather it is the inclusion of all those philosophies, and many more. America is free to borrow from any political philosophy, and it defines itself in far broader, more cerebral terms than "left" or "right".

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Post Baby-Boom Era

2008-11-05T12:10:00.000-08:00

I recognize, as many have said, that my generation stands on the shoulders of the civil rights movement, and the modern industrial age that was carved out after the end of World War II. In other words, I owe much to the generations that came before me.

However, I think it is important to note, that there wasn’t just a racial barrier that was shattered today, we also broke a generational one. 25% more people under the age of 25 voted in this election than voted in the last one, and 13% more people in the 26-44 age bracket (which at 42, I fit into) also voted in this election that did not vote in 2004. Those two age-brackets were the only two that voted more for Obama than against him.

So the data is clear: we are now officially in a post-Baby Boomer electorate.

For the first time ever, we have a modern President that didn’t face the draft during Vietnam, or wasn’t a veteran of World War II. So in other words, we have elected a President that isn't trapped by the culture war that has dominated this country for decades.

We have elected a President that was a pioneer in using the internet in motivating and mobilizing an electorate, and was able to largely reject corporate donations in lieu of micro-payments from ordinary people. This in turn, ensured his campaign was boosted massively by young voters, who participated in democracy for their first time ever.

We have, my friends, elected the first true President of the 21st Century, elected largely by people who will now definitively shape the century ahead.

We now have a president, who understands how the world has changed since the end of the Cold War, that grew up in a true multi-cultural environment, (just like we did, but our parents didn't).

If you are like me, you never attended a school that wasn’t racially and culturally diverse in the classroom and you've yearned to see a government truly reflect the very environment we grew up in.

What will my generation and future generations bring to this world now that we are now fully empowered? What lessons did we learn, from history, and what lessons do we bring from our own unique experience?

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This Close to History

2008-11-05T10:20:00.000-08:00

Standing this close to a historical moment, can be a very humbling experience. I find myself wondering what it must have been like to read about Pearl Harbor, or to experience the surrender of the Nazi regime in London.

I have had few historical moments in my life that have come somewhat close to that magnitude. One was, I witnessed my home province of Quebec reject a referendum that would have begun the process of separation in Canada. Another was, I witnessed Nelson Mandela finally get released, and then take command of the South African government via the ballot box. I also witnessed the Berlin wall falling down, and watched Germany unify once more.

Today, once again, I feel connected to history. It is a very satisfying feeling. I will try and document my thoughts…

We saw the youth of this country participate in the democratic process at unprecedented levels. This is, in my opinion, is just as vital an accomplishment as the racial barrier that was broken last night. Indeed, it might just be the lasting legacy of this election. The race problems in America, will take another generation (or more) to fully resolve; Obama’s election was just a stepping stone to that arduous climb, but not the pinnacle. However, I think younger voters will continue to stay mobilized and invested in this country, because Obama showed us how you can include them in unprecedented numbers. Young people in America, take a bow. It doesn’t matter who you voted for, you came out in throngs, and invested in this country’s future, I am very proud of you.

I was particularly thrilled to see Obama’s acceptance speech underline the theme of unity. In other words, to establish an agenda of non-partisanship, to understand the importance of working with all people, of all persuasions and politics to solve the difficult problems ahead. It was the first real sign Obama will govern from the center, and that the election was not a mandate to return to “tax and spend” liberalism of decade's past. If Obama can somehow miraculously diminish the poisonous politics of the baby-boom generation, and embrace a competitive, spirited but respectful debate moving forward, I believe this will be a monumental achievement.

My favorite quote last night, from all the pundits, all the panels and all the analysis came from a French journalist on the Charlie Rose show. He quoted a voter he met in New York, who surmised my own feelings on the historic nature of this election so beautifully:

Rosa Parks sat, so that Martin Luther King could walk, so that Barack Obama could run, so that America could fly.

Amen. I feel like I could fly today, that’s how good this feels.

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The Prediction

2008-11-03T23:08:00.000-08:00

This is what I think the map will look like by this time tomorrow (click to see a larger image)

I do not see a landslide win of 390 electoral votes like Markos (and others are predicting). I think several factors will make this a little closer than most of the polls have shown heading to election day.

I see blue collar states like Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and North Carolina going for McCain late. We'll see that the GOTV operation in those states for the Republicans was much stronger than anticipated and that in the end, many of the red state's undecided voters swung hard for McCain. Those states will be close, and may take a very long time to call, due to close votes and high turnout, but will narrowly end up in McCain's column.

Sadly, we will see columns written on Wednesday claiming the Bradley Effect isn't quite dead in America.

However, I see Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico needing to come through for Obama in order for him to prevail. Obama wins because of a superb ground game in these states. Latinos will be seen as one of the key reasons why Obama won the race. We will also see columns on Wednesday that will note this importance, and Latinos will be a much talked-about voter block in 2010 and 2012.

I do see Obama capturing 51.5% of the popular vote, but losing closely in many of the early swing states. Virginia and Pennsylvannia come through for him. New Hampshire is also suprisingly close but Obama wins it.

FINAL SCORE: Obama 291, McCain 247

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Unity FTW

2008-11-02T15:09:00.001-08:00

Unity for the win:

This, more than anything, captures why Obama's campaign defied the odds. This message of his, captures why he motivated us more than the Clinton machine, why he could soar above Rovian attacks and why he is energizing a generation of voters, that until now, never seemed interested in politics.

In a wretched economy, in a time where we are mired in two wars that show no tangible progress, as we witness a ballooning deficit that threatens the future of our children, and in an America that seems to have lost some of its prestige these last eight years, ideas like this seem genuinely soothing and inspiring.

Sure it is just words, sure it is just a stump speech, but it sends a message that is connecting to many of us, including, stodgy, cynical independents like me.

We want to unite, and solve our problems, not divide, blame, and antagonize those who don't think like we do, or look like we do.

I've said it before, but I'll say it again: if Obama wins, his mandate is not a liberal mandate, it is a bi-partisan mandate. It is a mandate for unity, moderation, dialog and inclusion of all Americans, regardless of religion, creed or political persuasion.

It is when Obama delivers this exact message, that our hearts soar. Put away DailyKOS and Drudge, and instead, find someone who has a different political philosophy than you, and then embrace them as your equal, instead of your adversary.

We all have a stake in this. Stop demonizing those with new and different ideas to your own, instead listen and find the common ground.

Obama's rhetoric might just be rhetoric, but it offers us a tonic that this country so desperately needs.

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Dowd: Schmidt is the Scapegoat

2008-11-02T14:35:00.000-08:00

Maureen Dowd reminds me of that English teacher that would scold you for a dangling participle, and then force you to read Catcher in the Rye. Maureen Dowd doesn’t really editorialize, she muses, and usually in a way that condescends, rather than inform.

While she may difficult to read, (and seems like the kind of woman that would immediately wash her hands after you were formally introduced), she is required reading for anyone interested in US politics. She is required reading, because like it or not, she often sets the agenda for a news cycle.

She and others (such as Matt Drudge), are shepherd crooks in the sheep pastures of American media. They are important, because in this age, our media seeks sparks with which to launch the next 24-hour fire. Dowd, Drudge (and a few others) often provide those sparks.

Maureen’s editorial today is one of several that are already writing the John McCain obituary before the results are even tabulated. It was as usual, quite sardonic, but it did highlight one scapegoat for McCain’s current situation that I’d also like to highlight: Steve Schmidt.

She writes this about him in her latest editorial:

In the end, “The Bullet,” or “Sarge,” as McCain calls his replacement campaign manager Steve Schmidt, was the one who did the shackling, turning the vibrant and respected McCain into a shell of his former self. Schmidt abruptly cut off the oxygen supply to McCain’s brain. No more of the oldest established, permanent floating crap game of press confabs. No more audiences that weren’t vetted for friendliness. No more of McCain’s trademark insouciant mocking the process even as he participated in it.
--Maureen Dowd

If McCain goes down in a ball of flames, (as many are predicting) then Schmidt is indeed scapegoat #1.

I believe the morale of McCain's campaign will be: you can’t run a Karl Rove campaign during a recession. Schmidt failed to see that obvious truth, and may have damaged the Republican brand for years because of that blunder.

One other small note: I think the word "insouciant", is the kind of adjective only a Thesaurus should ever print. :)

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Mocking Olbermann

2008-11-02T12:59:00.000-08:00

Blowhards from the left and the right must be mocked accordingly:

What makes the sketch so perfect is it shows how indignant and self-righteous the left can be.

Nice to see Saturday Night Live get some "teeth" back, embracing political humor again, and throwing punches at both the left and right.

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Conservative Litmus: George Will

2008-11-01T20:34:00.000-07:00

Do you want to know if you're a genuine conservative? If you demand a conservative litmus test, personally, I'd leave the final verdict to George Will.

His verdict on Sarah Palin is not a good one. This editorial from him is outstanding reading.

My two favorite quotes from this are below and my commentary follows:

Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin's never having attended a "Georgetown cocktail party" is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents "are in charge of the United States Senate"?
-- George Will

Later in the article George Will attacks the scapegoat tactics, that have demonized Obama's fund raising:

Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.
-- George Will

MY COMMENT: Palin was a farcical pick, a "sugar rush" that provides instant momentum for McCain's campaign, but then crashed and burned when it was obvious that even the most basic question from the press (say a question like "what newspapers do you read?"), had her stumbling for words, and struggling to deliver a single coherent sentence.

On campaign financing, Will makes superb commentary, but missed why McCain is making noise on this issue. While we all agree, public financing of presidential campaigns, need to go the way of the dodo (public financing does far more harm than good), the reason why McCain is raising the issue isn't because he defends public financing, it is because it is setting the stage for the inevitable Republican response to this election.

That response will be: fraud, fraud, fraud.

Obama's campaign financing will receive massive scrutiny in the weeks ahead, and his use of e-Commerce to raise hundreds of millions, will be called into question, and there will be enough odd cases of fraud, that the cry that his entire victory was fraudulent will sadly gain traction in the press.

Still, Will's commentary is laser sharp in the above editorial, and ends on a "delicious" piece of trivia about potato chips. It's worthy reading, from a worthy voice in our political landscape.

...

ACLU & Privacy For All

2008-11-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

It’s not often I agree with Michelle Malkin (who has written some of the stupidest things about Japanese internment camps ever).

None the less, civil liberties, are civil liberties and they must be protected for all, yes even political stuntmen like Joe the Plumber. If the claims Malkin documents are valid, then the ACLU needs to act and protect his rights.

Her editorial on this topic can be read here.

If state employees sifted through government records illegally, and then forwarded them to mainstream press in order to discredit Joe the Plumber, then this must be investigated.

I know the left are dismissing this with a shrug, and clearly the ACLU claimed they were appalled but didn’t actually do anything about it. On Bill Maher last night one liberal journalist actually claimed the state *should* violate the law, to sniff for dirt on Joe the Plumber, that this was a righteous act.

This is wrong. If we are to advocate civil rights and privacy rights (as we rightly should) then we must show our dedication to this cause, when it matters most. Civil liberties matter most, when the person you advocate for are not aligned with your own candidate or philosophy.

In short: if Joe’s privacy was violated, and if state employees broke the law for political gain, then we need to act.

I challenge DailyKOS and other leftist blogs to investigate this, and if proven to be right, then to advocate for privacy and civil liberty and criticize this violation of the law.

And yes, this blog just advocated an editorial from Huffington Post, and Michelle Malkin on the exact same day. Such is the glory of independent thought. :)

...

Doonsebury Out of Touch

2008-11-01T14:07:00.001-07:00

I've ranted for years about how Doonsebury is now so hopelessly out-of-touch with those of us born after the baby-boom generation. Now I offer this proof that Doonsebury lost its relevance twenty years ago, with this startling news.

What an idiot. For someone apparently so attached to the progressive cause, a headline like this in America's largest newspaper hurts Obama's cause more than helps it. That didn't seem to bother Gary, who clearly values publicity more than actually supporting a presidential candidate.

My disdain for this goes beyond the headline though. My biggest beef with Doonsebury, is the implied message that Gen-Xers (like me) were stupid, shallow and materialistic because we didn’t always fall in line with the cause of liberal baby-boomers. This has been obvious in his work for years, where almost every new character (that were younger than the original characters), were always shallow, vain, confused and seeking advice from the orthodox-liberal characters in the strip.

Don't get me wrong, Doonsebury deserves high marks for breaking barriers in daily cartoons. He also inspired greater cartoonists like Breathed and McGruder. However, in my opinion, Doonsebury stopped being genuinely progressive and open-minded a long time ago. Now of course, headlines like the one above from USA TODAY, (a clear and obvious marketing-stunt), just makes Obama’s cause synonomous with the arrogant and self-righteous leftists of the 60’s and 70’s.

It also makes Obama and his supporters look arrogant, and cocky, and quite frankly, I take exception to that.

Apparently none of us even need to vote, because Doonsebury tells us it is already over. A cartoonist, is counting the votes, before any of us have actually cast them, how can that not be perceived as arrogant, presumptuous and just plain stupid?

...

Hurrah for Grace Stanchfield

2008-11-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

We've talked a lot about "generational politics" these past few days.

I think it is important to remind ourselves just how much we owe the generations that came before us.

On that note, I thought the Post-Intelligencer had just a superb article yesterday, about a woman who is about to vote for her 19th president. You can read the full article here.

My favorite quote in the article, is her central advice on how to live such a long and happy life:

"Older people tend to complain," she says. "Don't complain. Take it as it comes. Attitude is the most important thing."

...

Biofuel is Worthy Research

2008-11-01T13:35:00.000-07:00

I've had many arguments with friends, about the validity of ethanol and biofuels in general. I concede all the valid criticisms of corn-based ethanol, and that many biofuels don't truly tackle our carbon emissions.

However, I've always argued, that anything is better than oil, and that all research that weens us of oil, is valid and worthy research to explore. Research begets more research, and science can breed new understanding and techniques that can often yield discoveries that become a catalyst to bigger breakthroughs.

I have experience with cancer research for years, and I can tell you, scientific discovery requires an iterative process, and what may seem like an imperfect solution at stage one, can yield far more promising resarch in future stages.

This is why I applaud, articles and research as the one outlined below...

In what could be a major breakthrough for second generation ethanol production, German researchers have developed a new method that easily converts raw wood into sugar using a liquid ionic salt bath at room temperature followed by reaction with a solid acid resin.

I believe we so often get caught up in the issues surrounding corn ethanol and making fuel from food crops that we tend to write off biofuels as a flop. In reality, corn ethanol is a stop gap to help us develop an infrastructure for the second generation of non-food biofuels like cellulosic ethanol.

The full article can be found right here.

...

Generation Gaps & Israel

2008-11-01T13:21:00.000-07:00

I criticize HuffingtonPost regularly, as being just a collection of celebrities, who cheerlead for democrats. Also I believe every time Arianna opens her mouth, the cause of progress suffers. :)

None the less, on rare occasion, smart people (rather than famous people) write intelligent things at that highly partisan site. Yesterday, I thought this editorial was quite interesting.

Much of the editorial, is just boiler-plate endorsement of Obama, but contained within that, is this important commentary on how the younger generation views Israel:

Now there is a generation growing up that is more distant from Israel than I should like. Young Jews do not automatically support Israel, and many are rightly troubled by what they learn about the ill treatment of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. No longer motivated by fear of anti-Semitism, they seek to understand what Israel stands for, not to say "my Israel, right or wrong." Without strong support among the younger generation of American Jews, Israel may lose its vital relationship with the US government.
-- Edgar Bronfman

MY COMMENT: We now have many young Jewish voters, who cannot remember the Suez crisis, and read about the peace treaty between Begin and Sadat in their history books.

The divide between orthodox and secular in Israel must be monumental right now, but I wonder if there is middle-ground between the two, and if the young generation in Israel can help to find that common ground?

I also wonder how demographics Israel's elections. How many Israelis under the age of 30, support the Likud I wonder?

...

Snazel Blog Feedback

2008-10-31T18:16:00.000-07:00

We don't get many comments on this blog, but when we do, it almost always provides great feedback.

For example: Culture Vulture commented recently on my thread about generational politics entitled Generation We vs. Generation X vs. Baby-Boomers. The comment is listed below...

As many prominent experts have noted, Obama (and you, born in 1963) is a member of Generation Jones–born 1954-1965, between the Boomers and GenXers.

Here is a column by Clarence Page about GenJones in last week’s Chicago Tribune.

And this new 5 minute GenJones video features many top pundits (including David Brooks, Clarence Page, Dick Morris, Juan Williams, Karen Tumulty, Howard Wolfson, Michael Barone, etc.) specifically talking about Obama (and Palin’s) membership in Generation Jones, as well as the surprisingly big role that GenJones is now playing in this election. Link to the video is here
-- CultureVulture

The next comment comes from Geoff who writes his own fine blog here.

Geoff wrote a couple of comments, but the one I'd like to highlight is the following, he wrote this in response to my rant about how "old school" and "Washington Insider" Obama's tentative cabinet choices look to be. A link to the original thread is here

Geoff's comment is below:

I think Obama is overcompensating for people's concern that he does not have enough experience. With the absurdly inexperienced Gov. Palin on the Republican ticket, Obama is not the one people are worrying about as far as experience goes. Agreed, Obama should reject this list. The old hands have failed us time and time again. He needs to put the power in new hands, starting with his own.
-- Geoff

Thank you both for the comments.

Cabinet List is a Disaster

2008-10-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

Politico has apparently come up with a list of possible cabinet members in an Obama administration. The list was compiled from inside information from those close to Obama, and others are purely speculative.

You can read the list here.

MY COMMENT: The list is an utter disaster.

Whoever it is in the Obama camp that is snitching on this issue, needs to be muzzled, punished and kicked out of the campaign. The list presented here, entirely contradicts the “Change” message of the Obama campaign.

This list reads like a “Who’s Who on the Inside of Washington”, a list of bureaucrats, old codgers and inside-track Democrats, that don’t suggest change at all. Rather, they seem to suggest Obama’s administration would quickly descend to “same old Washington”. This list should be dismissed officially by Obama, they need to get in front of it fast, because this is superb fodder for McCain’s campaign.

Also if many of these rumors are true, I am utterly disappointed. When I vote for Obama, I was not endorsing the Clinton administration, and this list looks largely like a sequel to a lot of the ineptitude of the Clinton administration, a presidency which made an utter mess of the Middle East process, and utterly ignored the growing threat of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Thank goodness Janet Reno isn’t on the damn list, or I would seriously be considering changing my vote.

John Kerry as Secretary of State? Are you kidding me? I could write volumes on what an utter disastrous pick this would be. Rahm Emanuel? Can anyone tell me what this rubber-necked, poll-watcher actually believes in, other than protecting his own job and ducking for cover when the tide gets a little rough? Tom Daschle? Who on God’s green Earth, thinks Daschle represents change? The man is a cowardly rat, and represents all that is partisan and dirty in Washington and is knee-deep in lobby influence.

We are not voting for Obama, just so old, liberal hacks, that have failed us for decades, can suddenly get a payday. For the most part, the “progressives” on this list, represent the old liberal dogma that was rejected by voters before and will be rejected again, if it is slammed down our throat. We expect more than just the same old tired bureaucrats of yesterday.

Somebody in the Obama campaign, I beg you, disavow this list, it’s a disaster and makes your campaign look like a complete charade. “Change” does not mean we reward Dean, Daschle, Emanuel, Kerry and half of the Clinton cabinet with cushy new jobs, and major policy influence. Those names don’t represent one iota of change, and most of them were rejected by voters for executive power.

If the list is true, Obama should prepare for a one-term presidency immediately, because this crap won’t fly in this new electorate.

Khalidi "Scandal" is Last Straw

2008-10-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

I personally don’t agree with some of Mr. Khalidi’s views, and I confess he argues for the Palestinian cause with great fervor. I also confess he has criticized Israel for failing to work towards a two-state solution. However, this does not make him a terrorist, nor does it link him to the PLO and it certainly does not make him an anti-Semite.

To make matters even more deplorable, John McCain chaired a committee which handed half-a-million dollars to an organization which Khalidi founded, so this campaign pointing any suspicious fingers towards him is utterly hypocritical.

There are several other aspects of this charade that bother me:

1) The idea that anyone with Palestinian heritage is somehow ‘un-American’, anti-Semitic or connected to the PLO is ridiculous.

2) The fact such serious accusations can be leveled by a presidential campaign with no proof, is unacceptable. I blame the media for this, for providing validity to the story, instead of clearly reporting the facts. Mainstream media has to stop merely being an echo chamber for campaign managers (both left and right).

3) Even worse, the insinuation that because Obama appeared at a banquet with Khalidi, means Obama is also in league with the PLO and is working to destroy Israel, is a new low.

4) Why hasn’t McCain criticized “Joe the Plumber” for suggesting, a vote for Obama would mean the “death of Israel”?

There was a time I had great respect for John McCain, but that is no longer the case, after this garbage. I really hope the Republicans get their soul back in future elections, because their current status and desperate tactics are beneath all of us.

Anti-Semitism is a serious charge that should never be reported by the media without definitive proof. The phrase “he will bring the death of Israel” is a phrase that must be substantiated immediately by a campaign, or withdrawn and apologized for profusely.

Goodbye John McCain, good riddance, your biggest failure is you actually made the wing nuts at DailyKOS seem like they were right all along, by running the lowest presidential campaign in history.

If you have any doubt of Khalidi, I invite you to watch the following debate he has with a former Israeli ambassador. And again, while you may not agree with some of his points of view, at least concede he argues his case reasonably, as any American should be permitted to do in a free society...

We vs. X vs. Baby-Boom

2008-10-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Everyone should see this, because even if you don't agree with the message, it should certainly spark a worthy discussion...

I have much to say about this, and while some of my commentary is quite negative, overall I have to say, I applaud this video. It may be a little cheesy, self-righteous and presumptuous, but it has its spirit in the right place, and it also signals the death of political power dominated by the baby-boomer generation, (which personally I cannot wait to see).

Personally, I am just two years younger than Obama, which puts me right at the cusp of "Generation X" and the end of "Baby Boomer". I've always considered myself as "Generation X" because my parents were born in the middle of World War II. I grew up with, recognize, and identify with much of Gen-X culture.

I have to say, I think a new generation finding its own identity and purpose is a good thing. What I especially like about the video above, is how often they suggest that their generation rejects partisanship.

If this is true, how will the cheerleader blogs and media (DailyKOS, Huffington, Rush Limbaugh, NRO) captivate this new generation? If all they do is attack the other side, demonize ideas contrary to their own, how can they expect to capture this new generation of voters?

I wonder how long it will be before JWR, KOS and other sites like it, will be seen to be as anachronistic as Dick Cavett, Donovan and Catcher in the Rye?

Hopefully not too much longer, because the need for true bipartisan and intelligent dialog (rather than pom-poms and rhetoric) is sorely needed. I sincerely hope this "Generation We" brings true bipartisan dialog to the internet.

Rovian Tactics RIP?

2008-10-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

It seems that this time around, (if polls are to be believed), that “Rovian” tactics are simply out of date. There have been many editorials of late that discuss “what went wrong”. Putting aside these editorials are jumping the gun a little, I think it is still it’s a worthy discussion.

My favorite editorial on this topic recently can be found here.

My favorite quote in this editorial comes at the end…

Two years ago, I wrote a book imploring the Republican Party not to follow its worst elements off a cliff—not to evolve, in short, into an insular party with little-to-no appeal outside of the rural, the southern, the Evangelical. As the McCain campaign flames out in a ball of Rovian disgrace, scorching the center in an attempt to fire up the base, it's difficult to reach any other conclusion than that the battle for the soul of the Republican Party has been lost.
- Ryan Sager

MY COMMENT: As much as I wish this election to put a stake in the "energize the base" politics of Rove and Kristol, I have a feeling, we haven't seen the last of this gang. They are plotting their triumphant return to power in 2012 already I am sure.

...

Score Another Point for Brooks

2008-10-27T20:30:00.000-07:00

For the second day in a row David Brooks scores a worthy quote. I don't always agree with this man, but this quote is precisely how I feel right now:

I have nothing against partisanship, but I do have something against self-deception. In the final months of a campaign large majorities in the country simply shut off all information that doesn’t confirm their own candidates superior virtue and intelligence. I’m amazed at the number of pundits I see who are simply campaign mouthpieces. I’m amazed at the bloggers who have lost all independence and are simply operatives.
-- David Brooks, New York Times

I challenge anyone who reads this to dial up a site that contradicts your established point of view and give it a read. If you are left-wing, dial up Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt or the National Review. If you are right-wing, dial up Markos, Huffington or "The Nation".

For us independents, this is a daily exercise, trying to read both partisan hype-machines, and then attempting to discern the truth amongst the cheerleaders and echo chambers.

It's not easy, but it is what responsible voters do.

...

Swines Compete for the Swill...

2008-10-27T20:25:00.000-07:00

The bailout is now the hottest lobbying game in town.
-- MARTIN CRUTSINGER, Associated Press

Cunning Realist links to an AP story that is truly frightening.

MY COMMENT: Swines, competing for the swill.

...

No Shame in Science

2008-10-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

Christopher Hitchens is the kind of editorialist many people loathe. He is loathed by some, because he is both a conservative and an atheist, he’ll cross any party line when it suits him, and because he can make eccentric arguments with great cunning and reason. Now, I don’t always agree with Hitchens but there are times he writes with great clarity and wisdom, and this is one of thos times.

My favorite quote from his latest editorial is:

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured.
-- Christopher Hitchens

A link to the full article is here

My comment: One of many positive possibilities from this election is that fiscal conservatives who value civil liberties more than religious dogma, might finally get their lungs back in the Republican party.

