Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not politics, I am as clanging brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophesy, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could move mountains, and have not politics? I am nothing. And though I bestow all my own goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not politics? It actually changes nothing. Politics is patient, and is helpful; politics is not personal, is something professionals know not to take too personally, not to have grudges over; rejoices not in ideological purity, but rejoices in practical solutions; supports all things, believes in the people, hopes for a better world, endures anything. Politics never fails: but whether there be prophesies, they will fail; whether there shall be spin, they shall run out of things to say; whether there be trivia, it shall fail. For we prophesy unsuccessfully, and we spin to an audience that knows our tricks by now, but when that which actually solves problems and gets things done shows up, trivial distractions pass away. For trivia is trivial, and prophesies get even the most elementary things wrong, but when the rubber hits the road, trivia and prophesies are done away with. When I was a child, I ranted like a child, I understood no more of how the world actually works than a child does, and I had a childish faith in ideology: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see the world as through a dirty window, but in the future, we'll see the evidence face to face; now we know a little, but then we'll know every bit as much about the actors as they know about us. And now abideth economics, history, and politics, these three: but the greatest of these is politics.

No, really, that's more or less how I think. OK, what's really going on above is that I was thinking about something way out of character for me, namely the fact that I am actually falling asleep at my desk while trying to watch the evening's political news coverage, night after night, for almost two weeks, to the point where it's randomizing my sleep schedule. And that's very, very weird for me, because there are three lenses that I use to look at almost the entire world: history, economics, and politics. That's how the parody of First Corinthians chapter 13, above, began, with the realization for me there "abides three things, economics, history, and politics, but the greatest of these is politics," and having put it that way, I couldn't resist completing the parallelism. But no, really, in truth three things are fundamental to my self-image, and fundamental to how I approach and understand and interact with the world. So do you realize how hard it is to bore me with political news?

But the fact of it is this: nothing has changed in months. George Bush and John McCain still intend us to be bogged down in two or more land wars in Asia for at least an entire generation, thinking that's the best tool for protecting us from tiny and largely irrelevant criminal gangs, and nothing's changed that. Congress is too afraid of having something go wrong if they stop these stupid wars, and too willing to keep signing Bush's loan paperwork and too willing to let several young Americans die per day in order to not have to deal with this until they have a Democratic president who won't blame a Democratic congress if things go wrong. Barack Obama is still going to actually win the whole campaign, Hillary Clinton will still say or do anything however sleazy to try to persuade delegates to steal it for her, but she can't so today's particular accusations are neither likely to be true nor at all interesting. And no, we won't know until November if despite John McCain's intention to wreck the country with disastrous unnecessary wars and even more disastrous deficit spending, people will vote for this senile and clearly increasingly deranged old man who only has two virtues: he used to have an honest reputation, and he's neither black nor female. And Hillary's still a woman, and Obama is still black. We've known all of these things since February, at the very least.

It has been at least that long since anything actually changed, so I'm having an increasingly hard time justifying to myself why it's still on the news every night. I mean, I used to have two problems with the Monica Lewinsky story. First of all, it was trivial garbage, something that took at most a couple of nights' reporting to know everything that mattered about it and for any reasonably well informed and honest person to see it as what it was, a right-wing partisan witch-hunt, an attempt to win in Congress what they'd lost at the polls in November of '92 and '96. But my even bigger problem with it was that even on nights in which there was no actual news on the Monica Lewinsky story, it was still the top headline. No, really, I watch the news to hear something new, at least some new detail in an ongoing story; recapping the previous several months' worth of story without adding any new details night after night after expletive-deleted boring night, eventually ticks me off. And that's how I feel about this increasingly pointless and stupid Democratic nominating contest. I just want the damned thing to be over, and if I can't have that, I want the journalists I watch to wake up and realize that even if it's not over, it's not news, or at least not the top news story of the day every day, any more.

P.S. That being said, one thing did wake me up last night while watching the news, briefly: Keith Olbermann was in rare form, at his snarkiest best in a way he hasn't been in months. Check it out. (YouTube copy found via obama_2008.)