If Republicans would simply diminish their slander of science and secularism, this would make them a far more attractive political party for many independent voters.

However, if Sarah Palin is dragged out of the Alaska wilderness and is offered to voters again in 2012, the Republicans will officially become a farce. The choice belongs to Republicans and it will be interesting to see which way they turn.

...

David Brooks is Right

2008-10-26T19:32:00.000-07:00

David Brooks.

DailyKOS rails against him, and questions his intelligence. Republican cheerleaders have ostracized him, for refusing to tow the party line.

So in other words, he annoys both extremes of the spectrum, which in my eyes, means he's probably doing something right.

Well, he did something right with his Sunday editorial I thought, my favorite quote is below:

...some of us hoped McCain would take sides in the debate now dividing the G.O.P. Some Republicans believe the G.O.P. went astray by abandoning its tax-cutting, anti-government principles. They want a return to Reagan (or at least the Reagan of their imaginations). But others want to modernize and widen the party and adapt it to new challenges. Some of us hoped that by reforming his party, which has grown so unpopular, McCain could prove that he could reform the country. But McCain never took sides in this debate and never articulated a governing philosophy..."
-- David Brooks

The full editorial is here.

Trite "Wardrobe Scandal" Hides More Obvious Truth

2008-10-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

It was a stupid and trite distraction to begin with, but the Palin “wardrobe scandal” has now come full-circle.

Recognizing the media went for the item (which first appeared as an item on Politico.Com for 24 hours before picked up by mainstream media), and now trying to distance herself from the damage the story scored, Sarah Palin is now washing her hands of the entire fiasco, with a classic denial story.

Earlier today, Kristol, (ever the Palin-apologist), even insinuated the clothes were purchased without any knowledge of Sarah Palin.

So in short, we’re meant to believe Sarah Palin doesn’t even know where the clothes she wears at public appearances came from; which even it was true, speak volumes on her leadership, naivety and accountability.

There is a much larger truth related to this story though. The real truth is, *all* political campaigns are obscene. They float massive payrolls to political hacks, custom jets, top-tier hotel rooms and 5-star restaurants.

It is laughable, that both parties stood in front of us, and tried to tell us they sympathized with middle-class America, while their personal expenditures and per-diems soared the roof, often to the tunes of millions of dollars a day.

If Obama was any kind of leader, he’d take half of that 150 million he earned this month in donations, and put it in a fund to fight cancer. I personally know of a great colon cancer study he could invigorate for years, with just 1% of the money he earned in a single month.

What do you say Obama? Will you recognize the funding of these campaigns has become obscene, and put some money where it is needed most?

And Sarah, I know the story was just a stupid distraction, from a lazy media, but just how naïve do we think we are? Are you not responsible for your own campaign, or are you trying to show us that real leaders duck, cover, and then blame their own friends and party when things get rough?

...

Franken Unfit for Senate

2008-10-26T16:26:00.000-07:00

One major drawback to the Democratic tide, (that is apparently sweeping the country if polls are to be believed), is that idiots like Al Franken get to ride it into the senate.

Having read Al Franken's disgusting slander in his book, Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them) and having listened once or twice, to that dreadful, partisan, snobbish and inaccurate "news" show he moderated on "Air America", I can tell you it saddens me this comedian, turned leftist-cheerleader is about to be elected.

He is a hateful, biased and narrow minded man, who advocates a dogmatic approach to every problem, and can't see beyond his left-of-center bias. He demonizes those who do not goose-step to his own narrow politics, he writes and says sexist things, and then ducks for cover when they cause him controversy.

If you need more evidence this man is a terrible choice for senator I offer you this:

Al Franken was taking on the vast right-wing conspiracy before other people even admitted it existed," Mrs. Clinton said.

That statement should be speak volumes to anyone with an independent mind.

Party cheerleaders find no comfort on this blog, and Al Franken is a dangerously narrow partisan, that is completely unqualified for the Senate.

Cheap Sentiment Hurts Gay Rights

2008-10-26T15:59:00.001-07:00

I was at a gay wedding in Vancouver, British Columbia, just a few years ago. I watched as two beloved friends of mine (whom I both consider as family), said their vows, and exchanged rings.

Let me tell you: Had you seen the beauty of the service, and the sincerity of the love at this ceremony, it would be difficult to advocate any kind of constitutional amendment against it.

Alas, in California, this is exactly the kind of amendment on the ballot in November. So obviously, I am eager to see this initiative defeated, and the constituion of California left alone.

All men and women, be they gay or straight, should be able to enjoy the legal and social advantages of marriage.

One small problem though, and that is gay advocacy groups in California, are botching their campaign with schmaltz like this:

Ads like this cheapen and trivialize the beauty of any marriage, be it gay or straight. Ads like this come across as the cheap sentiment that they are, and they hurt the cause for gay rights rather than help.

Such a serious issue, deserves a far more serious treatment than this. A hackneyed pull at the heart strings, will only galvanize the homophobic even more.

This issue, needs honest, unapologetic advocacy for basic human rights, not heart strings, pathos, sentiment and a really bad soundtrack from "Rent".

Someone in California, please I beg you, give Gay Rights, a better voice than this.

And shame on the state politicians of Washingston State, for refusing to tackle this issue! Given the cowardice and petty nature of our current race for Governor however, is it any wonder, both have ducked for cover on this issue?

Impressive vs. Squabbling

2008-10-26T14:33:00.001-07:00

I slam the Democrats, because I am skeptical of any political party, and view partisanship, as a dogmatic solution to problems that require a pragmatic approach.

It's hard however to criticize the Democrats current political success however. An illustration of which is best described here:

I just got back from the Obama rally at Civic Center Park here in Denver. The Denver Post estimates the turnout was 100,000 people, which is really just astounding considering the total size of the city is about 550,000 people.
-- David Sirota, Huffington Post

The full blog post can be seen here.

Meanwhile in contrast, we have Bill Kristol whining. Suddenly Kristol sounds like the KOS "gang" in 2004, who whined and squabbled like wet mules after Kerry was defeated.

If Bill Kristol is the best conservatives can do for a spokesman, you can kiss independent voters like me goodbye. The sum of Kristol's argument, is that it was not Palin's inexperience, her botched interviews, her gaffes, or her scandals that made America reject her at the polls. No, it was the fact McCain "mishandled" her...

Most of all, it bothers me how Kristol refuses to blame himself for the mess. He was a loud, and powerful advocate for Palin, and rather admit he was wrong, he seeks to scapegoat his own party. It is political cowardice, plain and simple.

I argued just a few posts ago, that if Obama wins, the Republican response to his victory will be calculated, effective and vociferous, and that the Democrats will be ill-prepared for it as usual. However, if this is the best they can do right now, it appears the Republicans are not only losing, but they intend to squabble and whine about it, instead of counter-attacking.

This is not good news at all if you are a Republican, and I suggest humbly you get better spokesman than Bill Kristol moving forward, or it could be dark times ahead for your political party.

Meanwhile in Iraq...

2008-10-26T12:34:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile in Iraq, failed negotiations are in a very dangerous position:

“Chief of the Kurdistan Alliance Fouad Masoum said if the agreement is not signed by the end of the year, U.S. troops will be left without legal cover from the UN. This means they will not have to perform security-keeping operations. This justifies concerns about the possibility of a coup. … Chief of the Accord Front Adnan Duleimi also warned of a coup toppling the government.”

Read this outstanding blog, for more.

...

The "Fraud" Narrative Gains Momentum

2008-10-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

I continue to harp about the inevitable Republican response to an Obama victory, which I predict will be: fraud, fraud, fraud!

We saw initial seeds planted last week for this narrative, and now we see mainstream slowly taking the bait.

A key quote from this article in the Washington Post:

Donors to the Obama campaign using false names such as Doodad Pro and Good Will gave $17,375 through 1,000 separate donations, with no sign that they immediately tripped alarms at the campaign. Of more concern, Cairncross said, are reports that the campaign permitted money from 123 foreign nationals to enter its accounts.
-- Matthew Mosk, Washington Post

As someone with a decade of electronic commerce experience in my career, I can tell you, there will be many examples of "suspicious" donations in Obama's campaign.

It won't matter that there was a serious effort to thwart the fraud, or that the vast majority of the contributions were probably legal, or that Obama was clearly the preferred candidate.

No, the narrative will be, that America's first black president, used "Chicago-style" politics to steal the presidency.

Sean Hannity is writing his first diatribe on this topic already, to be delivered within 24-hours of an Obama victory.

What is the left doing in anticipation of this? Nothing, they are popping champagne, laughing at SNL skits and saying stupid things like "leave nothing on the road, nothing".

It will be giddy cheerleaders versus a savvy, media-driven narrative to discredit the left's largest political gain in decades. I think it will be the cheerleaders that might end up "on the road:, if they don't start acting now to counter these accusations.

...

A Worrisome Mess

2008-10-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

A quote worthy of repeating, (and even shouting from rooftops if you have the energy):

We can go to the moon, split atoms to power submarines, squeeze profits from a 99 cent hamburger and watch football highlights on cell phones. But the most successful democracy in human history has yet to figure out how to conduct a proper election. As it stands, the American voting system is a worrisome mess, a labyrinth of local, state and federal laws spotted with bewildered volunteers, harried public officials, partisan distortions, misdesigned forms, malfunctioning machines and polling-place confusion.
-- Michael Sherer, Time Magazine

I have warned for a while now, how the outcome of this election will likely bring thunderous cries of “voter fraud”. If Obama wins, the validity of his victory be called into question, primarily because our election technology and voter audit procedures are sadly lacking.

Think of it: the first African-American President will have his legitimacy questioned, merely because our procedures can be called into question. That's just tragic, and we have only ourselves to blame.

We should be pushing our leaders for reform of our electoral process, and provide a means by which we can all track our individual vote, and ensure it was recorded correctly.

The full diatribe from Michael can be seen here.

...

Justice for All

2008-10-25T21:09:00.000-07:00

This will easily be the most controversial thing I've ever posted on this blog, so be warned, this is an opinion that may not sit well with others.

The sum of my outrage over this is simple this: I don't want to become so tolerant in life, that I begin to tolerate intolerance.

On that note, I am disturbed by this:

Sharia Rules in England

One set of laws for all of us please, this idea that a segment of society gets access to an exclusive legal system, just so sexist Sharia laws can be enforced in divorce and property disputes, is wrong. This is not democracy and this is not multi-culturalism.

If we oppose the Ten Commandments in our courts (as we rightly should), and if we oppose Christian prayer in our public schols (as we rightly should), then we must protest this disastrous decision.

Separation of church and state is a fundamental tenant for democracy to thrive, and pandering to any religious extreme (of any persuasion) erodes our freedom.

If you scoff at the dangers of Sharia rule, or suggest my concern over this is somehow "racially driven", I invite you to read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's book: Infidel.

She, as a Muslim, and without apology claims the following:

Islam is in a period of transition, the religion as it is currently practiced is often incompatible with modernity and democracy. It must radically transform itself in order to become so.

"We in the West," she writes, "would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life."

We are a secular society. We honor freedom of religion, but our schools, our laws and most especially our government, are separated from religion. We do this, so that all religions may flourish equally, and that no religious dogma is given precedence, or more power than another.

We cannot let the tolerance of democracy, allow an intolerant religion to demand and receive its own legal system, or become greater than the law of the land, simply because of their faith.

...

McCain Finally Finds a Message

2008-10-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Andrew Romano of Newsweek writes an interesting analysis of the McCain campaign, suggesting that they have finally found a message that might work against “Obama Mania”.

You can find the article here.

I agree with the editorial only in part.

While I agree capitalizing on Joe Biden’s incredibly stupid remark in Seattle is political platinum; I am not so sure the “Joe the Plumber” message is working.

I suspect most voters are a little fatigued with "Joe the Plumber" already. Not to mention, that most of us in the middle class, don’t see a pending tax cut to our returns as “spreading the wealth”, we see it as necessary relief to shelter ourselves from the impending recession.

To be blunt: I want that tax cut, and I don’t consider myself a “socialist” just because I’d like a little relief, from this current economic climate.

However, I think Romano is right that Biden's inane comment earlier this week, provides a means whereby McCain can score points on foreign policy.

...

Si Se Puede!

2008-10-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Clinton supporters claimed the Latino vote was one of Obama’s greatest weaknesses (among others), but as usual, the Clintons were wrong:

“Latinos make up 32.4% of registered voters in New Mexico, 11.4% in Nevada and 9.9% in Colorado. The institute examined data from eight polling firms and found that Obama's lead over McCain in Nevada would be 42.4% to 40.7% without Latino voters -- a difference that's within the margin of error. Include Latino voters, however, and Obama's lead grows to 50%, versus 43% for McCain.”
– Marjorie Miller, LA Times

The original/full article can be found here.

My comment: If things continue to tighten in Pennsylvannia and McCain continues to lead (and therefore win) Ohio and Florida, then these Latino voters in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado could well decide who is president of the United States.

...

Lions, Tigers and ACORN, Oh My!

2008-10-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

Great quote from Lisa Lerer on this idea that ACORN is part of a vast conspiracy to destroy democracy:

“But faulty registrations rarely turn into illegal votes. While ACORN has admitted to errors in its registration process, documented cases of illegally cast ballots remain rare. A five-year investigation by the Bush administration resulted in the convictions of only 26 voters found guilty of voting more than once, registration fraud, or ineligible voting.” – Lisa Lerer

The full article can be found here

Dumb "Buds" Redeem Themselves

2008-10-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

The dumbest beer commercial ever, redeems itself with this clever revisit many years later by the original actors in the ad:

This Week's: "Best of the Blogs"

2008-10-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

Here are my favorite "blog quotes" of the week. We begin with some sober analysis of the Republicans, and what they must do if they are "blown out" in this election, as some predict they will be:

“We will see a serious conservatism again when Bill Kristol and Karl Rove are banished from the Republican party and from the conservative media...It was when McCain ceded his campaign to Schmidt and Palin (creatures of Rove and Kristol respectively) that he threw it all away. As long as they are given any credence, Republicanism will not recover. “
- Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

The "YouTube" moment of the week was this video, which includes this quote:

“I just dressed up as an eight year old boy, from a 48-year old television show. Please don’t let my efforts be in vain”
- Ron Howard dressed up as Opie

Larry David summarizes our angst over the impending election:

“This is like waiting for the results of a biopsy. Actually, it's worse. Biopsies only take a few days, maybe a week at the most, and if the biopsy comes back positive, there's still a potential cure. With this, there's no cure. The result is final. Like death.”
- Larry David

Tom Ridge hints how things would be different, if he had been selected as the VP candidate:

“I think the dynamics would be different in Pennsylvania. I think we'd be foolish not to admit it publicly."
-- Tom Ridge

And to all left-wing nutters who think this election is already over, I have this reality:

Strategic Vision has McCain narrowly ahead in both Florida and Ohio, and gaining ground in Pennslyvania. Rasmussen, meanwhile, has him narrowly ahead in North Carolina…and closing his difference with Obama in New Hampshire, where his taxation message may be selling well.
- Nate Silver

Don't let the media fool you into thinking the election is all over! It isn't over. We need to hear from you.

So go out there and vote!

Chess and Checkers, Right and Left

2008-10-19T15:33:00.000-07:00

“Thus, what is of supreme importance in war
is to attack the enemy's strategy.”-- Sun Tzu

Today, as a purely mental and distracting exercise (it is a slow Sunday in comfortably middle-class Seattle for me after all), I began to think about what a Barack Obama presidency would look like. I began to contemplate the very thing, I have convinced myself is impossible. The more I contemplated it, the more I was disturbed by what lies ahead. Don’t get me wrong, I intend to vote for Barack Obama and still yearn for a regime change at the executive level of American government. However, seeing the discourse of the past week, and following that trajectory forward beyond November, I am very concerned.

Republicans are a notoriously aggressive political party, so "better luck next time" isn't enough for them. They use their self-righteousness to galvanize and energize their political maneuvers, and thus they need never apologize for their tactics and they never stop fighting. For many Republicans, the end always justifies the means, and the greatest end one can achieve is to solidify and protect the American values, that most Republicans feel that they alone symbolize. Literally, some Republicans view all alternative points of view as “anti-American”.

As I have written before, I admire Republicans in many ways, because far more than the Democrats, they do not delude themselves about how power is usurped, and used, to achieve an agenda. In other words, they see politics for the cold, malicious power-grab that it is, and not the pleasant discourse of contrasting philosophies that we wish it was. Also unlike many Democrats, Republicans actually have an agenda. You may not like their staunch support and vision of “Reagan’s America”, (and I certainly don’t) but give them the credit that they have successfully rallied-around this vision for decades, and have gone to great lengths to perpetuate and empower it.

Now of course, several boughs of the Neo-Con philosophy have begun to break, (or at least appear to be ineffective). Indeed, there is an argument to be made that Neo-Conservatism may have even been the systemic cause of some of the country’s current problems. So it seems like dire and desperate times at the Republican dinner table, which explains why even the National Review and the Buckley family have suddenly come to blows.

However, despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not convinced the Republican Party or the conservative movement is going through the utter collapse and humiliation, that DailyKOS is already celebrating.

Assuming however, the polls are correct, and Obama wins, let’s play the politics of the next year out, see what we find…

Nobody likes an angry Republican, and unlike the Democrats, when Republicans are angry: heads roll and blood is spilled, (Democrats in contrast tend to whine they lose, then mutter and write editorials that blame the centrists in their party for losing). To start with, all of the anti-McCain voices in the conservative movement will begin their “I told you so” essays. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter will appear almost instantly, to remind us they predicted the calamity months ago. This discourse will only last a day or two because the real message the conservatives want to perpetuate is: fraud.

Fraud. Illegitimate. Scandal.

These three words will be the only explanation Republicans can offer for the results of the election, and they will hammer these three themes home, well into November and well beyond the Obama inauguration (assuming he wins).

Already, the groundwork is being laid for this rebuttal, and the messages we hear are alarming. The most alarming aspect of them is there are just enough granules of truth in these accusations, to allow the Republicans to ensure their "scandal" takes root in the mainstream media. What media outlet doesn’t love controversy anyway, and wouldn’t be more than willing to magnify these granules into a full-blown, scandalous investigation and national dialog?

The attack will come from several tiers. First, we’ll hear reams and reams about ACORN, (and other community-based voter registration organizations), that registered thousands of fake voters. These organizations are skewed left, they are disorganized and they are quite frankly, a tad inept. Rightly, or wrongly, they will look and sound suspicious to the average American once the bright light of media scrutiny shines on them.

Then we’ll hear about “fraud” at the polls, and especially how early-voting in some states were usurped and manipulated by Barack Obama. The Republicans will scour the Earth for voters, who “confess” how they voted multiple times, or used a combination of early-voting, absentee-ballots and poor registration. Others will suddenly pop-up claiming Obama supporters urged them to cast votes in states they do not reside in. They’ll find a black-woman from Illinois for example, that will “confess” how she was urged and taught how she could actually cast her vote in Florida.

Then we’ll hear the more powerful and quite frankly more legitimate claim about the shady way Barack Obama was able to raise such enormous funds.

The fuel that will drive this “controversy”, will be that, in fact, Obama does indeed collect money in a somewhat dubious way. In many ways, this is not Obama’s fault. He merely perfected a means of fund-raising pioneered by Howard Dean. To make matters even more perfect for the Republicans, this means of raising funds, also questions the integrity and security of the internet, and this is a theme that a vast majority of older-Americans appreciate and applaud.

The internet is big and spooky to many Americans fifty and over, because it is a medium and tool that was developed primarily by the generation that came after them. And of course, there is a basis of truth in the internet’s unreliability and insecurity, so the ingredients are well established for the Republicans to make a lot of noise about how Obama "broke the law" in becoming President.

The Republicans will probably even find internet-donations, that have "links to terrorists", and despite the flimsy evidence, the headline will be so sensational our media won't be able to resist it.

Obama’s main source of income was built around a rule that establishes that nobody who contributes less than 200 dollars to a political campaign has to declare who they are.

You then combine this rule, with an internet-based campaign fund-raising tool, and you then combine this with the elements of fraud that take place under any electronic-commerce endeavor, and you have the recipe for the accusation of scandal.

I guarantee you, there will be examples and instances that the Republicans can point to in the months ahead, where people were donating money via credit/debit cards that were stolen, (or used without permission). There will be examples where people obscured how much or how often they contributed, (therefore bypassing the 200 dollar rule), by creating “anonymous” profiles to hide the true source of the contribution.

We'll see instances of foreigners contributing, and some of the contributions will be deemed to have very dangerous ties or a "threat" to our security. For all of these accusations, there will be examples along the way, to make these accusations seem legitimate, there are probably some being "planted" by shrewd Republicans right now.

It sounds outrageous I know, but I have a great deal of experience in electronic commerce, and indeed have had great success in my career in this field of work; and I can tell you any electronic-based, credit card system, can be exploited via fraud.

Indeed, there is no e-Commerce business I know of, that hasn’t had fraud issues and these include billion dollar companies who devote millions to limiting their fraud-liability. There is *NO* way, Obama’s campaign could have completely insulated themselves from fraud, because no e-Commerce business ever has.

So while, it may be true that Obama’s campaign did the best they could to limit fraud, (and make sure people were contributing honestly), all it will take is a few sturdy examples of fraud (and those examples will manifest believe me), and the entire campaign can be called into question.

Lastly, these two veins of attack (voter-fraud and campaign financial-fraud), is a clever and obvious move for the Republicans because they can claim higher ground on both fronts almost immediately, and even more brilliantly, could use their attack to create legislative pressure that will seek to strengthen them in 2012. They can’t lose anything (since they’ve already lose the election), but can gain not only legitimacy for the next election, but might also take away the very tools and means by which Obama has forged himself into such a strong political force.

One casualty from this election I am certain, is that if Obama wins, the rules for campaign financing will change again, because if the Republicans have any kind of congressional power (a lack of a filibuster-proof majority for Democrats in the Senate more than likely) they will extend that power to get this dialog onto the public agenda. They’ll rally the FBI/CIA to investigate Obama’s financing, and they’ll rally their “troops” into civil acts of discontent (rallies etc), to delegitimize Obama and his party.

It will be a war of words, unlike any we’ve ever seen, because the conservatives will perceive themselves as righteous and just, in raising these concerns.

If the left were smart, they’d be preparing for this inevitability right now. Sadly, the left in this country is not always smart. Remember this is a side of the spectrum where half of their members refused to recognize how brilliant a politician Obama was to begin with. Their solution was to dredge up the ghosts of the Clinton presidency. Mercifully, the other half of the left, stopped us from that nightmare, which would have surely ended in Republican victory.

Unbelievably, as I write this, the left is popping champagne and declaring a victory, before it is even won. The left will probably stand around stunned and surprised that their victory isn’t as fully realized as they deluded themselves it would be and then blame "racism" for it. Then the real war will begin, and the left will be (as usual) playing a reactive and defensive game to the right’s attacks, totally unprepared and hung over from their premature celebrations.

I think if this plays out, we’ll likely see concessions on voter registration and campaign financing, that will ensure that the populist-nature of Obama’s political rise, will not be seen in this country again for a very long time. After all, Obama's campaign defeated two institutional and powerful forces: it defeated the Clinton machine, and it is now poised to defeat the Neo-Con machine.

You can't slap the power-brokers of America that hard, and not get punished for it.

The fight does not end after November; indeed, the fight will have only just begun. That’s something the left should be talking about and strategizing against, but instead they post YouTube clips of Sarah Palin and giggle and pat themselves on the back, for an election that still is undecided.

The right is playing chess, the left is still playing checkers, and I fear Obama’s political career (and populism in general), could suffer from it.

News of the World

2008-10-17T13:49:00.000-07:00

"Each morning our key to the world comes through the door
More than often its just a comic, not much more
Don't take it too serious - not many do
Read between the lines and you'll find the truth"
-- “News of the World”, Bruce Foxton, The Jam

Not long ago, I wrote that I’m voting for Barack Obama. I stand by that vote, and after nearing the end of his book “Audacity of Hope”, I feel my choice is a good one. Now an eloquent and well-reasoned book about politics doesn’t mean the author will make a good president, but it is at least comforting to know your candidate is capable of explaining his positions on everything from the economy, to race, to foreign policy. I say that, because many of our recent political leaders, seem unable to even recite a cliché, without botching it up.

So, I am willing to give Barack Obama a shot, and I feel more comfortable with that decision after having read his book, which explains in detail his general philosophy about politics and leadership.

However, I also stated a few weeks ago, that I am apathetic about democracy in the US right now, and I also argued that despite my vote, I think Barack Obama will lose.

These seem like ludicrous positions now, given how weird and entertaining the campaign has turned of late, and extremely implausible given the polls show Obama has a significant lead.

However, I still stand by what I wrote.

I am still apathetic about the process, because the campaign is even more farcical now than it was just a month ago. The Ayers and ACORN “conspiracy” theories of the right-wing are laughable, the kind of “we never landed on the moon” ranting you hear from that schizophrenic low-life at the end of the bar.

The left however, simply can’t stop demonizing Sarah Palin and now of course they’ve focused their venom on the so-called “Joe the Plumber”. The left have talked more about the trivial details of these two people, than they have about the current economic crisis. Most disturbing the liberal blogs are ignoring how complacent, weak and ineffective the House of Representatives acted during the recent “bailout package”. Nor are they angry at all at their own party, for the shameful pork-barrel that was added to a bill, to provide welfare to companies that managed their debts irresponsibly. What we get instead is this weird self-righteous rhetoric because it turns our “Joe the Plumber” doesn’t have a license, and Sarah Palin lied about her experience hunting caribou, like this somehow justifies the shameful performance of congress.

This really goes to the core of my apathy. There simply doesn’t seem to be an outlet, for reasonable, non-partisan discussion about critical issues that affect me and the future of my children. Indeed, people assume that because I’m casting my vote for Barack Obama, that I must now forgive Democrats of all sin and “join the team”. My apologies, but Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barney Franks, Charlie Rangel and others have a lot to answer for, and I won’t give them a free pass simply because they play for the same “team” as my presidential candidate.

The blogosphere of course, makes the situation worse, and yes I do recognize the irony of whining about blogs, on a blog. Still, I took the time last night to click every blog link on the Andrew Sullivan page. There, I was taken a whirlwind trip of the partisan blogosphere. My favorite and most illustrative lunacy of these blogs can be categorized by these two points of view:

RIGHT: It is ridiculous that the liberal-press has vetted “Joe the Plumber” more than they have investigated the secrets of Barack Obama’s life and ties to domestic terrorists.

LEFT: It is ridiculous that the press has vetted “Joe the Plumber” more than they have investigated the secrets of Sarah Palin’s life and her ties to secessionist parties and their attempt to acquire explosive substances.

What made both points of view so ludicrous was not just that they were a partisan mirror reflection of one another, but that the rest of these blogs that made these complaint, went on to spend at least 50% of their real estate talking even more about “Joe the Plumber”. This is akin to complaining about the “power of cheese” while munching on pizza.

Meanwhile, real news is ignored: Our governments around the world are injecting tax dollars into banking corporations, radically altering the foundation of the geo-economy; the Russians have assassinated yet another dissident, this time apparently via mercury poisoning and once again have rattled their sabers with direct threats to the Ukraine and Poland. Saudi Arabia continues to indoctrinate their student population that western democracy is “evil and unpure”, while we hand them billions of dollars because we are addicted to their oil. Dubai perpetuates slave labor, recruiting Indian laborers into an indentured servitude scam that is now the largest slave trade in the world. China continues to send money and political support to the atrocities in Darfur and Russia props up Mugabe, a dictator of equal moral proportion to Saddam Hussein. Iran has just acquired better nuclear technology, and is defying the United Nations with an almost laughable hubris. Domestically, we see a volatile marketplace, frozen credit at our banks, and foreclosures rising. We’ve seen the worst unemployment in decades, and an infrastructure in the worst shape in our country’s modern history. We are fighting two wars, neither of them progressing as well as we would like, and our veterans are returning to a health care system that fails to treat their wounds adequately. Yet, the number one headline on CNN is that Sarah Palin will “star” on a comedy show on Saturday night.

How can you not just shrug your shoulders and tune out the media noise? How am I supposed to be “energized” into activism, when a Bruce Spingsteen fund-raiser is considered “news”, when our country just recently sent bomb-dropping drones into Pakistan? Apathy doesn’t seem so utterly unreasonable when you stare at that reality.

I also said a few weeks ago that I think Obama will lose. It seems like a laughable assertion given the polls. Heck, even Christopher Hitchens and Chris Buckley have cast their lot in with Obama. Still, I predict here and now that Obama will lose, and I predict this because of the following reasons:

1) The “Bradley” Effect, which I feel is very real. You can knock off at least 6% of Barack’s support (more probably in a lot of Midwest and Southeast “swing” states). Also polls *always* skew left, and you can review polls before the 2000 and 2004 elections for proof of that.

2) The “October” surprise. Republicans are starting the momentum towards a huge “voter fraud” campaign, that will make the liberals whining about Florida in 2000 look like a tea and cupcake party. This “surprise” will include even more allegations that Obama is a terrorist, and will inject so much vitriol, partisanship and hatred into the campaign, that the outcome of the election will suffer as a result.

3) The hubris of the left, will reach such catastrophic levels, and the expectations for Obama’s victory are now so unrealistically high, that voter turnout for the left (a critical element to Obama’s success so far) will falter, and Obama will lose states that looked in the “bag” heading to voting day (states like Pennsylvania will stunningly support McCain I predict). Obama succeeded in the primaries, because he was in a razor tight race, and his well-organized “ground game” was superb at getting the vote out. Now that everyone thinks its over, that energy will dissipate, and the left, being the left, will simply be too lazy to vote (once again).

If you doubt the third point, I point to you that the leading story on Politico today was “what networks should do when Obama blows out McCain on election night”. The media, (even the liberal blogs) are already crowing about a blowout. This is a disaster for the Obama campaign, that require a sense of urgency in order to win. Their “change” platform falls flat, if everyone already is deceived into thinking he’s already won.

I hope I am wrong. Indeed, there is a part of me that suspects that I am wrong, but I refuse to raise my expectations, because the alternative is so depressing, that I almost feel it is better to resign to it now, and just accept the fact that the Neo-Conservative apparatus will find a way to preserve their executive power.

I will be voting though, you can count on that. I am not so apathetic as to not cast a ballot. Let’s hope that vote actually counts, and that we give a new kind of leader a chance, the stakes are high, the times are dire and we need to move in a new direction.

Flat World, Fat American

2008-10-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

The world is shrinking, and like Thomas Friedman suggests, it is also flat, (or at least it is getting flatter all the time).

As an American, living in Seattle, I am fairly sure Melbourne, Australia qualifies as somewhere “very, very far away”. The thing is though, it really isn’t, and indeed putting aside the marathon flight it takes to get here, it is pretty obvious as you travel these days just how real the "global village" truly is.

I was 8000 miles from home, a distance just a century ago that was beyond the reach of everyone except the truly rich, and even then, would take months to traverse. Travel in the 21st Century is wondrous, because while the flight may not be faster than it was say 25 years ago, the speed at which information, communication and commerce could be conducted was measured in the blink of an eye.

On my recent trip, I kept up with local news, I even watched local sporting events, on-demand and at my convenience. I tracked my bank accounts, paid bills and monitored the situation at my work via email and Skype.

I didn't want to pay for any outgoing phone service, so instead, I'd email my wife via a cheap, but high-speed internet connection and this would signal her to call me, via our cheaper phone service from home. Literally her phone would receive the email, buzz her that I was contacting her, and she'd push a single button to talk to me. Another button later, and I was on speaker talking to my whole family, my voice emanating from the center of the dinner table, while my kids ate macaroni and cheese and told me how about their homework.

I thought the city of Melbourne was a poster child for the dawn of the 21st century. We live in a century where slowly the national and cultural lines have begun to blur, and we are becoming citizens of the world. Melbourne reflects this progression just as well as any other modern city I’ve recently visited. In Carlton for example, (the academic neighborhood of Melbourne where I stayed), the student population was literally, a world-wide population. I met students from China, Japan, India and North America, who blended in and mixed with the local students; the cafes and eateries too offer a variety of fare, curry at one stop, falafel in another, and then eggs and bangers in another.

During a taxi ride, I met a student from India, who worked a cab at night to pay his bills. He was in Australia on a student visa, and working on a path for Australian citizenship. When he learned I was originally from Canada, he immediately inquired as to the ease of immigration for students there. He seemed willing to contemplate moving there, if the economic and academic prospects were brighter. He resolved to research these opportunities, and the idea stunned me. Literally, this young, bright and ambitious young man was shopping the entire world for opportunity. The concept is not new or revolutionary, but it made me realize, even the cab drivers have become international citizens of the world. The very man driving me to the pub in Australia could be building bridges in Vancouver just five years from now.

I picked up a local newspaper in Melbourne one afternoon, and digested the front section in its entirety, editorial section and all. The paper had a conservative lean, and was commenting on the global financial crisis and the American election, with a unique Australian-conservatism. It smeared Barack Obama in one editorial, linking him to Ayers and suggesting strongly Obama was far more radical than America realizes. On the very next page, George W. Bush was ripped apart for his ineptitude. It seems even conservatives in Australia can't stand America right now. One out of three entries in the paper had an extremely anti-American take, and therein lays the problem.

As the 21st Century starts its second decade, our political and social biases haven't kept up to speed with the advances in communication and multiculturalism. We still define one another by our nationalities. While I was in Melbourne, I was nothing more than a fat American tourist in most places I visited, and I was sized up and categorized into this pidgeon hole quickly and often.

I understand and even empathize with international resentment of America right now. However, to judge someone purely based on their nationality, is a shallow and extremely outdated prejudice. I was born in England, I was brought up in Canada, and now I reside in Seattle, Washington. Along the way, I called Mexico and the Bahamas home for brief periods. I have about as much in common, with the stereotype of the "fat, ignorant American" caracature as the Australian serving me has in common with "Crocodile Dundee" (well except the fact, I must confess, I could probably shed 25 pounds). I don't suggest I'm the most intelligent, or open-minded fellow on Earth, far from it, but I deserved a better chance to distinguish myself from a stereotype than I received in many places I visited while in Australia.

So while the world may be flat, and it may be shrinking, our minds have not broadened to match. I concede, I am just as guilty in this regard as anyone. All of us, still occasionally cling to this idea that we're culturally divided, and that these cultural lines define precisely who we are. While we can all draw strength and a sense of purpose and faith from our ancestry, we are all much more than the flags and governments of our countries. Indeed, most of us (myself included), now draw our identity from several nations, and thus, borrow bits of culture from all over the place.

It may come as a shock to some, but as an American, I am not particularly fond of hamburgers (and prefer falafel any day), and I actually do know the rules of cricket, and yes, I have a basic understanding of the history of some other countries. I am not George Wallace, I am not Gordon Gecko, I am not Fred Flintstone. I also do not wander the Earth with a sense of manifest destiny. Similarly, I assume most Australians I meet don't wrestle alligators, or barbecue shrimp, or have blonde air, blue eyes and funny cowboy hat.

Yet, when we travel, it is amazing how quickly, we seem to call upon these wretched caricatures and apply them instantly to those we meet. Some of this is pure social anxiety of course, but mostly I think, we've just simply not caught up mentally to the realities of the world around us.

We are all connected now, and all reliant on one another. What makes the Bush administration such a dangerous anachronism, is more than anything, it ignored this basic reality, and tried to execute its policies unilaterally.

Perhaps, more than anything, this is why Americans are loathed abroad (and believe me I was snobbed in enough restaurants in Melbourne to verify that we are indeed loathed abroad). American government has refused to act like a member of the global village, indeed perhaps, denied it even existed, and more than anything I feel this is what other citizens of the world seem to resent most.

The global village is real. If there is any positive lesson at all from the current financial/banking crisis, it is that it demonstrates clearly, just how utterly dependent we all are on one another. A badly structured mortgage in Ohio, will eventually cause the Australian government to pass new bank deposit reform. A butterfly flaps its wings, and the price of tea in China changes.

Now that we're all in this together, economically and politically, its time to take the next step socially as well. Although the world is changing quickly, and often this is difficult to cope with psychologically, we need at least to make the effort.

Don't let Lou Dobbs tell you, that internationalism and multiculturalism is something to fear. It is as inevitable as the construction of roads, after the invention of the combustion engine; as inevitable as electronic commerce, once the computer modem was perfected. You shouldn't waste energy trying to stop, fear or demonize the realities of human evolution. This kind of resistance inevitably hurts your culture, and holds it back.

Look, I am narrow-minded as the next fellow, I am not trying to preach from a soapbox, I just see what I see, and try to understand for myself what I can learn from it. To do that, I must admit my cultural prejudices, my biases and distortions run as deep as any other. More than not, these prejudices are barriers to my happiness, and now more than ever, they are far more out of touch with the realities of the world today than ever before.

Bigotry, in any form, simply isn't a 21st century idea, and to put it bluntly, bigotry is bad for business. While all human beings cling to cultural distortions and consume propaganda from their governments a little too willingly at times, the good news is that the ugliness of nationalism and racism are slowly eroding. They are eroding because we all rely on one another to survive, and we are learning through one on one contact, that we are all not so very different from one another.

The good news here is, the more we connect, rely and depend on one another in the global village, the less likely we seem to want to destroy it. The 21st Century more than any other time in history, has all the right tools and technology for us to forge a level of prosperity and peace that seemed like an utter pipe-dream just 50 years ago. It might take the rest of this century to come even close to this, but the tools and progression are already there, we just need to advance socially to keep pace with the technology around us.

That's a comforting thought, especially as the anachronism of the Karl Rove era of gunboat diplomacy comes to an end. And to those waiters, hosts, clerks and others who treated me like a second-class human being simply because I was American I simply say this: I may be American, but I am also much more than the cartoon figure that word seems to conjure today.

Let's shake loose these mental shackles. If a cab driver from India can see the world as a marketplace of opportunity to consummate his dreams, so can the rest of us; if a girl from Shanghai can perfect her doctorate in microbiology in Melbourne, then move to a research facility in San Francisco to help isolate a new vaccine; if this fat American can sit in a college pub watching live cricket from Bangalore, while drinking Australian beer with students from New Delhi, Perth and Adelaide, then maybe we can finally catch up socially and mentally, to the technology and advancements and realities of the 21st Century.

We are neighbors. We are neighbors, just as surely as the woman next door who trims her hedge and shares with you the chocolate cake she just pulled from her oven. Our technology, our email, websites, cell phones and economies have brought us together. So lets act like neighbors, and lets not punish Americans just because they elected a bad president. Heck, Canada made Brian Mulroney Prime Minister, and nobody ever complains about “that fat Canadian at the end of the bar”, well except for one bar I know, but that’s because it’s a bar full of Husky fans, and they tend to behave that way after they lose the Apple Cup. :)

Apathy Wins, God Bless America

2008-09-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

My silly blog here is chaos. You may have noticed this. It bounces around from deeply personal and incoherent rants, to strange, cryptic entries about baseball and Steve Raible.

So for better or for worse, (and mostly for worse), this is a little vent for my streams of consciousness. It demonstrates pretty clearly, my lack of academic skill, and my complete butchery of the English language. Yet, despite all this, I continue with the exercise. Sometimes you simply have to force yourself to write down how you feel.

This is, without a doubt, very interesting times in which to be alive. In 1998 the leading news stories were about shark attacks, and blue dress that was saved as a “treasure”. Now of course, the Arctic continent is literally melting before our eyes, Mother Nature is unleashing furious storms of record size and devastation, our stock market is collapsing and people are losing their homes to foreclosure. The media reflects all these events by reporting about lipstick, a Tina Fey skit on Saturday Night Live and a new OJ Simpson trial.

Sport in America has hit a new low, which considering the seedy, corrupt and criminal history of Sports in America, hitting a new low is really something. The NFL was caught red-handed helping specific franchises succeed, and had their “union leader” in their hip pocket for the past twenty years, in the worst case of management/union collusion I’ve ever seen. You wouldn’t know any of this from the ratings, most Americans care more about whether their fantasy football team won last week.

Companies that speculated with high-risk loans, then covered up their asset to debt ratio in their books, collapsed, and a government that has preached “free enterprise” for eight years wasted no time in bailing them out. We’re now meant to believe, that a company that got itself into trouble by borrowing too much, needs yet another loan, this one financed by taxpayers. I haven’t had a tax reduction in eight years, but my basic cost of living has raised 10% in the last year alone and I have the receipts to prove it.

I guess I should be outraged by all this. I guess, the “genius” of the times we live in, is that somehow I am not outraged. I’m too damn complacent and comfortable with my refrigerator full of snacks, my big-screen television and my vast array of video games to entertain myself with. I should be motivated to some kind of political activism, but I’m too bloated, too lazy and most of all too cynical and apathetic to want to participate. These statements probably “outrage” a lot of people, but to be honest, I feel utterly powerless, and most organizations out there designed to “do something about it”, irritate me. They seem designed to exclude people like me. The poorly-educated, middle-class consumer of video games, television and sporting events, isn’t the kind of recruitment they are looking for. I don’t cut the mustard for their private club of outrage and rallying.

I could join a blogger community, and coalesce into an online gang, that thumps any thought that deviates from the collective. I could be a “KOS Klone”, and go around urging forum Admins to delete anything on DailyKOS.com that doesn’t shoehorn into their gang’s little game of “mock every American that doesn’t think like we do”. I could pat myself on the back for joining their clan, and pretend that cheerleading shamelessly for one party over the other 24-hours a day, equates to true activism. I could listen to Rush Limbaugh I guess, but that little posse hasn’t accepted an audience like me in decades. Indeed, I think as an immigrant atheist with gay parents, I am probably the poster child for the kind of Americans “ditto heads” love to loathe.

I could seek an independent clan of voters and community, but I am not convinced there is such a thing, and if there was, probably was so flat, that it would come across as very “Joe Clark”. That obscure reference to an ex-Prime Minister of Canada, basically means, it would be intelligent, and probably even have positive ideas, but would be so grey and dull in its delivery, it would feel more like medicine than nutrition. People much-prefer leaders that do pirouettes behind British royalty, but then impose fascist wage freeze laws, that destroy your chance of promotion in the workplace, or even declare martial law, in an act that makes the “Patriot” Act look look timid in comparison. The bottom line is: fascism always wins if it is delivered with a little style.

So, I have chosen to just wallow in apathy and write a chaotic blog of my thoughts instead.

I wrote earlier that I have chosen to support Barack Obama in my first presidential election. This choice is solidified with the choice of Sarah Palin, who represents the same Neo Conservative philosophy that I feel has led this country astray in the last eight years. In fact, I really hate to use the word “conservative” to describe this group of voters. This is an insult to true conservatives, who value freedom and controlled spending, more than religious zealously and corporate bail-out.

What I haven’t written before is I think Barack Obama will lose, especially now that Palin is on the ticket. In fact, I predict here and now that I think Barack Obama will now lose pretty handily. The election has reduced itself to another cultural war (by design), and this is a battle Neo-Cons win, because they can claim the higher ground before the debate has even begun. Once the bible becomes the central reason for a politician’s appeal over the other, all the facts, and stock market collapse will not matter. I think at this stage, Obama can kiss Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida good-bye.

My only hope is, if we must suffer through another Republican presidency, that the result is at least definitive. If it comes down to a box full of proxy-votes, or if some hidden cache of votes from overseas is found to claim a key state, then America truly is deep trouble. This is a nation already radicalized on both sides of the spectrum, and if those divisions fester and if the nation becomes even more polarized, it will become increasingly dysfunctional in its government.

To be honest, I’d much prefer it if Palin or McCain had some kind of “youtube moment”, a-la Bob Dole falling off the stage, or Gerald Ford stumbling over himself as he gets off an airplane. Something the fast-food media can repeat endlessly, to guffaws and laughter of the voting public and this somehow miraculously wins the election for Obama. I don’t think Obama has any chance of winning it based on a debate on the facts and issues. We live in a world, where such a debate does not entertain us, and therefore we pay no attention to it.

This is why, I find my apathy growing to new heights, and thankfully this consumerism-society offers me all kinds of distraction in which to indulge that apathy. I’ll still vote, but will walk home from the polls convinced the vote didn’t do a damn bit of good.

Feel free to loathe me, because I’ve given up on the democratic process; just remember I can see Mount Rainier from my house, which must mean I’m an expert on Geology. Of course what is there to know, other than God made all mountains, attempting to move any mountain, would seem to violate some kind of divine decree wouldn’t it? I’ll sit at home and play Spore instead.

My Choice for President

2008-08-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

Last night's speech by Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention was not of any particular historical significance.

What will be historically significant is if he wins the election. The great triumph of Jackie Robinson is not measured by his "try out" for the Boston Red Sox in 1945 it isn't even measured by his full-year of play for the Montreal Royals in 1946. History isn't measured by "getting close" to doing something, you actually have to do it.

I am a great admirer of Barack Obama. I say that without reservation and I say it because if you read the first two paragraphs above, you might think I am not. Indeed, what I find so compelling about his candidacy is his eloquence, his ability to deliver his vision to ordinary people like me. This to me is such a welcomed change from George W. Bush, who can't even recite old clichés, without bumbling over his words, and looking like a constipated man negotiating with his own bowels in the process.

I am not an admirer of the Democratic Party. I say without reservation and I say it because if you read that last sentence you might think I am one of those cheerleading Democrats who waves DNA pom-poms in the air at every turn.

The Democrats have been an embarrassment to this country several times, and I see no definitive evidence that the Democrats have provided better leadership than Republicans throughout history. LBJ did nothing to stop the Vietnam war, JFK took us closer to nuclear war than any president in history, Carter couldn't even rescue a handful of hostages from a third-world country, and Clinton lied about something so stupid it nearly cost him his presidency.

Clinton's presidency was particularly inept. His key fault was he took a non-issue and made it so mammoth in proportion he cost Al Gore a chance to be president. I happen to think Al Gore would have been a far greater president than W, and so I will never forgive Clinton for protecting his own ego, over his own country.

What frustrates me most is that three simple sentences from Bill Clinton was all it would have taken: I made a mistake. I am sorry. It won't happen again.

If he had the courage to look in the camera and make that simple confession, George W Bush's presidency never takes place, the Iraq War is never waged, and we do not suffer through Donald Rumsfeld, the most inept cabinet member in modern American history.

So no, Democrats, you are no better than Republicans, not by any measure what so ever. You've produced just as many lies, prolonged war, cheated the public of their own money and reneged on your promises. When you got into scandal, you bombed innocent people to distract us, when an act of honesty would have brought short-term pain for long-term gain you decided to lie and then gambled no evidence would surface to expose your lies.

I like John McCain. In fact, I find him a very refreshing Republican. This statement angers my liberal friends, but I truly do like McCain. He is not as strong a candidate as he was in 2000, because his own party destroyed him that year. To rebuild his candidacy he had to charm certain wings of the party, or risk being destroyed again. He became less independent and more of a party whip. Still, McCain is about a decent a public servant as you can expect. He works well with his opponents, he is generally honest and he isn't a complete pawn of Neo-Con doctrine.

Despite McCain's interesting candidacy (and his extremely interesting VP choice) I still like Barack Obama better. Having said that I must admit, I have been disappointed in Obama's campaign of late. His convention for one thing, came across as plastic, staged and entirely phony. For someone who preaches so effectively about changing the very fabric of American politics, his dog-and-pony convention seemed very state, very partisan and highly stylized with little to no substance.

I also find Obama's choice for VP rather boring. I like Biden as Secretary of State, or Secretary of Defense, but he lacks the temperament for executive office. He's also safe, established and knee-deep in Washington "politics as usual". His choice was also a slight to the 18 million people who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nobody, and I mean nobody, dislikes the Clinton-dynasty more than I do, but let's face it, she should have been the VP choice, because so many people were enamored with her. Does Barack Obama listen to the American people or not? His VP choice demonstrates that perhaps he doesn't listen.

Despite these reservations of late I am still going to vote for him. This is the first presidential election I get to vote in. I take pride that my first vote ever, will be to elect the first African-American president in this country's history. I didn't get to see Jackie Robinson play for Montreal. I didn't get to see MLK deliver his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I wasn't alive for the zenith of the civil rights movement of the sixties. Despite that I have seen other proud moments: I have seen apartheid fall in South Africa, and I've seen a liberated Nelson Mandela give a speech at Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario. Shortly after that speech, Mandela would go on to govern the very nation that imprisoned him.

Now, I want to see Barack Obama become president. I believe his election will be measured as a significant step forward for America. His presidency will make mistakes, because all presidencies do (Reagan and Grenada, JFK and the Bay of Pigs etc. etc.). He may not, in the end, be measured as one of the great presidents of my lifetime, but his election will be historic. His speech last night in Denver wasn't historic, but watching him taking the oath of office in 2009 will be.

I'd like to witness that history. I think it would be good for this country.

Having lived through 8 years of the worst president of my lifetime, Barack Obama doesn't seem "risky" at all, and he seems more than ready, and far more competent than what we have now. And please don't tell me, a poor black kid growing up with a single-parent, who lost his mother at a young age and had to borrow money to get his education, is somehow an elitist. That's a lie, and I'm sick of lies. Education is a good thing anyway, and it bothers me that propaganda sometimes attempts to suggest a solid academic career makes someone untrustworthy and unfit to lead us.

So I choose Barack Obama, a man of eloquence, a man who claims to lead us into changes, this country needs (energy, health and educational changes in particular).

Here's hoping Barack Obama redeems my choice, and makes my first vote ever for president, one I'll treasure and be proud of for years to come. Despite the charade of a convention, and the boring choice for VP, I have every confidence Barack Obama will not only make history, he'll also make progress for a country that for too long has been lead by cowards and thieves.

Death of the Ditto-Head

2008-02-06T17:05:00.001-08:00

We’ve heard a lot about "change" recently in the US elections. I suppose this is natural, given we have an American president right now that as his term expires, is one of the most unpopular presidents of my lifetime. His opinion polls are tracking lower than Nixon’s when he was forced to resign. Even Jimmy Carter at the height of the Iranian hostage crisis was liked more.

So, like all politicians do, when there is an unpopular person or idea in the arena, they run away from them like wild gazelles. They try to distance themselves from the disliked entity. Sometimes they even claim they “knew all along”, that the entity was a bad seed. So Hillary Clinton who was beating war drums, and waving the American flag like all good little political children were after 9/11, now tries to cast herself as an anti-war candidate, and Barack Obama proudly states he never voted for the war – (and conveniently he didn’t, because he wasn’t even in the Senate at the time the war was being ratified). To be fair Barack probably would have voted “present” had he been there, it’s a habit Barack seems to enjoy when the political waters are a little muddy.

There is one other change however that this “average Joe” has spotted recently, that some pundits, spin-masters and opinion factories don’t seem to be talking about.

I’ve noticed is the Republican Party itself is changing, and changing in a way that is frustrating those who thought they were in control of it.