I've been meaning to bring this up for a while, obviously, because it's about something that Senator Clinton said in her last debate with Senator Obama, the one right before the Pennsylvania primaries. I see that she's still taking occasional flak from various members of the commentariat over this one answer, so this gives me a good opportunity to do something you will almost never see me do: defend Hillary Clinton. Because this one time, she's being criticized for what may, in fact, be the only completely honest and halfway intelligent thing she's said during the whole campaign.

In particular, it was one of those hypothetical future questions that debate moderators think make them look so smart and issues-oriented. (As far as I'm concerned, they're wrong. The correct answer to any future hypothetical is, "I don't know, because I can't know all the facts that I'll know then. So all I can promise is that I'll do the best I can with the information I'll have then." But no, instead, politics requires that the candidates play along with these goofy role-playing scenarios. I find it annoying.) The question was, let's assume that all our efforts to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons fail, and some time during your presidential term, Iran gets The Bomb. What should we do? Unsurprisingly, both candidates said, "let's be sure it never gets to that point." But Clinton went further, saying that we should also make it clear to Iran that if they use weapons of mass destruction against Israel, then even if they managed to take out Israel's (she didn't say nuclear, but we all know it) deterrent in the strike, we'd respond with all available force, up to and including nukes. Note, by the way, that this is not the same thing as McCain's glib and flippant answer to the same question, where he simply joked or hinted or whatever that he'd be in favor of nuking Iran preemptively as soon as they got the bomb; that, now that? That answer is completely irresponsible, but that's not even in the same ballpark as saying that we'd nuke Iran in response to Iran using its nuke(s).

Her answer went on to them point out that if there were a Shiite nuclear bomb in the middle east, that would increase pressure on all the Sunni states in the region, including US "allies" like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to resume their nuclear programs. So she went on to say that we should offer all of the states within range of Iran's hypothetical future nukes this deal: we will include you in our nuclear deterrent "umbrella," we will promise to nuke all of Iran into a sheet of green glowing glass if they nuke you first, in exchange for a promise from you to not develop your own nukes.

This is not a stupid answer, let alone a crazy one. Nor, and here's the part that makes me want to thwap not a few network news reporters upside the head, is it even all that new or controversial an idea. No, on the contrary, we've known ever since Herman "Dr. Strangelove" Kahn made this point 50 years ago that once one of two potential enemies has an atomic bomb, the other side has to have their own bomb, in order to be able to credibly threaten to nuke someone back if they get nuked. The need for mutually assured destruction has always been the critical flaw in the idea of nuclear non-proliferation. But nuclear non-proliferation wasn't stupid, itself; it rested on the idea (however plausible you think it is; I think "not very") that increasing proliferation of nuclear arsenals increases the chances of accidental or terrorist-triggered global thermonuclear holocaust. This was a substantial part of the logic of the Cold War: to sign up every potential combatant in any war in the world into one of the two nuclear-armed factions, so that they could rest assured that there was somebody with nukes who'd nuke their enemies back if they got nuked themselves.

And, in fact, over the course of the last half of the Cold War, there was a growing diplomatic consensus that if any nation used its nuclear weapons without itself being nuked, this would trigger a nuclear response from other nuclear powers, up to and including maybe even its own nuclear-armed allies, that America only got away with nuking Japan in 1945 because there was no one to threaten to nuke us back for it yet. There was even a determined diplomatic effort, world-wide, to codify this into law, in a No First Use global treaty. It never got anywhere, because the doctrine of "no first use" pinched every US president in a tight place; we were committed to defend western Europe from a possible Soviet conventional-forces invasion, and there was no way for us to win such a war without using nukes. So the US, alone, clung to the right to First Use of nukes, even though this made us something of a pariah state (even as far back as the 1970s), even though every president who contemplated the possible future need to nuke the Fulda Pass to stop Russian infantry and armor had to know we'd get nuked by Russia if we did, even though it came close to costing us the whole Cold War when the West German people elected a government that threatened to leave NATO if the US didn't abandon its First Use threat and withdraw the short-range nuclear weapons we were planning to use in the event of a Russian invasion of West Germany. And every President since back when Dr. Strangelove made his points about nuclear strategy has clung to this ambiguity over whether we would, or wouldn't, use nukes preemptively. Heck, it's part of why Reagan cultivated the image, during his first terms, of a deranged and belligerent cowboy; he wanted his Soviet counterpart to be a little bit afraid that Reagan was just crazy enough to start World War III if pushed hard enough.