For a long time now, the Republican Party has been dominated (some like Kevin Phillips would say “usurped”), by a highly religious, deeply social conservative wing of the party. The phenomenon is well documented in Phillips’ book: American Theocracy. Tied to this wing of the party, is a wide band of rubber-stamp mass media, that pounds the social conservative agenda every single day. Now despite my some of libertarian values, and my atheism, I’ve always respected this wing of American politics. You can’t advocate freedom of religion, without tolerating and respecting, the right of like-minded religious citizens to coalesce, organize and fight to win elections, to advance their cause.

While I respect social conservatives, I don’t agree with them. I’d be a hypocrite if I did. None the less, it is pretty clear that the social conservative wing of the Republicans truly galvanized in 2000, when Karl Rove saw the zealous nature of the wing. He saw their ability to organize and get out a large number of voters, and he realized they were the key to defeating Al Gore.

Fueling this “revolution” of 2000 and 2004 were the social conservatives and their impressive array of media preachers. Rush Limbaugh was at the height of his game, Fox News Network came online and ascended to TV ratings that CNN could only dream of. Sean Hannity was an icon, Ann Coulter was quoted weekly in mainstream press, and everyone was wearing an American flag on their lapel. The old “tragedies” of the Bush 41 were being corrected now, by Bush 43, and the more partisan you were as a Republican senator, the better you were received by the party as a whole.

Now suddenly, in 2008 it seems that revolution in the Republican Party is starting to diminish, and the proof is in John McCain’s success.

John McCain was never “in” on the exclusive social conservative wing of the conservative party. He dared to run against, George W. Bush in 2000 (the hand-picked choice of Karl Rove and the social conservative wing). McCain dared to cry “foul” when he was assaulted by slime tactics that questioned his war heroism, and demonized his public record. Worse, McCain seemed to preach compromise on such sensitive issues as immigration and abortion, he dared to suggest the social agenda was not as important as the fiscal agenda, and suggested the geopolitical goals of the country, are not always achieved by brute force.

The right wing, social conservative pundits slaughtered McCain, they sliced him up, they fed him to their wolf packs, and they tittered with glee when he was defeated. “This is what you get for being a moderate Republican,” they chided. “Only real conservatives will thrive in our party,” they decreed.

2008 has come along, and to the utter outrage of the Republican Party “base”, John McCain is not only alive and well, he’s a few weeks from seizing the Republican nomination for President of the United States.

The social conservative wing of the Republican Party has done everything it can to stop John McCain from winning. Rush Limbaugh in fact, has turned his website and his radio show in a 3-hour long daily rant about the “evils” of John McCain. There’s no gray area in Rush’s editorial rants either. He suggests without apology, that McCain is a liberal that will destroy the Republican Party in 2008. His rants are supported across numerous blogs, commentators and editorials on that side of the spectrum, even Ann Coulter declared last week, that she’d rather vote for Hillary Clinton than vote for John McCain. Folks, to social conservatives, this is akin to saying you’d rather contract syphilis than kiss the groom.

During the Super Tuesday primaries, the social conservative power core, were urging voters to mobilize and defeat McCain. Ari Fleishcer lowered himself to appear on the CNN broadcast of the primaries, and with each result shrugged and said “McCain is not the clear choice of my party”. Karl Rove went to the flagship Fox News, and also insisted the race was not over, despite McCain’s success.

What happened on Super Tuesday essentially was that the social conservatives made a huge power push, and nothing happened. In fact, if anything, the voters went in the opposite way. Each Rush Limbaugh editorial somehow seemed to bring John McCain another vote. The party rejected the very power core that had brought it success in 2000 and 2004.

It’s an amazing change, and the elite members of social conservative wing of the Republican Party are livid. They don’t control the party’s destiny anymore, they learned that Republicans are not all “ditto heads”, that Goldwater Republicanism is not a dinosaur, and that a moderate conservative, is still a legitimate conservative that can win the Republican nomination.

That’s an amazing change in the landscape of American politics, essentially, what has happened in 2008 is Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity have become irrelevant. Their preferred choice in 2008 is getting slaughtered. People still listen to these guys, but they don’t comply with their commands. They have no real influence. Their rhetoric pushes the party in the opposite direction that they want.

As an independent, with no allegiance to any political party, I find the diminishment of the social neo-con’s influence over the Republican Party to be fascinating. Despite all their yelling, clamoring and demands that McCain is a heretic, McCain responds by proceeding to thrash his opposition. I am unsure if I’ll ever vote for John McCain, but I do recognize his ascendancy as a sign of a fundamental power-shift in the Republican Party.

Here we have a politician, outside of the Karl Rove mold, and he is winning, and there’s nothing Rush Limbaugh can do about it. That outrages Rush, but it fascinates me, because it signals a change. Essentially what is happening in 2008 is the more Rush Limbaugh yells, the more the party moves away from him and his ditto-heads. Indeed the era of the “ditto-head” seems to be coming to a close, and that is real change.

Gabe & Tyco's D&D Farewell

2008-01-28T12:46:00.000-08:00

Make no bones about it: Gabe and Tyco are wretched little snots. I love them, like one loves a mouthy cornerback who performs obscene dances when they catch an interception. They have great talent, exceptional skill and are entertaining to watch, but I am not sure I’d invite either of them to dinner, because I don’t enjoy that much ego with my soup.

But we like arrogant, loud mouths in America don’t we? This is how and why we still treasure Babe Ruth. This is how Rush Limbaugh makes a living. Tyco and Gabe are just the editorial Babe Ruths of the gaming industry.

To be fair, they are more substantive than radio talk-heads, because at least they inject some craft into their work, but they also pass opinion off as factoid. They also mistakenly believe that their subjective opinion is kept objective, by just claiming that it is objective. They've wallowed in this lie for years now, and believe it. They believe their own myths, and while it is true a monkey can live off its own dung and urine for days, its health slowly deteriorates along the way.

And we have a very unhealthy monkey on our hands here.

Having said all that, I still read them with each update. Reading Gabe and Tyco as a gamer, is as essential as reading Maureen Dowd if you're a politics-nut. You may not agree with her, you may see her as snide, condescending and biased, but you still read her, because her editorials will ripple all around the blogosphere. People react to what she says, like it is "news" all in itself. Gabe and Tyco can make cannon-ball splashes in the gaming waters with a simple cartoon, or even a single sentence in their editorial rants. I admire that fact, and if there is any industry that needs the occasional slap in the head, it is the gaming industry, and Gabe and Tyco slap hard. They take their baseball bats and they beat down a bloated and hypocritical industry with great delight.

On that note, I want to say that I thought Gabe and Tyco hit a homerun today with this comic:

D&D Online Comic

Now don’t worry if you don’t get the joke. This is part of Gabe and Tyco’s schtick, they don’t print cartoon for mass market consumption, in fact sometimes the references in their cartoon are so obscure you need to read Tyco’s 900 word essay accompanying the cartoon to truly understand it.

This cartoon is catered to the semi-casual gamer, but a lot of them come from so deep in the gaming trenches, that they test the trivia of even the most ardent gamer-nerd. Just last week for example, not only did you need to read the editorial to get the joke, the editorial explained that to TRULY understand the reference, you had to download their podcast. Nerds will lovingly do this, because they love exclusivity, they love the illusion of elitism, and there isn’t a hardcore gamer on the planet, that doesn’t think he’s smarter than the average bear.

That lie in itself, is really part of the real problem with gamers in general. Watching Star Trek and slowly developing your Klingon vocabulary isn’t a particularly skillful display of academic prowess, and neither is reaching level 70 in Warcraft. Nerds often equate obsessive behavior with intellectualism, and will dissect any minutia related to their obsession endlessly to prove it.

This behavior, is of course, annoying. That’s why we nerds are a rather annoying sub-culture. We exclude others who are not as obsessed as we are, and we boost our own self-esteem by simply indulging our obsessions even more; until we eventually even exclude each other on ridiculously thin lines of division. So for example, you may play World of Warcraft, but since you don’t play Horde and you like 2v2 Arena PvP, and because you always run a DPS rogue, I cannot include you in my little group. We gamers divide our community into such tiny bits, that in the end we find ourselves alone, with our opinions with only PornoTube to comfort us.

Today’s comic rips the heart of the Dungeons and Dragons brand, and crushes it before our eyes. It was brilliant. It shouted a statement that all of us gamers know in our hearts: our old friend D&D is dead. It has become the “8 Track Tape” of gaming. No amount of 4th Edition and no amount of “gimmickry” on D&D Online will save it now. Cast it adrift onto the sea of history, and reminisce about it, like some 40 year old remembering a KISS concert when he was 12 years old.

It’s a sad truth though that Gabe and Tycho exposed today. If you are old nerd like me, you remember Dungeons and Dragons fondly. Like me, you might even still play the game once in a while (with dice and not a keyboard), but it’s not real gaming anymore, it’s a trip down memory lane. I might catch an old episode of Gilligan’s Island too, but the entertainment derived from it, is purely nostalgic now, as if watching the episode was a small glimmer and slice of your youth. You could get the same experience by thumbing through your old high school yearbook, or finding some old t-shirt you wore as a kid and giving it an unhealthy sniff.

That’s what D&D is now, an anachronism – left behind by bigger, brighter brands that seized the ideals of D&D and took them to new heights. World of Warcraft lore is terrible, it’s one of the worst narratives in an RPG I’ve ever digested. It doesn’t matter, because it’s been absorbed into mainstream culture, it helps sell trucks during commercials of an NFL game. It’s become so pervasive we can identify it on a cereal box, or embroider it on a button down shirt.

Why didn’t D&D become that brand? The answers to that are complicated, but lie firmly on the shoulders of Wizards of the Coast. Note I did not say Hasbro either, I said Wizards. Eat your lumpy gruel, WOTC, you blew it. You held the most identifiable fantasy game in America just twelve years ago, and you squandered it on a litany of sub-par books, that even your most obsessive fans failed to greet with any enthusiasm. You seized some part of the pie with Baldur’s Gate, but then you hemmed and hawed about how to exploit that opportunity on paper. You still won’t license your brand without massive deliberation in your R&D department, despite the fact your R&D department has developed a winning game in over a decade (not to mention producing some of the biggest and worst flops in gaming industry history).

Sure Atari took over with the Hasbro Interactive debacle, that saw Peter Adkinson quit your company in disgust, but what excuse is there for Eberron, and why on Earth would you choose that rubbish as the source for Atari’s first attempt to compete with the monolith WoW?

Six months from now, Gabe and Tyco are going to catch wind of the chicanery in D&D 4th Edition. They’ll see that WoW is not only the winner, but that Grandpa is dressing up in his Granchildren’s clothing and trying to download Amy Winehouse onto his iPod. All 4th Edition is, at its most fundamental level, is a D&D sheep dressed up to look like a WoW Wolf. The master has now been relegated to the apprentice and the funeral pyre has been lit. Come on old man, we’re supposed to look up to you, but now you’re prancing around in your Timberlands and reciting DMX lyrics. D&D 4th Edition is like Pat Boone trying to jam with Metallica, and you just look foolish.

To be fair, D&D Online was a disaster for many reasons, not related to Wizards of the Coast, but the systemic rot within the D&D brand grew out of the dung-infested top soil of WOTC R&D. Gabe and Tyco have declared the brand dead in the online gaming world, and we all now damn well that the cardboard version, has been relegated to clinging to a measly plastic miniatures market to justify itself.

We’ll miss you D&D, and like the Brady Bunch, maybe a delicious parody will be made of you by Hollywood, and we can enjoy you again but this time, knee-deep in irony, and nostalgic sarcasm. Oh what a groovy, groovy time that old D&D game was.

2007 Reflection

2008-01-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

So 2007 is behind us.

As I examine the sum of the deeds and events of the year for our family, I feel it was a great year.

Each of us blossomed in unique ways this year.

Desiree (my youngest daughter) grew both emotionally and physically this year. She has become one of the most conscientious children I have ever known. Her empathy and her understanding of others is remarkable. For a child who just celebrated her tenth birthday last month, she exemplifies an emotional strength and an understanding of others, that many of us “adults” have never attained (including myself).

Academically she still struggles in some areas, but even this, she takes in stride. She became excited when told she required additional work in the morning to get up to speed in mathematics. She met the challenge with genuine enthusiasm. Her math skills are blossoming quickly as a result. She’s a giver, a true and genuine giver, and she likes to work hard when given the chance. She’ll also go out of her way to comfort, or aid others around her.

I worry of course, this means her childhood is being rushed too quickly, that she is taking on adult ideals and adult emotions at too young an age. However, my wife points out to me all the time, how much “little girl” there is in her still. This is obvious in her favorite games and toys, the way she interacts with other children, and even the way she decorates her own bedroom.

My favorite moment with Desiree this year is hard to isolate because there were so many. However, one that stands out immediately is one that is fresh in my mind. Recently Desiree had to write an essay over the holidays for her school. She was told to essentially write an editorial about something she was “passionate” about.

She wrote an essay about a television commercial of all things. In fact, she discussed a commercial for a popular children’s cereal. She compared the commercial that airs now, to the commercial that used to air a few years ago. She drew a comparison of the two, and criticized the new campaign. She accurately described the marketing’s focus, and then cleverly deduced how and why the advert had changed, and then expressed strong opinion on why the change had deteriorated the overall strength of the ad.

It was a brilliant analysis of how mass-media markets to young children like herself. She saw through the ad’s gimmicky façade, and then extrapolated her own view.

This is, in my opinion, a clever expression of thought. It required her to view media that was attempting to manipulate her emotionally, compare it to media she had digested before, and then draw independent conclusions. It was independent thought, with an editorial viewpoint. It was strong analysis, and it was entirely her own creation.

Reading this essay, it made me proud that her mind was so open, so capable of combining her emotions with objective analysis to produce a fabulous essay about how television ads attempt to market to children her own age.

Chantal (me eldest daughter) also blossomed this year. She is beginning to show the early signs of teenage life. This means her emotions are becoming more complex, and her reactions to the outside world aren’t as “pretty and perfect” as they used to be. Indeed, she’s begun to experiment with cynicism, and even at times outright rebellion, surely a precursor of what is to come as moves into her teenage phase of life.

I could consider this advancement a loss, as she wiggles out of her childhood cocoon and sheds some of her innocence along the way. However, I don’t see this as regression, or loss. I see this as growth, and I have to admit, as a spectator it is fascinating to watch her find her voice, and her sense of self.

Chantal is very much an individualist. She does not dress like her school mates do, she develops her own eclectic style, one that is unique and all her own. She is famous for trying out unique clothing combinations, accessorizing her appearance in unique ways, and sometimes even “crafting” her own clothes and symbols that she uses to establish her own identity.

I worry at times, that she will suffer socially because of this. Middle school rewards conformity, and indeed it is really the first place where conformity is introduced as a means to social acceptance. Chantal, for better or for worse, has rejected it outright, and has accepted the consequences in return. She is even proud of her decision, and is self-aware she has decided to be this way.

There are many moments that I enjoyed with Chantal this year. She blossomed academically, in a year where there was a lot of pressure on her to improve. She moved to a stricter and more demanding school, and she not only survived, she thrived, bringing home impressive grades and praise from her teachers. This is quite an achievement given some of the challenges Chantal faced in her early development.

However, for me, the proudest moment I had with Chantal was when she was faced with an awful field trip, shortly after the school year began. I can’t imagine the stress of the situation. She was brought to a new school, and all her old friends were no longer in the same class. Everyone in her class was new, and unfamiliar. The teachers were new and unfamiliar, and the school itself was vast and crowded compared to where she had gone to school before.

It was the first year of middle school, and every kid (and even some of the teachers), were stressed out about this new phase in their lives.

To alleviate the stress all the children were feeling at the school year, the teachers took the children on a field trip. Alas, for Chantal, the selection of where to go on their field trip instantly became an issue.

The school had decided to take the children to a live production of “High School Musical”, a Disney television show that is geared to the pre-teen crowd. It is, as you can expect, highly sanitized, and polished into a television product that threatens nobody, says as little as possible, but provides a lot of glamour, pretty boys, pretty girls and sugary music along the way.

Chantal despises the show.

She considers the show beneath her. She can’t stand the clothes they wear; she particularly dislikes how the girls in the show are submissive and seem to obsess about boys and shopping. She even once compared the women on the show to “Barbie” and claimed the show was too “fake” for her to enjoy.

These were her own assessments of the show, in fact, my wife and I had never seen the television program, so her exposure to the show, and her decision to dislike her came all from her.

When the field trip was announced, she made her vehement disapproval of the show known to her class.

She was immediately ostracized and even somewhat vilified for opinion. Many other girls in the class “loved” that show, and it is of course, one of the most popular shows for young girls on television right now. Chantal knew this, and yet she expressed her dissatisfaction with both the show and the field-trip to see a live version of the show.

She came home very disillusioned that day. She was unaware, that going against the grain in a social situation can yield some very nasty backlash. Some of her classmates teased her, even her own teacher seemed unsympathetic to her protests.

When she came home, we had a long talk about it. She expressed beautifully why she felt the field-trip was inappropriate.

“Why not a trip to the art museum?” she asked. “How about a science museum or a trip to a place that celebrated the natural beauty of the northwest?” she wondered. “Why on Earth would you participate in an academic event that was essentially sponsored by Disney?”

I was worried she was becoming an elitist, someone who couldn’t shrug off her concerns and just have fun with a situation. However, her own expression of dismay over the choice was just far too eloquent to deny. She had a point, why was the school rallying around a television show?

As the discussion progressed, she began to protest the fact she had to go. She basically felt, since she thought the trip was a waste of time, she didn’t have to go. For better or for worse, I explained to her that this was her new school, her new class, and even though she did not like the show, she had duties as a student, and just like a regular class she was compelled to attend the event.

She was very disappointed in my decision. Still, she listened to my reasoning, and even listened to my concerns that while she was perfectly entitled to her opinion about the field trip, and in fact, I even admired it - her point of view did not make her “better” than the other kids that did enjoy the show.

On her own, she then deduced, that if her classmates were willing to accept her, for how she feels, for how she dresses, she must in-turn accept them for their differences.

I thought it was a fantastic insight into how society requires tolerance. I also thought it was good of her to attend the field trip with a stiff upper-lip.

She came home the day after the field trip, even more vindicated about her opinion of the show. She pointed out several instances of the show she found offensive. She argued quite strongly that the show was sexist. I have no idea if her opinion is right or wrong, in fact, I do not even care if it is, I just admire that she came to this opinion on her own, of her own free will.

She was proud of the fact though that she attended the field trip without antagonizing those classmates who loved the spectacle. Her own teacher even commented that Chantal behaved extremely well, and while she was clearly unhappy with the show, never showed any sign of “sour grapes” or offered any condescending remarks about the show or her classmates.

She instead went to the event gracefully, and then came home and expressed what it was about the event that she did not like. She stuck to her guns, she didn’t cave into the majority opinion, but neither did she wield a superior attitude about her own point of view either. That is a highly complex reaction to a rather stressful social situation. I thought it showed great maturity, and I will always remember her and admire her for how she handled that situation.

There are so many other proud moments of 2007 for me, too many to catalog here. Overall though, I have to say, it was a good year.

It was not a perfect year, there are moments of 2007 I’d love to forget, moments that made me sad, or disappointed me. Those moments were rare though. For the most part 2007 was one of my fondest years ever.

I hope 2008 provides just as much joy and wonder…

Pierrefonds

2007-05-08T10:04:00.000-07:00

Pierrefonds was a suburb like any other. It just happened to be a suburb of Montreal, Quebec and I just happened to live there in the early seventies.

There are lot of mental images that flash around in my head, when I drum up the subject of Pierrefonds and reflect. The first images that are summoned are the thick snow tires on those big, ugly cars of the seventies. In those days, cars were big, they made low, thumping noises when they were running and in Quebec, they were equipped with large, thick snow tires for winter.

The most vivid sound I can recollect is the sound of those big snow tires spinning furiously when they were stuck on a patch of ice or were caught in a bank of snow. Cars would sometimes hit a patch of ice on our street and swerve into the snow banks. These banks were often far over my head along the side of the road. When you hit the gas of the car, the tires would spin and the deep treads of the snow tires made an interesting and haunting sound.

In the end, the cars would always get unstuck and it would always leave a trail of black ice and snow where the exhaust had polluted the white snow bank. When I walked to school, you could see these black, carbon-stained scars along the side of the road, and you’d know that the snow and ice of Montreal had caught yet another victim.

Earliest Memory

2007-05-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Your earliest memories are always shrouded in fog and they are often only brief moments, tiny snapshots that your brain managed to capture when you were very little. These memories have been corroded by the moths of time. They have holes in them, and it isn’t always easy to pull them out of storage and look at them.

My earliest memory is being inside a BOAC jet, flying to England. I am not sure how old I am, old enough to talk, old enough to hear my Mom’s voice and understand it. My younger brother Keith has been born, but if memory serves he’s just a baby. I am probably three years old.

I remember being tired and being unable to sleep in the chair of the plane. I had never slept sitting down before. My Mom tells me to go to the floor and sleep by her feet. I was small enough to crawl down to the floor in between the seats. I spread across the floor in this tiny gap, without inconveniencing anyone else. I remember my Mom’s voice telling me to go to sleep and that we’d be in England soon.

It was a soothing voice my Mom was always good at making you feel safe. I fell asleep, a mile high in the sky, and rocketing at 500 miles an hour towards England, and it remains my earliest memory.

Good-Bye 2006

2006-12-30T14:04:00.000-08:00

So we come to the end of another year. They called this one 2006, based on a kooky religion and some bad math.

I liked 2006, I look back at it and it was a good year.

It’s easy to point out all the trouble in this world. There’s a lot of trouble to choose from. Massive 25 mile long ice drifts are breaking free and casting themselves adrift on the ocean. It’s just the start of events like this, ten years from now, we’ll see this happen more and more.

In case you weren’t aware: out planet is dying.

There are lots of other troubles, Israel is still…well Israel and Iran suddenly denies the truth about the holocaust and builds nuclear weapons. Radical religion continues to want to push us all towards a holy war. Just last week an elected US Senator suggested that a Muslim Senator, (who was also democratically elected), was a security threat to the United States.

It seems, we’ve never fully shed the Middle-Ages. I am waiting for a prominent politician to come around and challenge the notion that the Earth is round.

Ah but, 2006 was a good year. We learned more about cancer this year, than probably any year previous and we now actually have proactive means to defend ourselves from certain types of cancer.

Our knowledge of biochemistry and genetics continues to take amazing leaps. We are learning how the tissue repair process in our body can break down and form tumors in breasts and the colon. We’re learning how to isolate genetic indicators that signal that someone is at high risk of developing these kinds of cancers.

In the decades ahead, we’ll cough up some spit or a drop of blood and in two weeks, they’ll have a genetic disposition chart that will show your risk of certain diseases like an actuarial chart. You can then learn how to take preventative steps to prevent the development of those diseases. You’ll learn which types of screens and checks should be performed regularly for your genetic disposition. You can even see a Genetic Counselor if you want. By the way Genetic Counseling is a growing and lucrative field.

To those who fear anything new and different, it all sounds frightening. But what it really means is a Doctor can learn that your ten year old daughter is highly susceptible to breast cancer, merely because of certain indicators in her genes and you can take steps to prevent your daughter from developing a tumor later in life and dying. It’s a good thing. Life, health and improved understanding of how our bodies work, is a very good thing.

There were other great achievements this year, too often ignored by a media infatuated with dysfunctional celebrities and gossip.

Alternative fuels are making serious headway and automobiles are finally reducing their fuel consumption. Slowly America has realized that our addiction to OPEC Oil is a dangerous addiction, heck even the President said so this year.

Micro-Credit has come of age, a concept that is helping turn around the eternal poverty and hardship in places like Bangladesh. There is hope for the poorest and meekest on this Earth. I grant you it’s a faint hope still, but more and more various nations are fighting their way out of poverty.

New super-powers are beginning to emerge. This is a frightening thought to the xenophobic, but surely the fact that India’s standard of living is vastly improving is a good thing. They are a democracy; they have a fantastic education system and their life expectancy, economy and political influence are all improving. They have removed the shackles of the Third and Second World and moved into the First World. It’s a good thing, their growth and evolution doesn’t mean it is coming at the expense of our own.

Technology of course, grows in leaps and bounds. It is easy to be cynical about these improvements. Sadly, there are some who argue we’ve become slaves to our machines. I think its hyperbole to argue such things. I enjoy talking to my relatives, via phone, text or video at a fraction of what it cost me twenty years ago. I enjoy connecting with and finding people all over the world that share my interests and hobbies. I love the fact the internet teaches me something new every single day.

I am also a hedonist (at least part-time hedonist). So forgive me if I enjoy my new HDTV, my new video-games and my digital camera. Consumption is too often viewed as a sin. Over-consumption is dangerous, especially when it endangers our planet, but that new digital video camera you just bought should be enjoyed guilt free.

On a personal level, 2006 was fine and dandy. I finally got some financial discipline. I have stopped being a teenager when it comes to money. The accomplishment sounds meek, but for me it’s a huge step forward. My work was fine, despite severe challenges and a few internal battles. Mostly I am very proud of my work and I know what I have developed is miles ahead of the systems I inherited.

My family is awesome. My younger brother got to spend his first full year watching his new baby daughter grow. I hear my younger brother’s voice now and I reflect on who he is and where he is in 2006 and I beam with pride. You made it pal, and it looks and sounds really good on you. I could not be happier for him. My Mom spent some time in Ecuador, helping to build a community shelter and recreation facility down there. She came back saddened by the plight of good, honest people down there. I take pride in the fact, that despite the fact she’s over sixty years of age, she found the courage, strength and hard work to make a difference amongst all that hardship.

My wife and my own children are as lovely and healthy as ever. They are happy, I know this because I can hear them laughing in the other room. They are warm, they are dry, they are safe, healthy and they are well-fed. That’s not the most impressive accomplishment of all, but it is certainly the most important.

Good-bye 2006, forgive me if I try to forget all your trials and troubles. Forgive me if I ignore your terrorism, religious intolerance, racism, pollution and frightening politics. Today I celebrate the good things about being alive in 2006. Because it truly is a great time to be alive.

My only lament is the few that I love dearly in my heart could not be here to share this incredible year with us. To them I say, you live on inside our hearts, but I really wish you could have seen just how great a year 2006 was.

My Raible Vacation - Calgary Concert

2006-07-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

At last we arrived in a civilized place! Calgary, the most cultured place in all of Alberta, which is kind of like saying the most woman-friendly tavern in Madinah.

So we decided immediately to do the most cultured thing we could find. Now this is Calgary so ballet, opera, symphonies and theater are pretty much out of the question, so we did the next best thing, we went to a KISS concert.

After the show, we went backstage. We found Gene Simmons there and he was hanging out with Howard Schultz and Ariel Sharon. They all seemed to be getting along well and kept switching from English to Yiddish in mid-sentence.

Gene asked everyone if they were interested in a KISS merchandise license. Just 10K to put the KISS logo on a labia ring and sell them online. Not a bad deal really, I'll think about it, I might be able to make some money on that.

I started to get angry at Howard Schultz (which isn't hard), because he was bragging about 'fleecing the Emerald City'. So I decided to get violent, but then I realized Schultz was surrounded by a gaggle of high-priced lawyers, so feeling intimidated I beat up Tommy Thayer instead.

Well the police came and took me away. They mumbled something about "Soccer Riot Snazel", but of course the Canadian justice system is a joke, so my sentence was to receive free medication and a formal apology from the Ministry of Tourism. Apparently, they felt their country must have done something wrong to make such a nice American tourist such as myself to act that way. I used the free medication to get hold of some Codeine and Xanax. I figure they'll make a nifty cocktail with Tequila if Phil and Bobby get on my nerves.

Here's a snapshot of the concert, pretty crazy. You can click the image or you can click here instead to see a larger version of the photo.

Raible Vacation - Respite in Red Deer

2006-07-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

The snow was so heavy we had to use snowmobiles to get out of Edmonton. At last we are out of that sub-artic wasteland!

We have spent the night in Red Deer, Alberta. The people here in Red Deer are very nice, although they tend to hiss like Sleestaks whenever you mention Eastern Canada. I think most people in this town would rather drink raw beef dip than converse with some snot from Toronto. Who can blame them really?

Lanny McDonald called, he says he has a big night planned for us in Calgary tomorrow, I look forward to it. I've lost my camera, I'll have to buy a new camera now. I just hope I can figure this dumb purple and orange currency that Canada uses. Honestly, their money looks like it was made from gay pride parade confetti.

Raible Vacation - Breakfast in Edmonton

2006-07-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

Well I was right, Edmonton is cold, Edmonton is bleak and the Yaks shed hair everywhere.

We tried to make a nice morning breakfast, but our spirits were low.

Bobby Orr and I spent the night with Ariel Sharon who was in town to score some free heart surgery from the socialized medicine here in Canada. He was making all kinds of jokes about the United Nations and he got drunk on Molson Ice.

Bobby and I didn't like him much.

Some dude in a weird looking van keeps following us and pestering us with voice mail, but we just ignored him.

Tomorrow we're off to Calgary, thank goodness, civilization at last. You can see a bigger version of our breakfast snap shot by clicking the picture or by
clicking here.

My Raible Vacation Day 2 - Scenic Edmonton

2006-07-26T22:59:00.000-07:00

It was time to move on to Edmonton.

I had been to Edmonton once before, it was bleak, it was cold and a Yak ate my shoe.

My friend Phil and I made the trip via the Trans-Canada highway. This is Phil and me in Edmonton, there wasn't much there so we decided to skate on a nearby lake.

As you can see it’s not much of anything, but I was able to watch Eskimos score a touchdown and then skin whale blubber on the sideline to sell in the concessions. I really liked the Caribou meat myself; it goes great with Tim Horton donuts. I understand Eskimos don’t use labia rings, I guess the danger of frost bite is too severe.

I’d like to tell you I didn’t think about Chone Figgins today but I’d be lying.

You can click the photo for a larger image, or you can
click here for a larger image.

My Raible Vacation - Day 1 Catching Salmon With Bobby

2006-07-26T08:14:00.000-07:00

Day 1 - Catching Salmon With Bobby

Finally! After packing up all the Aason cards, changing my cell phone number again and establishing email filters I was ready for my first ever Raible vacation.

My friend Bobby and I flew to Prince George BC, where we went ice fishing in July and caught this really cool salmon. It was great, I didn’t think about Chone Figgins all day.

After that, we went shopping for labia rings but couldn’t find any. Later that night, we sat around the ice shack and I did begin to think about Chone Figgins and Bobby made me drink a lot of alcohol so I’d shut up and go to sleep.

I hope to write more about my vacation later.

I Like Blogs Damn You! Here's Why...

2006-05-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

Blogs.

So full of deeply personal and uneducated opinion that they are so easily dismissed by anyone with even a smidgen of cynicism, which in today’s modern age amounts to every living soul on the planet.

Still, as uneducated and self-centered as most Blogs are, they still reflect one delightful and often overlooked virtue: free speech.

It’s too bad (in my view) that Blogs became a branding agent for political mongers who make money by broadcasting one and only one side of the political spectrum.

It’s too bad that Blogs were usurped into the pedantic MySpace, a place where kid’s gather and pretend they are adults while adults gather to act like children. If the deafening sound of American pop-culture has left you with a headache, then MySpace is the last place you want to visit. Here, all that matters is the latest comedy skits on television, aptitude with the latest colloquialisms those skits have spawned and of course, discussion of any celebrity that is flogging their wares in mass-media.

If ever a fascist wanted to prove his case that the general public loves to be duped, usurped and lead astray, the vast majority of dialog on MySpace proves their case in spades.

None the less, it is still a medium of free speech, free thought and free interaction of human being across the whole globe. However elitist your reaction to Blogs might be, you can’t deny that Blogs are unaltered, unedited and deeply rooted in the simple notion that all ideas should be free to be broadcast themselves. Yeah sure, some of you would rather listen to even the driest of editorials on NPR or re-read that Salinger novel for the seventh time, rather than stoop to the bowels of the internet. None the less, so far, most governments and corporations haven’t been able to get their grubby, dirty paws on Blogging.

Not that they haven’t tried of course, nothing freaks out an autocrat more than people expressing themselves. Even the most intelligent and educated people can feel threatened by a 10 year old girl simply writing her thoughts in an open diary. The reasons they feel threatened are often shrouded in morale concern. Pedophilia is of course often at the top of the list of reasons why Blogs must be controlled, terrorism is another frightening word that governments delight in throwing around to pardon themselves from judging your loyalty to them and punishing you if you dare to express a dangerous idea.

Frankly, I am choking under the 21st Century’s movement towards censorship, media manipulation and privacy invasion. Now defending Blogs and defending privacy almost seem contradictory. What kind of a nerd can complain about having his privacy invaded, when he writes massive essays on every single salient thought that pops into his head and then publishes them in a forum that the entire world can access and read? Well point taken, but while I defend the freedom of Blogging, I also defend its anonymity.

If you love Blogs like I do you know the success stories of free and anonymous editorial, the emergence of frank discussion on China from Chinese residents, who have found ways to Blog themselves and not get caught from the prying eyes of the Chinese regime is my favorite example, but there are others. The Blog of an ordinary Iraqi resident during ‘Shock and Awe’ was fascinating and the discussion about the Blog’s validity was even more interesting. Seeing a puffy, pill-addicted Rush Limbaugh feeling threatened by the ideas of an adolescent kid in Baghdad, was for me, delightful.

Blogging might be hated by elitists who think uneducated commoners like me should just shut up and read Tolstoy, but like it or not it is here to stay. Thank goodness too, because as I read more and more about stealth marketing efforts by large corporations (where companies ‘plant’ company stooges inside free forums, town meetings and large clubs to broadcast company marketing efforts), as I read about corporations that sue, bully and cajole consumers who dare to complain about their products, or worse companies that shut up formal employees by threatening them with expensive lawsuits, when those employees dare to expose the criminal activity they witnessed in their employ. As I read about our own government tracking every single phone call made in the United States, in the name of ‘security’, but has failed to secure our waterways, chemical plants and nuclear facilities in any tangible way. As I read about databases of debit card purchases being sold to whoever wishes to pay for them and wireless ‘smart barcodes’ on product that communicate to central archives as to when, how and who purchased them, and as I read about a world utterly obsessed with knowing who we all are and what we all think and then passing laws to put us in prison when those thoughts or actions don’t match a particular profile, well quite frankly Blogs quickly become a very safe and very necessary haven.

Censorship is in ‘vogue’ my friends. It’s the latest new ‘thing’ and we have all passively accepted it. Your neighbor calls and complains about a raise in his utility bill that was not broadcast or communicated to him before hand and his power is cut off for three days. You call to complain about the fact the garbage collectors were seen driving dangerously in your neighborhood and your garbage stays in your alleyway for days. You broadcast in some forum that a product you purchased has failed to meet up with your expectations and the post is deleted, or worse edited to make it look like you are completely happy with your purchase. You post a bad review of a movie and suspiciously a person that has defended every single movie that a particular media company has produced vilifies you and then proceeds to deliver yet another glowing review, just like the last one for the movie the same company release two weeks ago.

CNET, Amazon, Windows Marketplace, CNN, Hasbro and others have all allowed people who are PAID to editorialize to infiltrate their forums and areas reserved for customer feed back and splatter the medium with infomercials that appear to be just free thought, from a paying customer, but are in fact ‘employees’ of the very brand being discussed. Meanwhile an extremely dissatisfied customer has his message altered to make it look like he was happy the whole time.

Welcome to the 21st Century, the century where compliance and patriotism have fused to become the same thing. This is the century where discordance and complaint is met with vilification and even criminal prosecution in some cases. This is the century of databases with billions of individual data points on everyone and the massive queries that troll those databases for trends, profiles and bell curves. When your political thought, your private discussion with your neighbor about the civic election, your payment to the company that mows your lawn are all cataloged into the same central repository and then disbursed to the government that focuses primarily on staying in power, well forgive me, but the quality of Blogs are the least of my concerns.

In fact, in many cases, an angry Blog, from an uneducated slob like me, can at times, seem like a breath of fresh air.

I know what some of you are thinking, how dare I whine about the conditions of the modern world? I should go back to my cubicle, just shut up and watch American Idol. At the very least if I am going to rant about something, couldn’t it be about something interesting like Tom Cruise’s baby?

(The above was unedited and just a capture of train of thought, my apologies if it was painful to follow or read as a result).

Today

2006-04-22T03:20:00.000-07:00

So it’s time for me to write something...

I have so much to say I don’t even know where to begin, let me boil it down to some sort of stinkin’ office memo, in the name of efficiency let’s just craft it like some sort of inter-office memo.

1. Thank you all of you who raised concern about my last self-loathing post. It’s amazing what people who crawl out of the crannies when you claim you are unhappy. Thank you all and believe me, while I have moments of self doubt, I am overall doing just fine, and thank you all for asking.

2. Seahawk Kinship – Yes American Football is incredible. Yes, Seattle deserves a Super Bowl – and more. My favorite people on Earth live here. This is a city that quite simply is beautiful, not just physically, but beautiful artistically and spiritually.

3. Yes, I like to drink beer. Yes, I like to watch sports. You got a problem with that? If so, then good for you, none the less, beer and sports still serve me better than the New Testament. Put that in your Ann Coulter pipe and smoke it.

4. The Montreal Canadiens are about as close to human perfection as you can get. The sole exceptions I can think of are Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird and Gary Gygax.

5. You try collating multiple MSI and IHC genetic tests, from multiple labs across several genetic markers and then tell me I’m insane. Do that first before you ever fucking judge me and my ridiculous blog.

6. Oblivion is way fucking over rated. In my opinion, it’s more about hardware elitism and RPG snobbery than anything that resembles real entertainment. It runs on my machine fine. It's boring as hell.

7. The NBA has become a joke. Where are the ambassadors to the game? Am I really supposed to buy that Carmelo is on parallel with Kareem, Magic, Charles and Mike? No fucking way, the NBA right now is selfish, elitist and way too fucking expensive. It’s the sport of the upper-middle class, it’s the American version of Cricket. Fuck the NBA, it is totally fucking cheese. It is out of reach and totally out of tune with the average American.

8. Somebody took my cheesy ass lyrics and made a real rap song out of it. Holy shit, my cranky uneducated ass actually inspired someone to make art. Here it is… Check it out. Yes, those are my cheesy lyrics applied to real music and craft. My thanks to my life-remixed kindred spirit that produced this it totally made my week.

9. Steve Raible Baseball is dead. Yet instead some fucking ridiculous clown-like board game squanders millions. Wizards of the Coast is THE dumbest fucking dumb-ass company I have ever worked for.

10. England won World War II. Yeah sure America provided the tanks and the people. Yes, America’s significant contribution should never be denied. But the spirit of World War II, was embedded deep in the fire bombs that landed in London. That glorious country survived the nightmare and provided the launching pad that eventually ensured that democracy would dominate the rest of the 20th century.

11. Russia is fucked up and anyone who thinks the Cold War is over has not been paying attention.

12. No, I am not some sort of right wing bitch. I am not a clown who waves flags. China and Russia are fucked, period. America is superior to them both. I say that not because I am an overly-patriotic reactionary. I say that because America invented Jazz, put men on the moon and lead the vast majority of scientific fields.

It does so, because at this stage of time, it is a superior fucking country that treats its people with more respect than any other super power in human history. Yeah, I like Canada too and the UK, but let’s face it, neither of those countries intimidate the Security Council.

13. Yes, damn you vote. Yes, I know Florida was fucked up in 2000. Yes I know democracy isn’t perfect. Yes, George Carlin’s nihilism is right and correct. You know what? I don’t fucking care, vote anyway, it’s hell of a lot better than a country that doesn’t even provide that simple basic human expression.

14. I like Passover more than I like Easter. I say that as an atheist.

15. Did I mention that Oblivion is over rated?

16. Has anyone else noticed that the editorials on Penny Arcade have slowly become unreadable? Jesus H. Christ, put the fucking thesaurus down you nerd and just talk to me like a normal human being.

17. Yes Michael Moore lies. So does George W Bush, the left and the right have turned into cheerleaders. Make up your own god damn mind and try to do it without listening to NPR or Rush Limbaugh.

18. I love life, every time I doubt that statement, I look at my children. Whatever life is, for better or for worse, I believe it gets better with every generation. I believe I have seen visible proof of that statement.

19. To support item #18, I claim here and now, that I am a better human being than my own father. However, I also concede that one of the key reasons that I am a better human being, is my father worked hard to raise me right. It's called progress, it's called evolution. It's part of what makes life so beautiful.

Sometimes Mud Gives the Illusion of Depth

2006-02-06T13:00:00.000-08:00

Shortly after the Super Bowl ended, I drifted into a soft bed and became a piece of peaceful granite for about 9+ hours. I woke up feeling like Buddha, smiling quietly with an inexplicable sense of calm

I read all kinds of email threads from friends and family: Referees? Woulda? Shoulda? Coulda? Hollow? Bias?

All of it, some of it, none of it is true depending on context and perception.

Television media, which is what you subscribe to when you become an NFL fan, is beyond a fickle mistress. She's just a pure, unadulterated fusion of power, message and perception. She broadcasts the perception of truth for the sake of theme, power and profit. Put much more simply and effectively than my dumb ass can ever hope to say:

"The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan

...or perhaps even more appropriatley...

"Sometimes mud gives the illusion of depth" - Marshall McLuhan

Actually, it’s very difficult for me to put into words what I observed in the two weeks after the Seahawks won the NFC up until the Super Bowl was over. To summarize my thoughts, as best as I can:

The two weeks of hate-mongering towards our innocent city was something of keen interest to me. It helped me understand how the 21st century operates, at least when it comes to mass-media, power, message, brand and consumerism.

This was best illustrated in several editorials about our city written in several national publications, editorials that primarily attacked our city and its people and not the football team.

Their words, even the reason why they wrote the words are meaningless. They are meaningless because all that matters truly in the end, is your own reaction to them.

Rick Riley and Skip Bayless don't define this city. A television broadcast doesn’t define anything other than just a television broadcast. That's not sour grapes talking either.

Yes, it’s true that I would have loved to see Seattle win this game. Not for me personally, I've watched teams I admire win championships now 11 times in my life time. No, I wanted it for this city, this great city where my children were born in, for no other reason that it would have strengthened the kinship between all my friends and family who live here.

That kinship however remains, so what have I really lost? In fact all I would have really "won" is something to make myself and my friends happy. If you really think about it, all we would have "won" was our reaction to the event. In my opinion, if our reactions to this event bonds us further, help us understand one another better and bring us closer together in spirit and kinship, then perhaps we have won, at least at some level.

The noise you hear from the television station trying to sell you deodorant, the minutia over the details of a football game, the perception of meaning and significance from entities who profit from the business of football itself, mean nothing and from to time actually become quite boring, if you obsess over them enough.

Whine? Don't whine? Fair? Unfair?

They are just words and they are words too often bandied about by people who don't know us, and worst of all, have never lived here nor care to live here.

Your reaction is all that matters.

My reaction is this:

I love the Seahawks. They help me feel like I belong here in the Northwest. They are a story about how we fight to preserve the traditions, our passion for the only temperate rainforest on Earth, and in some small way how we honor the ancestors who lived here thousands of years before any of us. I can explain to you why the Seahawks mean all those things to me, but most of you who know me - know why I feel that way.

Take a walk outside, look at where you live. Take a look at your friends, family and the lifestyle you all enjoy here. Who on Earth would anyone trade any of it for a sports trophy? Not me. And who on Earth thinks their life would be as awesome as it is, if they lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? Who on Earth really believes Rick Riley isn't anything but a self-serving, sub-par writer who slandered Seattle for the sake of selling a few magazines and pocketing some greasy nickels into a bank account somewhere?

If you reflect on Super Bowl XL (and if you insist on attaching meaning to it on some way), then when contemplated long enough and truthfully enough, it was just one of a thousand reasons why we live in the greatest city on Earth.

Now if you'll excuse me, I am in danger of "walking backwards into the future", as McLuhan would say. So it's probably best that I just shut up and go back to work.

Thanks for listening though, if you made it this far.

Kinship

2006-01-03T11:33:00.000-08:00

So we are in the midst of the greatest Seahawk season ever. I am filled with so many thoughts on opinions on the subject I can barely contain myself.

I am the most opinionated bastard on Earth, so this is no surprise.

The world is full of people who are bigger Seahawk fans than me. I am a Seahawk newbie really. I adopted the team ten years ago when I moved out to the northwest and while I have a massive pile of ticket stubs and memories of the team, I confess my Seahawk resume is not that impressive. At least in comparison to a few fans I know out there.

I wanted to share my thoughts on four fans that come to mind immediately, and I won’t mention them by name.

My favorite Seahawk fan of all time is a guy who loves to mock and cajole my status as a fan all the time. That’s nothing new, as I am quite the loud mouth so I tend to attract a lot of angry, boisterous counter-opinion all the time. This particular fan has accused me of being a “care bear” Seahawk fan for a long time. He’s called me a “Holmgren-lover” and is quick to point out when my overly opportunistic view points come crashing down around me.

He watches the Seahawks from the bottom circle of the upper deck. He watches them religiously. He is knowledgeable and passionate about his team.

This guy also happens to suffer from Cerebral Palsy. I don’t tell you that to solicit sympathy for the guy, not at all. This gentleman holds his own and neither wants nor needs your sympathy. I did want to mention that to accentuate why he’s my favorite fan. You see he has to communicate to the outside world through a more code communicator mounted on his wheel chair. He has to tap his head onto a receiver behind his head to communicate. The chair then translates the message into text.

It can take him quite a few minutes to tap out a simple sentence that you and I take for granted. Yet this guy writes constantly about his passion for the Seahawks on the internet. He involves himself in complex threads about the Seahawks defense, the draft strategy or the west coast offense, all using Morse code from his wheel chair.

To me, that is just an incredible testament to the passion he has for the team and the emotion that being a sports fan can invoke. He and I have never really agreed about anything on these threads and he has mocked me all the time. In truth, he has been far more right than I have in the long haul. We are both opinionated bastards. It’s just that this fan has to work that much harder to express his, which means he has more passion than I ever will. On top of that, he’s a smarter fan, because as I say, in the long haul he’s been more right than I have.

He’s probably reading this now and thinking I am suck-ass for writing all this. That’s one of the reasons why he’s the greatest Seahawk fan I know.

Another great fan I know is someone I met only briefly while working a contract for a wireless company. The contract was terrible and it was easily the lowest point in my career path in the past 10 years. None the less sitting next to me was one of the biggest Seahawk fans I ever met. He went to school with Bill Gates and Paul Allen and pulled out his high school yearbook one day to prove it to me. I guess they were friends back in the day, but drifted apart when they went to college.

He was a Seahawk fan before Bill and Paul ever were and showed ticket stubs and other evidence that he’s followed the team since its inception in 1976 and has had season tickets in the family for 20+ years. He could recite memories of games that were not only obscure, but were fascinating in their re-telling. He’d tell me the differences between Patera and Knox’s style and he knew all the dirty details about the Behring family and just how dirty and inept the franchise became under their tenure.

After a game, we’d discuss and dissect the subtleties on Monday at work, discussion that were the highlight of my Monday. I just admire this man because he had been there from the start - and even though I was this nerdy opinionated newbie fan, he not only tolerated my allegiance to this team, he seemed to admire it. He made me feel like I belonged to the Seahawk family and he had the kind of seal of approval that you can take to the bank. I have lost contact with this man, which is a shame, because he made me feel like I truly was part of the legendary “12th Man”.

There are other fans I must tell you about. Each of whom have different stories to tell.

One I know came from another place but adopted the Seahawks immediately after arriving, and has held season tickets with pride for seven years straight. He used to shake his finger at me with his Seahawk opinions just about every day of the regular season at work. My favorite memory of this particular fan was the Cheshire grin on his face the day we drafted Shaun Alexander. “Shaun likes to score touchdowns,” he told me excitedly the day after we drafted him which has stood to be the most prophetic statement ever told to me by a Seahawk fan. He would come into my office for weeks after that and just repeat the phrase and then leave with that impish grin. Shaun does indeed like to score touchdowns.

Others friends I know still cling to the places they came from in the past, but have incorporated the Seahawks into their sports resumes comfortably and with pride, one fan I know who fits in this category single-handedly cursed the 49ers into missing a field goal on a pivotal season-ending game in 2003. It was the magic that only a Bills fan could have invoked. Another guy I know has the sharpest memory for statistics and play calling I have ever known. His passion for the team is undeniable and if you’ve ever heard this man rave about the overuse of the “half-back sweep” from the stands, you know who I mean. This man remembers everything and his accuracy for statistics and events long since passed borders on miraculous. Another friend has lived here all his life and remembers the franchise’s birth and its glory days in the early 80’s. This fan can communicate just how much the Seahawks mean to our community better than anyone I know. He’s one my favorites because every year he predicts the Seahawks will go undefeated and then lays out an entire argument as to why.

All of these friends are quick to tell me how wrong I am about my own interpretation of the team and rightly so. What I know about football can me measured with a thimble, but it doesn’t stop me from voicing that uneducated opinion constantly and with great ferocity. Most of the time, I voice them just to egg some of the people I’ve listed above onto a discussion. I do it to get them to talk about one of my favorite subjects, I have literally emailed “the Seahawks suck” and the “Seahawks are going to win the Super Bowl” out as opinions on the very same day, each to bait entirely different fans into a discussion.

There are of course other fans, the face painters, the ultra-diehards, the guys who constantly find a way to get on TV during and after the game. I’ve met most of them, but none of them compete with the fans I’ve just listed here. It’s not that they aren’t great people themselves (they are) it’s just that the people listed here have had more impact and influence in my own experience as a fan.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the Seattle Seahawks this year. I fear the worst, I hope for the best. I just know that whatever happens, each of the fans I’ve listed here will experience it as well. Our reactions will each be different but our experience will be shared and each of us in our own way will be hoping for something that the city of Seattle can cherish for decades to come. Each of us, in our own way, are just expressing our pride for great northwest and the city of Seattle specifically.

It’s that kinship, that I admire about being a sports fan most of all.

As for me, well I find I'm so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it's the excitement only a Seahawks fan can feel, a fan at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope we make it the Super Bowl. I hope to see my friends, and shake their hands when we do. I hope all our dreams come true. I hope.

MLB Showdown 2002: Broken & Bloated

2005-08-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

2002 was in my mind, a real low point for the MLB Showdown brand.

Tom Wiley the game’s inventor had left Wizards and the rest of Wizard’s R&D was not fond of the game at all. They disliked the game’s base mechanic, the game’s primary focus on luck and dice, but in particular a lot of people at Wizard’s R&D just felt a sports game was incompatible with Wizards as a whole.

In 2002, after Wiley's departure, the brand was given a temporary steward and a new card format. While the 2002 card format was superior to the treatment given in 2001 and 2000, the cards still suffered from ‘over-treatment’. In 2002 it had these awful ‘lines’ around the top of the card that just obscured the photo and in particular, made non-foil cards look rather cheap and tawdry.

The game also went under a small revision, players complained about the lack of ‘action’ on the batter’s card, because even the best batters only rolled on the batter’s chart 25% of the time, the game largely boiled down to high rolls on the pitcher’s chart. To combat that, the OB number on batter’s was extended higher but more outs were added to the batter's card.

This revision however made a huge mistake, it kept the 2001 cards (designed to work on the older statistical breakout) legal in tournament play. Those cards were a little broken to begin with, but when combined with more action on the batter’s chart they became lethal.

The game also had too many open ended rules, rules many of us (including myself) clamored to have changed. Cards that allowed you to draw an open number of cards based on some sort of trigger, cards enchanted an entire inning, but there were no specific cards to break enchantments and cards that could be put into stackable play. The game had never really defined how its ‘stack’ worked, which is amazing since the company created Magic, (the game that first invented the ‘card stack’ and the resolution rules within).

As an aside, I’ve always argued Showdown should have a ‘non-stack’, or in other words, have immediate resolution rules. The idea is all cards resolve immediately and in the case of resolution triggers, resolve in the order in which they were played when the trigger fires and resolve immediately. This rule, (the exact opposite of how Magic resolves a stack) solves 99% of all rule ambiguity that has arisen in the game.

The game also had useless defensive cards. In fact, the best defensive cards were used to GIVE UP runs, in favor of card draw, or ridiculously defensive cards actually used on OFFENSE, like doubling a person’s defensive ability just to increase swing pump, a combination actually ALLOWED in original tournament rules and to this day, I use a poster child of just how sloppy Wizards R&D can be with any non-Magic TCG.

The key problem with the game's strategy, (still to this day), is +’s to the pitch (the bread and butter of defensive cards) are statistically miniscule in advantage compared to +’s to the swing. Also the strength, scope and playability of +’s to the swing were far more rich and far more complimentary. Offense also had mechanisms to reroll outs in 2002, but defense had no ability to reroll hits.

It lead to the worst era in MLB Showdown history, the 2002 Aggro years and also one of the most embarrassing moments in Wizards R&D history, a national tournament, where a baseball simulation game was yielding on average over 50 runs a game. Meanwhile stunned members of Wizards R&D were forced to watch their own game butchered, hacked and exploited, making a mockey of baseball in the process.

Curt Schilling, an all-star pitcher who ACTUALLY PLAYS MLB SHOWDOWN, stopped considering the game seriously after the strategy card mess. Aggro players in their 20’s were literally crushing 10 year olds in tournaments by a score of 48 to 13 and we’re doing it by starting the game with 16 intentional walks, (another open ended rule Wizards never addressed)!

Sadly, the best tournament player that year, wasn't even a baseball fan. The 2002 national tournament prize was season tickets to your favorite team, the national winner that year proudly boasted he would just sell the tickets right away and as such wanted Cubs tickets, even though he lived nowhere near Chicago and indeed, had not attended or even cared about baseball in many years. He just knew Cubs tickets would fetch the highest price on eBay. He didn't even know who Ernie Banks was, when I asked him.

That sad scene actually affected the brand. The brand had lined up hall-of-famer and Nego-League legend Buck O’Neill to attend the National tournament that year. However, when associates of his showed up to scout the tournament atmosphere, they promptly returned to Buck with the advice of “stay away”. Who could blame them? The game was not only breeding poor sportsmanship, (evident to anyone who lingered in the tournament room for more than 10 minutes) it was also making a mockery of the great game of baseball, something any real baseball fan would and should never tolerate.

The tragedy of 2002 wasn’t that Aggro crushed the tournament meta-game, or that it actually scared away hall-of-fame sponsors and advocates. No the tragedy was that all of it could have been avoided.

Myself, and many others in the company had warned Wizards of the broken nature of the game, but our fears were ignored. In fact, some at Wizards actually thought a “breakable” set of strategy combinations would be good for the game, suggesting it brought ‘skill’ to the game. The same reasoning I suppose, that Wizards used when it was revealed just how broken the Pyschotog deck was in Magic around the same time.

You can’t develop a sports card product that way. While Aggro players were having a ball and patting themselves on the back for their strategy decks (and sometimes boasting about being the strategy's creator, when in fact most had copied the deck off just one player), that same small core of players were shredding the brand’s credibility. Remember as stated in earlier posts, if your tournament environment is not rich, your product’s longevity is doomed, that is a TCG industry rule, that I have as yet, never seen broken.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame Aggro players. They just wanted to turn a 200 dollar investment into a 1 in 10 chance at earning a prize that could be converted into 10,000 dollars with a simple posting on eBay. There were probably 10 decent MLB Showdown players on the national tournament scene in 2002 and not much more, so the odds were very high you could succeed.

No, like I say, its not the fault of Aggro players at all. I blame Wizards. I blame their R&D, their marketing and their brand management, the whole kit and caboodle. They had turned MLB Showdown into a disaster and the ever so important bottom line was getting worse.

The game's initial inertia and small growth atrophied in 2002, the game's audience was shrinking.

Miraculously, despite all this, MLB Showdown survived into 2003 and we enter the Worth Wollpert era.

2003: Wollpert Downer Syndrome

Death of MLB Showdown: 2001 – A STEP BACK, A STEP AHEAD

2005-08-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

2001 was a tentative year for the brand and in my view, one of the worst.

The brand did not meet the expectations of the 2000 forecasts and many of the brand’s opponents within the company were crowing about how they were right.

2001 was also the year Wizards realized that the Pokemon money-bath was about to take a dive. The little yellow rat was still making money, but the company could no longer roll marijuana in 50 dollar bills at the Christmas party.

Like any Wizards brand, one of the key focuses in terms of the brand’s potential longevity was the attendance it could muster for its tournaments. Anyone in the hobby game industry will tell you that it doesn’t matter how much you sell in a given quarter, if your tournament structure behind the game is weak or poorly attended, your brand will have no longevity.

In the hobby game industry, sales of course are the bottom line; we all like sales, but if you want to know if those sales will last, look at your tournament support. If its not there you can expect your brand to die within 2 years, maximum. If the tournament support is there, you can expect steady sales numbers, even some growth over the long haul.

MLB Showdown’s tournament participation was horrendous and it had the company concerned. It meant the lower than expected sales could likely fall in its second year. Now, my apologies to hardcore Showdown players who might be reading this, who feel I am insulting them when I say the tournament scene was awful.

The fact of the matter is though, the tournament scene for Showdown was always a giant mess and 2001 was the genesis of the scene becoming an utter disaster, which culminated in the 2002 Nationals, which were one of the lowest points for the brand.

Anyway, in 2001 Wizards focused on making strategy cards more compelling. Hard code Magic players dismissed MLB Showdown immediately as a simple game of dice. The Magic snobs in Wizards would frequently mock the game, by suggesting you could reduce the game to one simple die roll, who ever rolled highest would win.

There was a large element of truth to their criticism. Indeed, MLB Showdown displayed no more real skill than say Monopoly. The problem is people at Wizards wanted the game to increase the skill capacity by creating more complex strategy cards. It wanted to lure Magic players into the game by providing mechanics such as the Hung It strategy card. A card that a non-ATCG player would look at and consider it to be a wasted card, but even a reasonably seasoned TCG player would see “CARD ADVANTAGE” in a giant neon lights, printed over the card and gravitate to it.

The thinking in 2001 was so flawed from the start and really I think the brand would have died in 2001 were it not for one saving grace, which I’ll save to the end.

Not only was providing more ‘TCG-like” mechanics to the game not the answer, it was entirely the wrong focus. The real problem with the game was not the luck factor. People play games based almost entirely on luck all the time. There really is NOT a lot of strategy to backgammon once you master the basics. There really is NOT a lot of strategy to RISK once you master the basics. People play those games anyway, because of the meta-game attached to them, because of the social ties to the game etc. etc.

That actually, was the audience MLB Showdown was starting to cultivate, social gamers, who loved baseball and loves to simulate a baseball game with dice and cards. Wizards on the other hand, still felt the power gamer was the right profile for the game. Now for a football game, that’s entirely true, but for baseball it was wrong. Seam-heads, real seam-heads are stat freaks and if you provide mechanics whereby Bret Boone can produce a 1200 slugging percentage and a 625 batting average, you are immediately destroying your base customer.

I maintain this is, to this day, the key error Wizards has always made with MLB Showdown, that and it never focused on time to market. There is a 6 month cycle between getting an MLB Showdown set out the door. In the baseball card industry that’s a death knell. 6 month cycles work fine for Magic, but baseball is different. The fact Wizards can’t crank out product faster than Upper Deck, is a total logistical failure for Wizards in my opinion, one that to this day, they spend very little energy addressing.

Wizard’s problem, at its core is it only understands one business model: Magic the Gathering. Now they have a right to want to shoe horn every game they make into the MTG business model, because MTG is a 200 million dollar annual machine. The fact is however, a sports game and the MTG model are *not* compatible and never will be, but to convince just about anyone that matters at Wizards of that basic fact is next to impossible.

2001 catered to the power gamer in spades. The strategy cards in 2001 were a power gamer’s delight and the game began to attract that kind of gamer to its tournaments. The problem was the brand had little to no R&D budget, which mean play testing was non-existent. In fact, I have some evidence that Wiley knew he had broken the game with his strategy card combinations but didn’t care, he felt it would help sales.

Because MLB Showdown had no hand size limit, had no limit on the number of cards played per at-bat, or at the time, even a restriction on playing the same card at the same at bat, because it had powerful enchantments with no specific cards to dispel or remove enchantments, because it had all the power of card draw and board control as Magic, but none of Magic’s balance, countering or hand restrictions MLB Showdown was heading towards a meta-game nightmare.

The strategy card combinations produced such inflated scores and games, that anyone who played the game internally began to ban cards left and right in their internal leagues. The high-offense game were also longer and generally, because lower score games produce more 1-run deficits, the games were often blow outs and less intriguing.

2001 sales initially did not move from 2000 and Wiley’s involvement with the game was soon to be at an end. When the game’s creator abandons the game and the sales are stagnant, you can start to hear a brand death knell.

But, MLB Showdown was given a saving grace and his name was Ichiro.

Ichiro lit up baseball in 2001 and provided the Pacific Coast rim, with a genuine star. Ichiro was introduced to MLB Showdown in 2001 Pennant Run and for whatever reason the set and that card in the set produced a notable sales spike. It was enough of a spike that people began to project serious growth for the game, hell even the word ‘hit’ was tossed around by the end of 2001.

The tournaments had shown some growth as well, because the game picked up some power-gamers along the way, mainly frustrated Magic players that found more success in the much smaller fish-tank of MLB Showdown.

But there were problems lurking underneath the veneer. The brand still had major problems that nobody was addressing, because nobody thought they were problems. Those problems were:

1. The few kids who played in tournaments were getting destroyed by adults who had found broken strategy combinations in the game.

2. The cards designs were ugly and confusing. Wizards literally had the ugliest baseball cards ever made in 2000 and 2001.

3. There were no subsets, no thematic cards and no rare vs. non-rare version of star players. It meant your average booster back yielded a plethora of Michael Tucker and Sidney Ponson, but you could spend 200 dollars and not see a single Alex Rodriguez card. The thing is Wizards thought this was great, it meant their repeat-purchase model was preserved.

4. To this day, Wizards fundamentally doesn’t understand how a set of baseball cards are structured. One 2005 Upper Deck release I saw had 5 versions of Randy Johnson in it. The 2005 base set of MLB Showdown contained no Randy Johnson at all. Then, the brand brains at Wizards scratch their head and wonder why the penetration of MLB Showdown amongst baseball card collectors is so low.

5. There was no association at all, with just about every baseball fan’s point of entry into baseball. Most people become baseball fans because they discover or adopt a favorite baseball team. But Showdown was constructed via ‘points’. In fact, even if you wanted to build your favorite team (the Astros lets say), Showdown didn’t provide enough cards for you to even field an entire Astros team. This last point is still controversial, but I maintain, there needed to not only be a team format, people could compete with their favorite teams with in tournaments (an alternate format to points, not a replacement to it), but there needed to be a SKU that catered to team play.

6. The biggest problem of all though, was strategy cards had bent so far to lure power gamers, new players (especially kids) were abandoning strategy cards altogether. Citing them as too confusing, too clumsy and most of all, citing that they slowed the game down and made it ‘boring’.

By the end of 2001, MLB Showdown had cultivate a few frustrated Magic players, who bought the game on a whim to see if they could win some tournament prizes and collected a few actual baseball card collectors who were attracted by the book value in Beckett for the Ichiro card.

In fact however, the game’s health was more precarious than it had been in 2000 and worst of all; MLB Showdown was about to make the same mistakes in 2002 and this time the result would lead to a PR nightmare. The game had taken a step ahead in sales by the end of the year, but a step back in terms of its overall product strategy.

NEXT POST: MLB Showdown 2002: Broken and Bloated

Death of MLB Showdown - Part 1

2005-08-01T12:45:00.000-07:00

I want to talk about the death of MLB Showdown.

MLB Showdown is a trading card game, designed by Wizards of the Coast. It’s a baseball card game, similar in concept to the old Strat-o-Matic baseball game, but with actual baseball cards and a collectable scheme of booster packs and starter packs.

The game is the only game where I played some role in its design and layout. It also recently died, that is to say its latest release, the 2005 Trading Deadline release, is the last release of the game you will ever see.

I am saddened by the death of this product. I also think it’s death taught me a lot about the gaming industry and both the good and the bad of a company called Wizards of the Coast.

I know a lot about how and why MLB Showdown failed and thought it might be interesting to write down what I know. I am going to break this post up into several parts, as I have a lot to say.

First of all a disclaimer:

There are some who will say that some of my criticism of Wizards in these posts is jealousy, specifically because I no longer work at Wizards of the Coast, and therefore my criticism is rooted in that. Well, that’s a difficult accusation to defend, I’ll just say that my job now pays better, has more prestige and makes me happier than any gig I had at Wizards. Not to say I didn’t enjoy working at Wizards, I did, I enjoyed working there a great deal, but I’m happy where I am now too.

So yes, I’m going to criticize Wizards in my posts, but I am also going to praise them. I am the first to admit Wizards has great people in it, great ideas in it and still has my overall respect and admiration.

THE BIRTH OF MLB SHOWDOWN

The game was released in the late spring of 2000 and was originally designed by Tom Wiley. I don’t have much to say about Tom Wiley, I did not know him well. I watched him demo the game a few times to kids one day and he seemed genuinely proud of his game.

Wiley developed the pitch/swing die roll mechanic that is largely the trademark of the game and he came up with the idea of the strategy deck. It was RE Dalrymple, a play tester for the original release of the game, who came up with the Showdown brand name.

The interesting story behind the Showdown name is it was originally disliked by many people at Wizards. Now however the name ‘Showdown’ will be extended to new games that will actually replace MLB Showdown. These will be non-sport games.

MLB Showdown was released with much fanfare and ballyhoo. It was released during WOTC’s “hey day”, the company was still knee-deep in riches from its Pokemon trading card game.

Because Wizards was ‘fat’ from the Pokemon earnings, the company’s optimism and its expectations were vastly inflated. I saw earning projections for such horrible IPs as the X-Men TCG that Wizards’ produced that were outrageous and thus fell far short of expectations. WOTC just kept thinking they could crank out smash hits back then, when in reality Wizards really hasn’t had a “hit” in years and survives these days solely off of the revenue from Magic the Gathering and the few pieces of change that D&D delivers on an annual basis.

MLB Showdown suffered from inflated expectations as well, and indeed, in retrospect, it’s a miracle the game survived as long as it did. WOTC expected huge sales numbers for MLB Showdown and while initial base set sales were arguably quite healthy, the bloated expectations surrounding Wizards at that time, made MLB Showdown a disappointment in the eyes that matter most in the company.

One of MLB Showdown’s saving graces however was it received some fairly strong reviews from the gaming community as a whole (as opposed to other IP related games Wizards came with in 2000, which were universally panned). The game also out-performed any other Wizards product that year, other than their core stable of product. In short it was the strongest ‘new game’ , totally outperforming even strong intellectual properties such as Bugs Bunny, the Looney Tunes game associated with Bugs was an outright flop.

The game also seemed to open up a new channel, the baseball card store. This wasn’t nearly pervasive as people might think most Showdown sales were channeled through regular gaming stores and online sales. However, it was enough of a ‘new’ opportunity that once coupled with the fact Wizards license with Major League Baseball could extend for five years, meant Showdown would continue into 2001.

So at the end of 2000, despite a lot of problems and despite a slew of product being shredded and destroyed because it was left 'unsold', Wizards decided to continue with the brand in 2001.

This was a significant decision, because when the numbers were all tallied, the fact of the matter is, MLB Showdown cost Wizards money. It not only was *not* profitable it was taking money away from Wizards. Also it was a significant decision because MLB Showdown was not liked by many significant personas in Wizards.

Many of the ‘high minds’ at Wizards felt there was no cross-over between an average ‘gamer’ and an average ‘sports fan’. Indeed, many exhibited downright disgust that Wizards was attempting a sports-related IP. In their minds, it was breaking the ‘heart’ of what Wizards was, or at least was in their minds.

To this day, some of the antipathy towards sports related games still exists within Wizards and while those people are few in number and are by far, a small minority, I can tell you some of them are downright happy that Wizards decided to finally pull the feeding tube out of MLB Showdown.

NEXT POST: 2001 – A STEP BACK, A STEP AHEAD

Extreme Left/Right Both Wrong About Terror

2005-07-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

I am tired of my socialist friends coming up with a littany of excuses for terrorists.

Like somehow evil people with no conscience, are entirely the fault of our own foreign policy. It's a childish and simplistic notion, and it is also in my opinion, a dangerous one.

These would have been the same people that would have found reasons not to get involved in stopping the Nazis in the 40's and the same people that would have found Chamberlain's approach to "keeping the peace" in Europe, the 'smarter approach'.

Well history has taught us, that the Nazis were assholes, that the anti-war movement in America and Canada in the late 30's and early 40's was wrong and the world is a better place because those voices that 'reasoning', did not prevail. History has judged Churchill as being correct and Neville Chamerlain as being wrong.

But which one do you think Al Franken would have sympathized with, had he lived in that era?

And yes, sometimes war is not only necessary, it can, (on rare occcasions) actually improve the quality of our lives. Liberals can put that notion in their pipes and smoke it, because that is historical fact.

Now, for you Republican blokes out there, don't think that means I'm bowing down to the ridiculous rhetoric and squandering of public trust that the Bush administration has perpetuated for 5 years straight.

The Iraq war was mismanaged from day one, anyone who claims otherwise does not know the facts. The Iraq war was miscalculated strategy. Bringing democracy to Iraq is not the answer. Let's set aside that wasn't the reason we the people agreed to go to war in the first place. The fact of the matter is, democracy in Iraq is not the answer.

The single most compelling reason I can think of as to why democracy in Iraq is not the answer to terrorism, is because Iraq itself, should not even be a country, at least the way the country is drawn on the map now. Iraq's current borders were drawn up by colonial England nearly a century ago.

Someone once wrote that Iraq was 'not governable' and that insurgency would always be a problem there. They wrote those words in 1920. Do you know who that person was? That person was Winston Churchill.

Iraq's borders cross ethnic, cultural and religious lines. The borders make no sense! They never have, and as a result, bringing any form of stable and peaceful government to the region will never work. Even the mighty Ottoman Empire struggled with insurgency in that region for 300+ years! Look it up, that is historical fact.

300 years of insurgency? How does that sound to you Republican boobs out there?

It was an arrogant and blind administration, that believed that the age-old rivalries between Persians and Arabs that have existed for over 1000 years could simply be wiped away with an American flag and a piece of paper with the word 'constitution' on it.

Sure the ink stains on the old woman's thumb made for great press, but its an illusion that things 'are getting better in Iraq'. They will never get better in Iraq, because it is a country that has been knee-deep in cultural antipathy since the country's inception and indeed, for centuries before that.

That antipathy will never change, nor will it subside. Deluding yourself that it will change, at the expense of billion of dollars borrowed from China, is one of the dumbest moves in American foreign policy history.

Anarchist on Welfare

2005-07-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

He's an anarchist on welfare
He's such a fucking joke.
The government is evil, until he needs the poke.

He's first in line for handouts
He wants the life that's free.
He's an anarchist on welfare
and he's such a fucking joke.

Anarchy's religion,
or so he likes to say,
But his mother sends him cookies
To help him through his day

He thinks that he is hardcore
Doc Marten boot spit shine
And his leather jacket artwork
helps keep his peace of mind

But he's an anarchist on welfare
He's such a fucking joke,
The government is evil, unless he needs some cash
He likes to rob the system blind,
...so he can buy an ounce of hash.

If you're an anarchist on welfare
You are a fucking joke
You think you have conviction,
but in fact, you're just a joke

The government is laughing,
because you are its tool.
And the day they decide to start the draft,
you'll be the first in line you fool.

For the sake of just dollars a day,
You've submitted to their rule
You're just an anarchist on welfare, a total hypocrite
So please don't lecture me at all,
you collosal piece of shit.

IFC's Punk Documentary

2005-07-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

So I dial up my TiVO and was delighted to see a 90 minute documentary on punk rock had been downloaded from the Independent Film Channel.

Info on this documentary can be found here:

http://www.elitestv.com/pub/2005/Jul/EEN42cec8f17e252.html

What a pile of rubbish this documentary was and I am just too angry about it to let it go.

First of all, any punk documentary that spends 88 minutes recording drivel from David Johannsen pontificating on how socially significant they are and only two minutes showing and playing actual *music*, is bollocks.

To me, the best visual and audio historical documents of punk are the performances themselves and other than a very cool gritty film clip of an ancient Ramones performance at CBGB's, the actual musical performances in the film are brief.

We get endless musings from Henry Rollins however, weighing the 'significance' of this or that and we get Jelo Bifra congratulating himself for how important he is. (NOTE: Score a major point for Rollins, when he said PIL was infinitely more interesting than the Sex Pistols, I could not agree more).

The sum theme of the film is essentially, that Punk is an American invention, invented by Andy Warhol and then robbed and tainted by the British. While the film gives due credit to The Clash (and the film is dedicated to Strummer), and highlights worthy bands such as the The Slits, it also takes many occasions to deride the London scene. The scene in New York which was equally derivative and shallow at times, is largely given a clean bill of health.

And saddest of all, the punk scenes and punk bands that aren't from London, New York or LA aren't even mentioned at all, with the exception of Bad Brains, which I was pleased to see, but even they are barely a footnote, compared to about 15 minutes dedicated to Nico from Velvet Underground.

Then the documentary pulls an interesting stunt, it derides previous histories of punk as always glossing over the 80's, then immediately glosses over the 80's. The film literally moves from the breakup of the Sex Pistols to Nirvana, in about 5 minutes and most of that 5 minutes, is the lead singer of Agnostic Front whining that he never made it big.

The politics embedded in punk is utterly dismissed, and even suggested here and there, that it never belonged anyway. Like somehow, "Too Drunk to Fuck" was pure punk and something like "2 Milllion Voices" were just spoiled Londoners whining about the Dole.

Also embedded in the film are each artist's contempt for one another. Rollins passively-aggressively takes a stab at the California scene, Johannsen seems to think everyone owes him a percentage of their royalties he was so influential, and just about every New York artist suggests the London scene was bollocks.

The London artists, all seem to like everyone, except Nancy...as once again, we all refuse to believe that Sid Vicious was responsible for what he did to his body and his career. Right, and Yoko was the reason the Beatles broke up too I guess? Bah.

The film isn't a disaster, its just dull. It is really more a love affair with the music scene of the New York underground from 71 to 76. I don't disagree that was an influential and fascinating time and place for music, but to suggest punk 'died' shortly thereafter, or suggest that London just 'subscribed' to whatever scene was in New York and then fucked it up, is more than unfair, its downright boring and petty.

A punk documentary shouldn't be introspective. It shouldn't take a few egos and paste them all over a canvas with insightful commentary. It should have the same kind of energy and nihilism that was the center of what made 'punk' so refreshing.

Most tragic of all, the documentary, couldn't find one interesting new band to tell me about. Are you kidding me? I saw a great punk band in Kansas City of all places, the last time I was there and the only new punk bands you see to tell me about are fucking Green Day and Rancid? Do your homework, there's still great punk out there, what kind of garbage is this?

This isn't a punk documentary, it was more suited for an analysis of Pink Floyd or Eric Clapton. It might as well have been broadcast on PBS with Ken Burns directing. It actually tried to take something as random and beautifully meaningless as "punk rock" and put it in a bottle, label it and paint a historical perspective around it.

What do I think of this documentary? Unless you want to hear other artists tell you how wonderfully terrific MC5, Television and The Ramones were, *over and over and over again*, for about 90 minutes, you are better off finding some bootleg Stiff Little Fingers video and just watching that instead.

Klub Sportowy Deby Osielko

2005-07-05T13:57:00.000-07:00

Witaj na oficjalnej stronie internetowej Klubu Sportowego "Dęby Osielsko". Mam nadzieję, że znajdziesz tu wszystkie informacje jakie potrzebujesz na temat naszego klubu...

http://www.deby.osielsko.com.pl/

Steve Raible ma wąsy prawo

Ever Just Sit Back?

2005-07-04T02:10:00.000-07:00

Have you ever just sat back and watched the human dynamic in motion?

Have you ever been to a meat market, with no self-interest other than to just observe those desperate for love and companionship?

Try it sometime, go ahead, be the nerd at the end of the bar. It's not such a bad ride, in fact, on nights like this, it's better than therapy and it will probably cost you less.

The truth is, Vodka is cheaper than Freud.

Shut Up Bono

2005-06-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

Successful rock stars are narcissistic and selfish bastards. You have to be that way in order to survive an industry that is laced with ego, greed and corruption.

If you don’t believe that, you have absolutely no experience in the music industry. I have some experience here, not a lot, but enough to know that if you are multi-million dollar rock star, you’ve achieved that by walking hand in hand with corporate endorsement, shady deals with concert promoters and attaching yourself to a billion dollar industry, that attempts to bilk every single penny out of the gullible 14 to 28 year old demographic.

So I truly think Bono needs to shut the fuck up. Any pansy that does a photo op in Eastern Africa with 500 dollar sunglasses on, is just a hypocritical piece of shit.

Consider the hypocrisy of someone who screams we need to pay attention to poverty, while they ride in limousines, stay in the best hotels and charge talks shows a fee to come on their shows and talk about poverty.

This is not charity work people, wake up. This is a self-serving marketing scheme. It is intended to get young people to believe Bono is iconic to their hopes and dreams for the world. If you happen to buy an album, or a ticket to a rock show along the way, so much the better.

I am all for helping the plight of countries crushed with debt and if forgiving debt is the best way to do that, count me in. But don’t try to convince me, that someone who made an entire career of standing in front of a stage and saying “look at me, I’m a rock star”, has any business preaching about how selfish and greedy the world is.

Shame on the media such as Charlie Rose and Meet the Press for giving Bono a free infomercial. Bono, if you must insist on continuing this charade, at least have the courage to take of your designer sunglasses and your 400 dollar shirt and talk to me like a concerned human being.

Opportunity

2005-06-18T03:52:00.000-07:00

Sometimes opportunity presents itself. Sometimes elements combine to produce a shot at something unique, something special, something I can be proud of.

I am proud of so many things, and now if I do this right, I'll have something else to be damn proud of too.

Wallowing in the Gutter of Sports Media

2005-06-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

Sports journalism has hit new lows.

It's always been the bottom of the barrel in terms of journalism. As Woody Allen once joked:

If you can't do, then teach and if you can't teach, teach gym.

So in my mind, you could rewrite that to:

If you can't write, become a journalist and if you can't become a journalist, become a sports journalist.

I have a confession. I am a hopeless sports addict, I have been since the age of six, where I would rush to get the morning newspaper and read the latest hockey scores.

So its possible my standards are too high, but I am so often very dissapointed with sports writers, sports television hosts and most especially sports radio hosts.

In fact, sports radio, is a wasteland. Our own local sports radio station here in Seattle, is easily the worst sports radio station I've ever heard. I remember one day, there was a prominent NBA playoff game, several intriguing baseball games with marquee pitching matchups the same day. Did I get to hear any of that? No.

Instead, our stupid radio station choose to broadcast an inter-squad exhibition football match for the local university. The freakin' QBs were wearing red jerseys for Christ sake, marking them as unhittable. That's not a football game, that's a freakin' extended passing drill.

That is just beyond weak and relegates sports radio in this town, to not much more than gossip columns and loud mouths.

Our local sports writers, are also for the most part, a huge joke. They are often vain, egocentric and tend to cover up a lack of analysis or knowledge of the sports, with cheesy humor and sarcasm, the kind we all mastered and perfected back in Junior High.

They also tend to be spineless. Villifying players and coaches when the lose, but turning the tables quickly should they succeed. They never hold themselves accountable to what they said in the past. In fact if anything try to ride the current tide of popular opinion, as their gospel truth. They are beyond populists, they are often, trend sucking whores, who just echo whatever the popular opinion is and call it analysis.

They are also, very often racist. Yes, racism still exists in sports, in particular with sports writers. They are often give black and latino players much less rope and room to fail, than good old white boys. Toronto is a city especially guilty of that. I will one day talk about that at length. But, Toronto is a very racist city underneath its surface anyway, so that racism doesn't surprise me.

A new ugly trend in sports programming is the increase in gossip and celebrity infomercials. Sports shows that bring in some cheese actor to promote Deuce Bigalow II and then ending the conversation with, "who do you like in the NBA finals" to clumsily tie it back to sports. The truth is you just watched a 2 minute infomercial for a movie you never intended to watch in the first place. But the canned audience applauds anyway, because the sign tells them too and they cut to a commercial.

Gossip has begun to abound in these types of shows. Who Alex Rodriguex is dating? is it true there's an imminent break up of some b-grade actress and some Nascar driver with bad teeth? The similarities between ESPN's Sportscenter and Entertainment Tonight are frightening.

The packaged segments on Sportscenter are beyond embarassing these days. I stopped watching Sportscenter for nearly a year now because of them, and when you start putting athletes on a big monitor, and then ask him things like: what's the best accessory to help 'pimp your ride'? Well ESPN, at that point, enough is enough and I just refuse to watch anymore.

The 'serious' sports shows can often be so dissapointing. Outside the Lines and the Gumbel/Costas shows on HBO are promoted as 'insightful sports journalism'. Then you actually watch a show and you realize the journalism usually very light, very shallow and often cobbled together hastily.

When was the last time you saw any real level of research or statistical information? What you get is, Bob Costas and his one guest, telling you for twenty minutes that steroids are very bad? Nobody takes an alternate view (say for example the libertarian notion that regulating what people can and cannot take to help their careers, is no business of government). They instead, just echo what everyone wants to hear, as fast, as easily and as cheaply as possible.

In fact, the last sports interview/show I saw that had any real merit was when Charlie Rose brought in guests to discuss the Red Sox last year.

That's pretty lame when you think about it, we're saturated with more sports shows, radio, newspapers and magazines than ever before, but the best sports related journalism I saw last year, came from a low budget PBS show.

Maybe there just isn't a market for 'upscale' sports journalism. Maybe if someone did a real examination of the utter corruption in the Olympics, the outright bias of NBA referees, the rampant racism still dominant in baseball, the collaboration of the baseball union and ownership to allow steroids to run rampant, the outright chicanery of the NHL that has seen millions swindled into the pockets of an elite few, maybe if there was real examination of these events, journalism will have bitten the hand that feeds them too hard.

Maybe sports journalists can't really be journalists, because they very thing that provides them their jobs, are also the very thing they are paid to analyze and critique. Maybe someone needs to do a documentary on just how shallow, passive and symbiotic sports journalism really is, I bet the media's cooperation with big league sports has provided some shameful moments.

I *do* know that sports has a million ghosts in its closet that are never examined or talked about. College sports is seething with corruption and graft, as well extremely complicit in its use of steroids. Other than the occasional weak 5 minute rant about the playoff system in college football, the rampant criminal activity of the NCAA is never discussed or analyzed.

All the real warts of sports entertainment is swept under the rug and instead we wind up talking about Johnny Damon's facial hair, or the new uniforms of the Cincinnati Bengals. We will never get beyond that, because its apparently all that America wants.

Actually to be more accuarate, we'll never get beyond infomercials and childish editorials, because the secret 'sugar daddies' of sports media, are the very owners, leagues and associations that sports media should be confronting.

When you wallow in the gutter of sports media, you learn quickly who butters the bread. The rich black athlete, can be cast as 'selfish' and 'cocky' at the drop of a hat, especially if popular opinion is already turning against him. But the greedy corporation behind the sport, the one that just swindled 800 million in tax dollars? Well you leave those boys alone, otherwise, its no more free meals at the buffet during the 7th inning stretch.

That's America for You...

2005-06-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

You know every once in a while, not often, but every one in a while, I am kind of ashamed of the US...

http://msn.foxsports.com/soccer/story/3659634

...that's just pure bullshit. 7 decades of playing friendlies and neutral game matches and a New Jersey Governor has to get his underwear in a wad, over it? Just for a little political "Look at me I'm patriotic" media time?

Like somehow America is so much more important than everyone else, that it has to break tradition, just so it can wave its flag and its anthem?

What the hell does that solve anyway?

What garbage...like somehow we all hate our country, because a silly song isn't played when we are not even represented on the field of play. Should we sing 'America the Beautiful' at Olymic medal ceremonies too, just to be sure we don't offend anyone in Hoboken?

Meanwhile our bill of rights get pissed on, our governments lie to us daily and the electoral process has become highly suspect and even possibly high jacked by powerful interests groups, anyone who lives in Washington State knows what I mean by that.

...yet our patriotic duty and concern for the day, is to apparently ignore all of that and instead gripe about the anthems played at a soccer game...

Un-fucking-believable.

That's America for you. That's Raible for you. Love it or leave it Snazel...and meanwhile enjoy a nice hot piping cup of shut the fuck up...

Death of Paper Gaming

2005-05-26T13:49:00.000-07:00

Paper gaming. It's a term used to describe playing a game that basically, isn't a video game. In other words, the term refers to board games, card games and dice games.

Paper gaming is a billion dollar industry still, with brands like Monopoly, Sorry and Clue leading the way - and even Magic the Gathering chiming in around 200 to 300 million a year, depending on the popularity of its expansions in a given year.

Yet, despite that success, paper gaming is dying. Those who deny that, just simply are not looking at the numbers nor are they counting the number of brick and mortar game stores that are closing down year to year.

Here’s a classic example of where gaming is today: Sale of Baldur's Gate video games (which are a D&D branded set of games), outnumber the sale of the books by a healthy margin. Here’s another factoid: if the subscription numbers are true, then World of Warcraft brings in more monthly revenue, than paper D&D makes in one year - and of course with a higher margin to boot. The active player base between the two brands, probably favors World of Warcraft by a 15 to 1 margin.

The cost of goods on your average board game means it's almost impossible to make money with them. Even a brand with reasonably high exposure and recognition such as Axis and Allies, can't make the grade, and that's with prominent placement on a Toys-R-Us shelf.

Trading card games come and go like sailors at a brothel. The market is flooded with just about every intellectual property imaginable attached to a weak TCG mechanic. Yugioh rules this world at this stage and Magic will always be king, but other than those two, every other TCG is a dog (with the exception of Pokemon which treads water every year, much to the delight of the small faction that now runs the brand).

So what to do? Well sell your Hasbro and Mattel stock immediately. I'm not kidding, those companies will do nothing but atrophy as time goes on and Hasbro in particular still carries a fair amount of debt. The stock will spike occasionally after a good Christmas, but in the long haul these shares will atrophy.

If you are interested in making games (and what self-respecting nerd hasn't dreamed of creating a new game mechanic, publishing his own D&D adventure, or revamping some war game), then take a deep breath and consider wisely…

Even if you produce the greatest RPG book in the history of time and space, your ability to sell just 40,000 units will be extremely, extremely difficult. Now factor in your high COG and your low overall margin and ask yourself if the gamble is worth it.

Want to make a new TCG? Good luck, even with a multi-million dollar marketing campaign, tied to a kid's television broadcasting prominently on Saturday mornings, Duel Masters fell flat on its back and is poster child for the "swing and a miss" trend that is predominant in the gaming industry right now.

If you are a gaming retailer, the news is worse. A reasonably successful demand for the new D&D Miniatures, did almost nothing to benefit your average brick and mortar game store. Why? Well, a sizeable percentage of those miniatures are purchased online and through auction sites. Why pay 15 dollars for a 8 figure booster, when you can acquire a case at a 30% discount and then just resell the minis you don't need, back online.

Online purchasing mean the big boys eventually win, Amazon, Toys-R-Us and those boys will eventually win the online retailing game, e-Commerce has moved in that consolidated direction since the .COM bust back in 2000.

My friends, I hate to tell you this, but we are at the dawn of the final decade for paper gaming. In 15 years, Monopoly will probably still survive, but its volume will diminish severely. The board game section at Toys R Us will be reduced to the third of its current size. Trading card games will have new digital equivalents. Paper based role playing has faded already and within twenty years, relegated almost exclusively to retirement homes.

It's sad, but I also believe it’s inevitable. Until then, I'll pull out my MLB Showdown and leave my EA Sports X-Box games to gather dust on the shelves. There's just something about rolling a twenty sided die and then slamming the game board when Vernon Wells hits a homerun that no amount of console graphics can provide.

Prestige Marketing in Video Games

2005-05-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

Today, I promised I'd talk about secondary marketing and video games, which I believe is the future of massive online games. I use the term ‘secondary’ marketing incorrectly.

NOTE: What I mean by ‘secondary’ marketing, is the notion that Company A produces a widget and then Company B buy that widgets and resells the widget for a much higher markup based on the demand and alleged 'rarity' of the widget. I also use the term to label the idea that people will pay extra money to increase their prestige within a particular hobby. People pay extra for an “exclusive” Barbie, or a “rare promotional” baseball card. Perhaps, what I mean, is better described as "prestige marketing"...

Did you know that during the height of the "Pokemon card" craze, the demand for the product was so high, that the single biggest logistical problem for the company producing and profiting from the cards, was finding ways to increase to production? Literally, every available outlet that could produce and package the cards was tapped out. The company literally could not produce cards fast enough. At the height of this craze, production was so high that there were more Pokemon cards produced each year, than there were people in the United States.

Yet, on web sites like eBay, individual "rare" Pokemon cards were commanding 100 dollars or more. The fact of the matter was, there were 100,000 copies or more of that allegedly "rare" card.

Secondary market, doesn't work on the reality of ample supply, it works on the "illusion" of scarcity of it. More importantly, it also works on the notion that acquiring the product increases one’s prestige and reverence within the hobby itself.

The first concrete example I ever had of the power of secondary marketing, was the Upper Deck baseball card craze of 1989. Literally, a case of Upper deck baseball cards in 1989 was commanding thousands of dollars. The reality was, Upper Deck was not only cranking them out a break neck pace they continued to produce the "rare" set until 1991.

To this day, a Ken Griffey Jr. card from this set sells routinely for 100 dollars or more. There are probably at least 50,000 copies of this card in sleeves and plastic protectors, because the card is so "rare" and valuable.

Magic the Gathering proved that secondary market can drive and define a game's identity. Consider how ridiculous the notion is of a card game whereby the more you spend to acquire cards, the better you are at the game. The more you pay, the more you win and the more success you have at the game. Add to that a continuing cycle of cards rotating in and out of what is "legal" to play and you've not only tied the purchasing of your product to winning, you've also stamped a limited life span on each purchase. A Magic card, no matter how expensive it is, is only ‘legal’ for two years in the most common format of the game.

Magic players are dumb asses, they truly are. I say that knowing many of my friends and acquaintances love the game with a great passion and the game is, at its core, a great strategic game. But Magic players are scalped into a 300 million dollar a year business that is about 80% profit and that may be a low estimation. The highest cost of goods on a pack of Magic cards is the foil wrap they come in and that chimes in at about a penny and a half per pack. Rarity? I've personally seen entire boxes stacked with Black Lotuses and original foil Serra Angels. The notion some of the cards are 'extremely' rare and valuable is once again predicated on an illusion of scarcity.

How long before video games exploit this? If Magic the Gathering can command 300 million, or if Pokemon in its hey day can generate nearly 1 billion dollars in a single year, how can companies like Sony and NCSoft ignore that revenue potential?

When you consider how lucrative the secondary market for video games is already, even as a cottage industry, with no real business strategy behind it, it seems obvious to me, this is where video games will eventually. There are people who make 30,000 or more a year, harvesting items, currency and wealth on video games and then distributing what they acquire to the highest bidder in real dollars. Now 30,000 a year, isn't much more than a job at 7-11, I grant you that, but like I say, that's just one person, acting as a cottage industry.

What if the companies behind the game, started to tap into and exploit this demand and market? The idea that people will pay more to succeed in a gaming community, has been proven umpteen times over. While many will gripe about it and say the game is 'ruined', many of those same gripers will then begrudgingly pay "just to compete".

Don't think the secondary market translates digitally? Think again. Magic Online has already proven that.

Magic Online is garbage. The game crashes, it has security leaks, it is ripe with fraud and dubious practice. It has serious scalability issues and is a technical abomination. It has limited graphics and a very high learning curve for new players. It does everything wrong, that makes a video game successful. As a result, it has a fairly limited player base, a mere fraction of what a game like World of Warcraft commands.

Now, what if I told you that the average Magic Online player spends 50 dollars a month? Isn't that 350% more revenue than what your average subscriber to an online RPG pays? What if I told you because the game is very low tech, the development costs and support costs for that game are also considerably less?

In fact, in some ways, less players with a higher revenue stream actually wind up helping you. It means you require less bandwidth, less hardware and less customer support. If Magic Online has 50,000 players, this equates to over 175,000 of a game that fails to exploit secondary purchases and markets and the cost of support. The fact the Magic cards purchased online are just digital objects (you literally pay for database inserts, I suppose) and can only be tenuously converted to an actual physical card does not sway demand. People will still pay, most especially, and this is key, if the purchase increases the players’ ability to compete and succeed in the game itself. Prestige within the hobby is always something people will pay for. Games like golf and tennis figure that our years ago.

So how does a game like Everquest, step lightly into this business approach? Well it has to be done gingerly I believe, especially for the first one. It has to be sold as a 'feature'. I don't know the marketing angle on it, but it seems to me, I should have the option of paying more money to World of Warcraft, in return for prestigious quests, prestigious items and other 'unique' qualities. And yes, the initial reaction from gamers will be to holler and scream, but many of that same crew will begrudgingly commit to the purchase once they see how "cool" the additional feature/quest is, or once the competition of the game itself drives them to do it.

Tying a virtual economy to the real economy is no easy trick, but the revenue potential is too high for someone not to try it. The first few attempts will likely be clumsy and fail, but someone will get the balance right. When they do, suddenly your user base translates to a higher revenue stream. Given how expensive making and maintaining these games have become, I believe its inevitable.

So yes, one of the days, Halo 3 will offer you a special quest to retrieve a special weapon, but only if you pay 5 dollars or if you retrieve a special code from a Burger King Happy Meal. The possibilities and ties in are endless and the code can be just as simple as inserting a unique item into a player’s record. Again, as getting users to pay for a database insert, the cost of goods on such a scheme is probably negligible compared to the revenue potential.

Look for things like this, it in the next year or two. NCSoft already tried a small venture, they released a DVD version of their video game, where if you purchased the DVD you got one additional power and access to a unique cape design that regular users could not access. The DVD contained no new game code that had not already been release. Despite the fact 95% of their users already owned the product, the small additional ‘features’ and prestige, pumped up sale of the DVD significantly.

In short, if there is one thing the gaming and collectable industry has taught us, there is no limit to the demand for items (even digital items) that increase the prestige of the obsessive hobbyist and gamer. I expect that simple fact to become exploited in more and more creative ways in the video game industry as time goes on.

I have one more rant about the gaming industry in me. I have forgotten to mention paper/dice/board gaming, which is becoming more and more of a relic. I think tomorrow I will talk about the atrophy of TCGs, paper games and board games.

Slice at the Gaming Industry

2005-05-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

So E3 is over and it seems like an appropriate time to take a slice at the gaming industry.

The video game industry is still in its wild west stage. There are still a lot of players, a lot of unconquered territory and there's definitely a gold rush feel to it all.

Walk around E3 some time and watch the suits hanging around some of the displays with their tongues hanging out. They literally smell money and are grinning ear to ear because of it.

It's also a very tempermental market place right now. Branding and game loyalty mean nothing. That can turn (and has turned previously) in a heart beat. If Microsoft thinks Halo 3 is 'assured' to keep its core audience and maybe even add to it, they are taking a heavy gamble. The core audience wired into Halo 2, could abandon Halo in weeks and adopt some new game, let alone by the time Halo 3 releases.

This is why I feel the Halo 3 strategy of Microsoft, (holding Halo 3 back to coincide with the PS/3 release, to diminish the attention paid to the PS/3 release), could back fire, and back fire hard.

This is not and will not be the first time Microsoft over estimated its customers' loyalty to one of their brands.

It also needs to be said, that "speed to market" is killing the creativity in the industry right now. It also means 70% of all video games released these days are garbage or so chock full of bugs, their innovation is not worth tolerating.

This is a similar cycle that the 'internet' suffered through from 1996 to 1999. Too many websites, too many DOT-COM companies, just cranking out crap to try and catch a genie in a bottle.

The internet, went through its Darwin phase, where the weak and the chafe died out and those bilion dollar stock option dreams went the way of the Dodo.

The video game industry is poised for this kind of cycle soon and I believe some of the casualties will be fairly important.

Look for Microsoft to ditch its online RPG soon, within a year. Look for PC based online games to slowly lose market to console based networks. Those who fail to port their RPGs to console in the next two years, will die, fast and hard, no matter how high they are soaring now.

Look for the 'life cycle' for RPGs to diminish. People will want to login and play for 6-8 months top and then abandon their characters and their game for the newest 'flavor of the month'. If your business plan is counting one a two year player loyalty cycle, you will die, because the percentage of players who will stick around that long will diminish even more.

Look for games that tap into socializing, to grow a niche market. SIMS had some popularity and boasted the highest percentage of female players than any online game ever developed. Someone will key onto this and take that style of gaming to another level and it will catch on. It may be a niche market, but it wil make money and the media will pay attention because it's the kind of "kitch" thing the media likes to talk about.

Most of all though, look for the secondary markets of gaming to become exploited by the companies that produce the games. I will talk about this in more detail in another rant, but I will leave you with this:

On various web sites, online stores and auction sites, people will actually purchase 'virtual' items to improve their experience in an online game. 'Virtual' currency, 'virtual' weapons and 'virtual' items can fetch a reasonable price. If you were to add a collectible element to that and control that market at some level through the very company that generated the game, how much more revenue would it generate? I believe the answer will surpise you and I will talk about that the next time I post.

Final Thoughts: Star Wars

2005-05-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

The Star wars saga is over.

There will be other spinoffs, books, comics, TV shows etc, but Star Wars is a cinematic experience and that experience is now over.

The prequels were lesser than the originals, not so much because of their content, but because the time and era that surrounded them. When the prequels came out, action and fantasy movies were not only common place, they practically dominated the Hollywood menu. To the point where films of that kind had become tiresome and Star wars was therefore reduced to "just another movie with a lot of special effects".

Alas, I have to tell you the last installment Revenge of the Sith, doesn't do much to elevate the Star Wars prequels beyond that, truthfully, its strongest assets are nostalgia and eye candy. It's a little more than that, in places Revenge of the Sith is magical, but on the whole the movie wheezes, lumbers and clumsily plods away to its inevitable end.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the movie, I like all Star Wars movies, but the reason I like the prequels are entirely different than the reason I liked the originals. I want to share with you something I wrote, that tries to explain my admiration for the series, despite its flaws:

I am watching a scene where the Emperor goes to the opera, in Revenge of the Sith and it suddenly came to me why this franchise is so great.

If this were Star Trek, the opera house would be "a perfect replica of carnegie hall", simulated by the ship's computer to make the crew feel more at home and the opera would be "Figaro" to illustrate the longevity and humanity of Mozart. The main characters would be drinking tea and wearing military uniforms and they'd all have this 'elevated' air, speaking melodramtic dialog about the immortality of 'music' and I'd be falling asleep in my chair.

If it were Lord of the Rings, we'd get a massive helicopter shot from the mountain nearby that slowly panned into the opera house, then the camera would do a 360 degree turn and settle into on some New Zealand sunset, while some endless theme song swelled and pounded into my head for the one millionth time.

This is how and why Star Wars is different. I say this not to disparage other fantasy films, but to illustrate why Star Wars can appeal to me. Star Wars takes the road less traveled, not always, perhaps not even often enough, but when it does, it's bold, unique and for me personally, magical.

What we get for an 'opera house' in Star Wars is a lush, lavish interior, with incredible imagery and light through the window to the outside. Then during the opera itself, the music and the stage imagery, is beyond bizarre, more surreal and ethereal than even the most avant-garde glam-rock show. It just sits there in the background, completely alien and non-sequitur while some of the most important and best delivered dialog is delivered to main character.

It's this attention to detail and the willingness to polish that detail into something extremely alien and bizarre that can often make a Star Wars movie seem so magical.

Like all Star Wars movies, Revenge of the Sith is flawed. In fact, it's very flawed in many, many places. This is not a perfect movie and nothing can ever hold a candle to the hysteria of Star Wars 28 years ago. If you were a child of the 70's (like me), Star Wars was your generation's Beatlemania. The cultural phenomenon and the cinematic revolution spawned by the first two original movies, will never be duplicated in our lifetime.

However, when Revenge of the Sith works, its magical. It is the kind of magical cinema that is unique and pushes the envelope both in technical delivery of the effects, and in the detail and beauty of its design.

I confess, you could argue the prequels are largely technical films. Lucas was always this way anyway, his very first film was literally just a montage of images, called "A Look at Life". It didn't speak a word and quite frankly, its when Lucas abandons the clutter of "talking" that his films tend to shine.

Go see Revenge of the Sith. You will wince at some parts of it. You will shuffle your feet during some of its scenes as it plods along and wheezes its way through its story line.

Then later, you'll see creatures, vehicles, planets, buildings, even furniture, lights and imagery that will stun you, because simply they've never been conceived and put on film before. If you are open minded, you'll come to admit that these designs are the work of a large team of creative people, that have populated a world with such love and enthusiasm, that no detail has been overlooked.

All of the Star Wars movies (yes, even the one with Jar Jar), took cinema to a new level. They are a different kind of masterpiece than the Godfather, or Citizen Kane, or the Bicycle Thief. You can argue, they are lesser masterpieces, because their genius resides primarily in their fusion of cutting edge technology with simple childlike mythology and adventure.

That's really all Star Wars is, kids movies, done with such wonder, imagination and attention to detail, that to an adult, it can often come across as more sound than fury, more bark than bite. To the heart of a child though, its translates to magic.

I can tell you, that I sat next to a 12 year old boy for Revenge of the Sith last night and he was scared down to his bones and hinged on every word and scene. He even applauded when Anakin "died", happy that the tragedy he had witnessed, was put to death.

Ah, but he doesn't die does he? He goes on to become one of the greatest movie villains of all time. He's the Oedipus complex, Hitler and Frankenstein's monster all rolled into one. He changed the way movies are made and to this day, Star Wars takes more risks than most fantasy films would dare to tread. Even when it doesn't work, I still admire the fact Lucas insists on pushing that envelope a little further, just to see what happens.

I watched a Charlie Rose interview of George Lucas that was completed on September of last year. Lucas reflected on how he would be remembered and offered this sobering thought:

"I think in the end, I'll be a footnote, when they discuss the change in cinema from a light sensitive chemical process to a digital one, I'll be mentioned as 'some guy' who helped foster that. Other than that I just hope children find my films enjoyable for a few more generations."

George is right on the money when he says this. In the large sweep of time, much of what George Lucas accomplished will get swept under the rug, but he will be remembered as a pioneer in cinema. A technical innovator beyond a thematic innovator to be sure, but an innovator none the less.

Star Wars is Political?

2005-05-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

I have loved the Star Wars movies since I was a boy. Never in all that time, did I consider them to be political films.

Apparently however, they are, at least some sites have taken a George Lucas quite that Star Wars was originally written during the Vietnam war and extrapolated that Star Wars is just liberal dogma:

Libertas Web Site

Pabaah Web Site

In both cases, you need to scroll down to find the relevant article concerning the politics of Star Wars, as I could not find article specific links.

If there are those on the right side of the spectrum that view Revenge of the Sith as criticism of George Bush and the Iraq war, that is their perogative.

As someone who likes to think he resides at the center of the spectrum, I think this 'controversy' is really just a sign of how much Star Wars really means to our culture, for better or for worse.

Is Star Wars a political statement? I don't think so, THX1138 was a much stronger political statement, if that is the case. Really, all Star Wars represents is all the childhood influences on George Lucas, (Christianity, Judaism, Flash Gordon, Japanese epics and cowboy movies), all kind of gloriously rolled into one.

Darth Vader doesn't represent, Bush, Republicans or American policy, he represents "fathers" and the psychological struggles we all have with father figures from time to time. I mean the name 'Vader' means 'father' how much more proof do you need?

I think there's more freudism than socialism in Star Wars, but then again, I could be wrong.

It is amusing though, to once again witness the influence of a silly series of movies about giant talking dogs, space ship driving cowboys and latent robots.

Star Wars Follow Up

2005-05-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

The cultural effect Star Wars is everywhere. What other action adventure serial spawns an article from a PhD in Philosophy, and Religion at Boston University.

Daniel Newkirk, offers his thoughts on the 'message' of Star Wars. for the Science & Theology News

read it here

While, I don't agree with every assessment made here, it amazes me that such a learned man, would take the time to disect the themes of Star Wars.

I don't suggest this exercise is futile, or even without merit, but I do suggest that it proves the level of impact that Star Wars has on our culture (for better or for worse).

Star Wars

2005-05-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

Star Wars is back.

Love it or hate it, it is hard to deny that you can have a pretty heated discussion with just about anyone regarding Star Wars and its impact on cinema and pop culture.

Even the most hardened cynic, has to confess that Star Wars changed American cinema. Whether those changes were for the better or for the worse is another matter.

I am a child of the 70's, which not only means I am getting old, it means I am in the exact demographic that George Lucas cultivated in 1977.

Now, the alleged "final installment" of Star Wars is upon us and I thought it would be fun to offer my thoughts on the "impact" of Star Wars, in general.

First, lets get the discussion of the "original" trilogy vs. the "prequel" trilogy out of the way. Yes, quite frankly, the prequels are vastly inferior, that is undeniable, simply because there is no cultural significance to them.

Even as a kid back in the 70's, there was a sense that Star Wars was 'important'. Indeed I'd argue that if you were a child of the 70's, Star Wars' impact on you was as socially significant as "Beatlemania" was in the early 60s. Socially significant when measured on the pop culture scale that is, I do realize its just a movie.

The prequels lack that cultural significance and ultimately, this is why the prequel films simply do not resonate like the originals.

Secondly, I recognize Star Wars fans can get obsessive and out of hand and I can be guilty of this as well. Those fans who line up for months or try and reverse engineer children's films into philosophical and even religious dogma, go too far. These films are meant to be a lark, a bit of escapist fun and shouldn't be elevated beyond that. Listing "Jedi" as a religion in a goverment census, might be whimsical, but it also insults the historical longevity and cultural meaning of real religion. (I say that as an atheist with no attachment to any religion, save I suppose atheism itself).

Having said all that, the last installment of George Lucas' 6 part epic, has me excited. I don't expect much thematically, because in truth, the best film George Lucas ever made in that regard, was American Graffiti anyway. I do expect a wonderful romp through my childhood affection for the Star Wars myth and I eagerly await seeing Darth Vader appear on the big screen one last time.

Darth Vader, or "dark father" as the literal translation goes, is a massive villain, with Freudian roots, a booming bass voice and fascist evil undertones, that slice through a boy's fascination with power and dare I say it, the boy's natural wonder for what Nietzsche called the 'Ubermencsh'.

Thus, Vader resonates into a young boy's psyche greater than any other science fiction villain ever created, because he represents our struggle with our own fathers but also our own selfish struggle for power and independence.

Okay, okay, I've gone too far, I've assigned dramatic weight to a simple 'action adventure movie'.

None the less, Vader is what helped sell the original Star Wars hysteria, conversely the villains in the first two prequels, were merely mannequins with no subtext or presence with which we could attach to. It left the Star Wars prequels hollow and without any energy or real conflict.

Now, the next Star Wars movie, brings Vader back, albeit just for a cameo at the end. But because the movie leads up to exact moments of his birth, I believe I will enjoy this film, like I've enjoyed no other sci-fi movie in a long, long time.

Yes, a lot of us children from the 70's assign entirely too much significance to Star Wars. I just offer that many children of the 60's make the same mistake with the Beatles or Jack Kerouac. I guess Elvis and maybe Joe Dimaggio suffer from this as well from generations before, I don't know.

Star Wars, it's just a silly space movie serial. I know this. I just think that with Vader as the central theme and nemesis in the latest installment, I believe I am going to enjoy it very, very much indeed.

EDIT: I just found a delightfully angry review of the movie at the New Yorker web site. You can read it by clicking here.

Although the review is vey funny and very accurate in its assault on the film's weaknesses, one has to wonder if the anecdote about the warm water wasn't derived by the author's personal experience as an adolescent.

Perhaps one or too many dark nights in that lonely closet, is one of the reasons the author can't just sit back and enjoy a film aimed at children.

Trendy Red Sox Fans

2005-05-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

Trends come and go. The Farrah Fawcet haircut, the Thompson Twins, acid wash jeans and grown men using the adjective 'gnarly' have all thankfully passed away as time has progressed.

It's time for another trend to go away, alas, it will be a while before it does, for right now, this trend is at its peak.

It's time for trendy Boston Red Sox fans to die the same death, the KISS solo albums did in 1978.

Are you a Boston Red Sox fan? I have a small quiz for you then...

1. Where and what is the .406 club?

2. Which Red Sox player used to spit at the fans and/or the press box when he hit a homerun?

3. Tris Speaker vs. Jimmie Foxx discuss who was greater and why.

4. You are coming from Oak Grove to see the Red Sox, name the subway line you would consider taking to see the game.

5. In regards to question 4, what stop would you get off at?

6. In most places, Who's On First refers to a Abbot/Costello routine, in Boston though, what would most people would be talking about what when they mention 'Who's on First?'

7. Who is Thomas Menino?

8. You walk into Fenway Park from Gate C and start heading to the Bleacher Seats, what would most Red Sox fans confess is dominant smell in those corridors as you venture to the Bleachers?

Now if you struggle with more than 2 of these questions, I would now like to inform you that you are not a real Red Sox fan.

To the real Red Sox fans of the Earth, the natives of New England, the generational tradition that has permeated that region for a century, I have no argument with you. Indeed, you have my respect, as much as I dislike Boston, I confess it is one of America's greatest sports towns.

However...to the slacker, who works at Starbucks, with his Modest Mouse CD collection, surfing his favorite web site for Halo 2 cheats and exploits, who wears a Red Sox hat because he read some article about that "Babe Ruth curse" somewhere...

...or to the chubby chick that thinks the Red Sox are the charming epicenter of baseball, but have never been east of Spokane and doesn't have a clue what position Bobby Doerr played...

...or to the ultra-liberal pansy, who digs the notion of the perpetual underdog so much, that he wears a Red Sox hat to promote his devotion to all things weak, inept and vaguely conspiratorial but never once saw Yaz hit a homerun...

...or to man in his 40's, who bought a Pedro Martinez jersey one day, because his own home team has gone out of fashion at work and amongst his friends, and then places said jersey next to his Manchester United shirt, his San Jose Shark jersey and the bevy of other merchandise received from bandwagon.com...

...to all of you, who have clung to the Red Sox, because its the "nifty" thing to do these days...and especially to those of you who think that doing so, makes you a 'real' fan of baseball, I tell you this:

You are not a Red Sox fan, you are a vapid, follower of social trends. In 15 years from now, when the yarn of the "Babe Ruth" curse has lost its luster, you'll be sporting a Cubs hat, or a Buffalo Bills hat, or some other jersey or icon, which ESPN and the rest of the sports conglomerates are spinning as the 'grand epic tale'.

You and your kind will die one day, just like the notion that 'Tears for Fears' were a great and serious band.

And for me personally, it cannot happen a day too soon.

Personally, I've hated the Red Sox for two decades, and I will continue to do so with utter delight for many decades more, oh and fuck the Yankees too while we're at it!

I Like Data

2005-05-10T13:02:00.000-07:00

I like data.

I like numbers and statistics, I like what numbers can mean, but I also like the fact numbers don't tell the whole story.

I like how data can give you a perspective on history or tell a tale often more real than what a historian will record in a text book. You can compare the employment rates of women in the 20th century and get a very accurate view on the progression of the women's movement (or lack thereof for that matter).

I've liked data for a long time. At the age of 6, I use to record hockey scores and hockey statistics onto paper. I'd create my own standings and I could recite just about every player and position in the NHL.

In fact, stats are at the heart of why I still love to follow sports and of course baseball is a statistician's dream. So much so, that I simulate baseball games with dice and cards just to record, review and analyze the numbers. I even built a web site to record and analyze it all here.

There not even real baseball games, yet the numbers related to these 'simulated' games still generate great interest for me. You know, some people build aquariums, or model railroads, others paint pictures or knit shawls. Apparently, I roll dice and record the results into a statistical database.

I am not sure why it appeals to me so, but somehow sorting, analyzing and reviewing good clean data is very soothing to me.

I'm Still Good

2005-05-08T02:18:00.000-07:00

I don't know what to tell you. I was at a bar and I saw it all happen.

There was poor, there was rich, there were the desperate and the fliratious

There were those that wanted, those that neeeded and those that had so much they needed a rest from it.

Then there was me, somewhere in the middle,(where ever that is) watching it all happen, watching it all go down.

And there it was, in some obscure bar, in some corner of the universe, like a flash, it was there...

...the answer to everything...

...the very thing we all seek when see a psych, or when send a probe to Mars. The thing Orson Welles was seeking when he threw the snow globe onto the ground, or the very thing we seek when we put a pen to paper and write a novel, or every time we create in any capacity, the answer to 'why' was right there.

I had it, yes I had it, for a fleeting moment, I swear I had it and then it was gone. Gone, gone, gone.

And all I can remember was, the answer was simple and made me laugh when I thought of it.

It's gone now and all I got is this stupid blog to show for it.

Trashed World of Warcraft

2005-05-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

I trashed my World of Warcraft account today. I only had it for three weeks and before I actually had to pay for the first subscription month, I went in and trashed the account.

I can't tell you how dissapointed I am with World of Warcraft. It is, the most dissapointing game I've ever played. There are some fantastic elements to World of Warcraft. It has beautiful graphics, it is easy to play and it is widly popular with a large player base.

It also took all the mistakes Everquest made and corrected them. In fact the resentment most gamers had towards Everquest and its design flaws was highly under estimated by Everquest and heavily exploited by World of Warcraft when it released.

EQ2 on the other hand, totally miscalculated. They marketed EQ2 with the idea that the EQ brand was its strongest asset. That its previous frenzy was the key reason people would return to it and generally marketed their game and their brand as the "best".

In fact, the EQ brand had been tarnished significantly and had built a strong resentment with gamers by the time WoW released. EQ's marketing failed to communicate effectively that "your gripes had been answered with EQ2", instead seem to reflect "EQ2: same old EQ you know and love only with better graphics".

In fact, in hindsight, EQ2 shouldn't have branded itself with EQ at all and instead established a new identity, but I digress.

The bottom line is, that people jumped on WoW's free trial in droves and once they found they could level fast, with a minimum of grief and that all their previous EQ beefs had been solved, they raved about the game and killed EQ2's launch.

WOW game exploded in popularity and WOW's only initial problems were they did not anticipate demand and a lack of servers and server stability was a key issue.

It didn't matter though, fans tolerated the outages, because it was better than EQ and even more than that, they felt they finally had the last laugh on EQ, a game they perceived did not care about them or their concerns.

But to me, now that the hysteria of "hey its better than EQ2" has worn off with World of Warcraft, all that remains is the game itself. And the game itself is relatively weak in mechanics/class design, extremely weak in character customization and is endlessly, endlessly repetitive with no real significant outcome/consequence to your player's actions.

My beefs with WOW include but are not limited to:

1. The music is derivative and weak.

2. Ambient sound, is extremely weak.

3. The look and feel is cartoonish, you spend more time lauging at the monsters and creatures than being inspired or awestruck by them.

4. Everyone looks the same, the lack of customization, especially early in the game, is extremely annoying. You feel and look, just like everyone else.

5. The story and NPC character development is non-existant. I am never involved in any of the communities I visit, except to do quests which are never anything more than 'fetch, grab and kill' missions.

6. None of the missions are unique, hardly any of them develop in story and none involve any thought or skill. It's all about investing time and knowing where to go.

7. The mapping system is terrible and in fact, the game forces you to read web sites, blogs and the like to find out where things are, where to go and what is worthwhile exploring or doing.

People who are engrossed in WOW, have largely been engrossed since its release. 'New' players are harder and harder to find on WOW servers.

What that tells me is I give the game about a year before the entrenched players have exhausted the game's playabilty and begin to gripe about it, much like everyone griped about EQ when its player base began to withered and atrophied.

And hopefully what ever comes along to replace WOW next year, will be a lot more compelling to play and won't look and feel so much like a dumb Saturday cartoon.

What is Raible?

2005-04-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

Raible is not a person, it's not a thing. At least it is none of these things on its own. Raible is a state of mind, Raible is also the sound of one hand clapping, it is the joy of a young man who first discovers he can grow his first mustache.

Most of all Raible is freedom.

It is not a cult, it is not an egg, but it can be extended into your vocabulary in numerous ways:

Raible (pr: Ray-bull)

1. To possess or demonstrate extraordinary qualities. In particular, to possess the ability to shed good kharma.

IE: Brad Wilkerson has good Raible. The Democratic Convention was flat and had no Raible.

2. To pursue various acts, including acts involving dice, chicanery, shenanigans or head games.

IE: Do you want to Raible on Friday?

3. To insinuate that the cosmos itself would approve or not approve of a particular action.

IE: Raible doesn't like it when you cajole Worth Wollpert into making Todd Pratt.

or

Wow, you're actually playing the Twins again, Raible would be pleased.

4. An image that is distorted or altered digitally, often for comedic effect.

IE: That Raible head you pasted on to Fidel Castro was hilarious.

OR

Isler's Raible art, is the best in the world.

5. A wide receiver for the Seattle Seahawks during the first year of their existence and former cohort of the legendary Pete Gross.

6. A game, that stems from a particular original brand and involves taking the general rules of that game and contorting them. The rule contorsions are generally for the purposes of the players involved. In particular, they generally make the game more complex and more fun for the participants.

IE: I wonder if you could Raible monopoly?

OR

You playing normal rules or Raible rules?

OR

We Raible half of the shit WOTC R&D comes up with, 'cause they don't know what they are doing.

State of Baseball

2005-03-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

Are you a baseball fan? Sadly, so am I.

I say 'sadly', because lets face it, baseball has kicked us in the teeth for over a decade.

What do I think of all the latest 'steroid' scandal?

Well at the purely political level, I think its ridiculous that the government regulates any substance that a grown adult and a physician have agreed to use. The fact tobacco, alcohol and other prescription drugs are legal, while other chemical substances are 'banned' is the height of hypocrisy.

Okay, enough of the libertarian rhetoric, what do I 'really' think of the steroid scandal?

I think its a by-product of baseball's economics and I think its a by-product of the fact that in order for baseball to thrive in the days of luxury suites, 25 dollar bleacher seats and 4 dollar hot dogs, it needed to make a 'big splash'.

My passion for baseball, has diminished since the 1994 season. That strike was ludicrous and the return of baseball in 1995 brought us a baseball that famous pitchers like Curt Schilling insisted were wound tighter, to produce homeruns to bring fans back.

Curt Schilling was given a gag order for speaking out about the baseball and mixed with the heavy steroid use of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa eventually produced the 1998 season that truly brought baseball back to the limelight.

Was it a rouse? Yes it was.

Was it a sham that was ignored and perpetuated by both owners and players? Yes it was.

Has it tainted baseball? Yes it has.

Does it really matter? No it doesn't.

Baseball, is and always has been a mirror to the culture which gave it birth. Babe Ruth symbolizes the decadence of the 1920's, Joe Dimaggio symbolizes the birth of American pop culture abroad in the 1940's. The 1950's show America's birth of the "jet" era, as the west opens up and two New York teams flee to California.

The list goes on, we have Jackie's historic appearane on a major league team in 1947, the cocaine scandals of the early 80's and the advent of free agency in the narcisstic 70's.

Now, we find that in the years that fueled the corporate fraud of the dot-com and Enron era, baseball was dabbling in its own form of fraud: it produced a baseball and produced players 'enhanced' with substances. The combination of the two smashed and destroyed their own record book for the sake of money and ratings.

I ask you though, is a juiced baseball and steroid laced Barry Bonds, really any different than cooking the books to help a lagging stock on the Dow Jones?

I am not so sure it is that different at all. In fact, I think you could dial up 100 American companies and probably find transgressions that are worse a Mark McGwire who grew his biceps with chemicals and shattered the Roger Maris record.

Baseball will surive, it always survives. If it can survive 1919, it can survive anything.

And baseball will always be dirty, it will always cheat, it will always lie to its fans and it will always be guilty of the very prejudice, greed and dishonesty that perpetuates society itself.

Sadly, believe it or not, that is part of baseball's charm and part of why it is such a cultural centerpiece in America. There is something magical about baseball, primarily because it provides us with a historic link to the very aorta of America, both the good and the bad of America.

It's why I also say, that sadly, I am indeed a baseball fan, because baseball is a dirty corporate sham, a spectacle played on a stage of grass and dirt, for the sole sake of producing filthy lucre.

In other words, it's just like the very country we live in, a country I happen to admire and respect a great deal.

Yet Another Top Ten List...

2005-02-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

There is nothing more meaningless than making up 'Top Ten' lists. However, it can be quite a bit of fun, so without further ado, my 'Top Ten' movies of all time.

CITIZEN KANE

ALL ABOUT EVE

DUCK SOUP

THE TRIAL

THE SEVENTH SEAL

BRAZIL

ROPE

SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

GANDHI

RAGING BULL

EXTREMELY HONORABLE MENTIONS

Sleuth

Bicycle Thief

Life of Brian

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Wizard of Oz

Malcolm X

Godfather I

Godfather II

Apocalypse Now

African Queen

Woman of the Year

Bridge over River Kwai

Amadeus

Being There

Rear Window

Arsenic and Old Lace

Maltese Falcon

The Caine Mutiny

Bull Durham

Annie Hall

The Player

Taxi Driver

Light and Meaningless

2005-02-13T03:00:00.000-08:00

My last two blog entries were kind of heavy and preachy. I can get that way sometimes.

So I am going to make this one rather light and quite meaningless. Here are ten things I can think of that fit that bill:

1. I like City of Heroes more than World of Warcraft.

2. I like the Seattle Seahawks football team, despite their utter lack of success for 29 years.

3. My kids are awesome, and yes, I know all parents say that.

4. I watch Charlie Rose sometimes, especially if he has a good guest.

5. My wife made me a scrabbled egg bagel today with cheese. It tastes better than an Egg McMuffin.

6. I don't like reading books. That upsets a lot of people when I say that, but I just don't. I think its because I used to read all the time when I was a kid.

7. I can see Puget Sound and downtown Seattle from my living room window.

8. I can see Mount Rainier on a clear day too from the same window.

9. I have this ridiculous collection of D&D Miniatures. Which makes me the biggest nerd I have ever met.

10. The thing is, I like being a nerd. In fact, I've done it for so long, I think I've learned how to be quite happy as one. That also upsets some people when I say that.

Atheism is a Faith of its Own

2005-02-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

I am an atheist. It took a while to get here, I was agnostic for a long time, but I'm an atheist now and that provides a great deal of comfort to me.

I have respect of course, for all religious philosophy and I'm not so obsessed with my atheism that I need to mock or cajole other religions. My 'faith' brings me comfort and that's enough for me.

Yes, I did just say 'faith', because ultimately any personal answer to the question of God, requires faith, yes, even atheism.

Ultimately the 'science' behind life's existence will never be exact, but you can't prove or disprove God's existence with logic anyway.

Ultimately, the question of whether you think God exists or not, isn't really a scientific question at all. It's a philosophical question. As such, it should be intepreted by the individual, for the purpose of finding 'peace' and a personal outlook on the universe as a whole.

Does God exist? If you answer "I don't know", I am not so sure (with all due respect) that you fully understand the question.

You probably *do know*, you just need to search your heart for the answer. It may not be important enough for you to conduct that search and that's fine, I respect that, but the answer to the question is there and it lies within you.

My answer to the question, after some thought and reflection is NO, God does not exist.

That answer gives me great peace, great solitude and provides me with a framework with which to conduct my life. It's this peace, that lets me know I've found the right answer, at least for myself. I wouldn't dare inflict it on someone else.

How do I know God does not exist? Because, I couldn't live in a world where God did exist, it would be, without meaning to me, and life would lose a lot of its beauty and purpose. Basically I have faith that she doesn't exist, its as simple as that.

You might notice these answers are similar to what a religious devotee would offer to his or her own faith. That's why and how I can respect all those with religious sentiments.

The question of God cannot be proven or disproven scientifically, because as I say, God isn't a scientific question to begin with, its a personal and philosophical one.

The 'truth' that is arrived by so many of us, be it Christianity, Islam or in my case Atheism, is a personal truth. It speaks to us, it comforts us and thus we adopt it. Sometimes its adopted through generations of tradition, sometimes its adopted after a personal search to the answer. Either way, the answer is valid.

The key, in my opinion is not to promote that truth as universal, or suggest it is the singular answer to what ultimately is a very personal question.

So if you are reading this and you think I am out to lunch, or my viewpoint is senseless, or flawed, then good for you. It means you are already adopting or sticking to your own religious convictions, whatever they may be and I personally think that can be a very healthy thing.

Just don't try to convert me to your own philosophy. It won't work for me, mostly because the one I have now, suits me just fine and provides me with the peace I need to conduct life the best way I know how.

That answer, as I say, for me personally, is atheism.

Right vs. Left

2005-02-03T13:07:00.000-08:00

I want the right and the left to stop screaming in my ear.

It seems to me if you are left wing or liberal or whatever term you want to use, then you seem to want to endlessly preach the following:

1. Republicans are evil and just want to make lots of money

2. The war on terror, is being usurped to send the US into tyranny and corporate fascism.

3. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeldt, Cheney and the so called "Neo-Conservatives" are all idiots. They are also evil and cannot be trusted in any shape or form. (NOTE: Seems to me, the left always insinuates that people right of the spectrum are less intelligent than they are. I find that most insulting of all).

4. You seem to suggest constantly, that Republicans want to pollute and destroy the Earth and sometimes suggest there is a massive conspiracy, to keep people on the right side of the spectrum in power.

Turning the tables to the other side, it seems to me, that if you are right wing, then you seem to want to preach endlessly that:

1. The left hate America and blame America for everything.

2. The left are naive, foolish and don't know how the "real world" works.

3. The left are Godless, faithless, cheat on their spouses and cannot be trusted in any shape or form. (NOTE: The right always insinuate the left is immoral and out of touch with how "real" America feels, I find that most insulting of all).

4. The left just want to tax everyone so they can get rich. They are evil liberals who live in the Northeast US, they hate everyone and think they are better than everyone else.

You know quite frankly, I'm sick of both of you. The next time I read a political column I'd like it to be about ideas, solutions and analysis, why is that so hard to find these days?

It's not sports, its not "us vs. them," its not Packers vs. Bears, its not Arsenal vs. Chelsea. Its political dialogue and it seems sadly lacking in real thought and analysis these days.

So, I have news for the so-called left and right of this country:

I find the notion, that one prevailing side of the political fence is always right, while the other is always wrong to be childish and quite frankly, tiresome.

Liberals, please shut up, you don't own the patent on human compassion, mercy, charity and progressive thought.

Conservatives, please shut up, you don't own the patent on patriotism, common sense, thrift and morale values.

I wish I could send both of you to bed with no supper, until you can learn to play together like human beings, with respect and tolerance for those who don't think like you do.

I Am a Raible God

2005-02-03T13:04:00.000-08:00

I am a Raible God.

I am on a Raible card, for real, no lies.

Alas, I cannot tell you what that actually means, what card it is, or how it got there. That would get people in trouble.

But trust me, I am on a Raible card, for real. Thus, I am a Raible God.