But back to the potential Iran problem. Hillary's suggestion amounts to something very close to No First Use, without the US political baggage that would come from trying to push a No First Use treaty through the US Senate: a unilateral commitment to only use our nuclear arsenal in our own defense or our allies' defense (while leaving it unanswered whether or not we'd respond in a nuclear fashion to any non-nuclear attack, letting the history of all the times we haven't yet to speak for itself) or for a nuclear counter-attack on any non-proliferating nation. I think it's actually an elegant, nuanced, and plausible solution. If I thought she were always this smart, and if I trusted her with my country's wallet, I'd vote for her myself. So it kind of annoys me to see her attacked for this one thing. If you want to attack her for her disastrous record during her husband's administration, for the abysmal quality of the cabinet members she recommended to him, for her long history of financial scandals, for her almost equally long history of sticking up for giant corporations over actual voters, for her sad and scary history of sucking up to some of the scariest people in the religious right, for her newfound admiration for Fox News and Richard Mellon Scaife, for the mean-spirited and deeply dishonest (and flagrantly incompetent) campaign she's run for the presidential nomination, and for her mind bogglingly stupid vote for, and early defense of, George Bush's war in Iraq, knock yourselves out. But leave her alone on the issue of Iran and a possible expansion of US policy of nuclear deterrence, because she's almost certainly the only one running who's right on this one.

You know that stuff I wrote about how anything resembling a functioning democracy, anything resembling a free country, needs a fair and impartial independent meritocratic tenured judicial system, needs citizens to give that system the benefit of the doubt? I had my own belief in that rather substantially challenged by a news story on Monday: Mark Sherman, "Supreme Court says states can demand photo ID for voting," Associated Press, 4/28/08. Given that even the 6-judge majority wasn't able to find a single case of documented fraud in all of Indiana history that would have been prevented by this law? Given that even the 6-judge majority admitted that the Republican majority in the Indiana state legislature passed this law for partisan advantage, to make it harder for Democrats to win, that their allegedly neutral justification for this law was just a fig leaf? Given the largely hostile tone they adopted towards this law back when this case was argued in front of them? This hit me hard.

When I got into the story, I was expecting "Bush v Gore II: Bush Harder," yet another 5:4 vote by which the Republican judges sided with the Republicans. And I could already feel myself getting pinched in a tight place, pinched by my own insistence, a while back, that there are still enough safeguards in place to prevent dishonest and/or ignorant and/or partisan hacks from getting a majority on any appellate court bench in America. But then I went over to SCOTUSblog, which unsurprisingly has some excellent coverage of this, and saw that maybe, just maybe, my faith in the universe and in the robustness of American democracy was not entirely misplaced. Because the actual vote was 6-3, the actual official ruling has some interesting implications, and I think maybe there's a coincidence that even the analysts at SCOTUSblog haven't noticed. First, some links to the SCOTUSblog.com coverage, all dated 4/28/08:

• Lyle Denniston, "Court rejects voter ID challenge; no new grants," their main news story,
  
• Ben Winograd, "From Election Law Blog: Initial Thoughts on the Supreme Court’s Decision in Crawford," by a lawyer who filed an amicus brief against the Indiana voter ID law, and
  
• Jason Harrow, "More on Crawford: The Court Steps Back From Electoral Refereeing," by a lawyer who filed an amicus brief in favor of the Indiana voter ID law.

Because, as a few of the news stories and editorials I've seen elsewhere have also picked up, this is actually a much more complicated ruling than usual. Unless they're unanimous, Supreme Court rulings are always divided into two sections: the ruling majority opinion, and the complaining losers' dissents. But what we have in this case is three entirely conflicting opinions, each with three votes. Three judges, unsurprisingly led by Scalia (who never saw an attack on any minority other than Catholics that he didn't like), think that anywhere that Republicans are the majority, then as long as Republicans can come up with even a fig leaf of an excuse to disenfranchise Democrats, that's their right as the (permanent) majority; suck it, losers. Three judges, led by David Souter, flatly oppose disenfranchising any voters without first meeting a very high standard of proof. And three judges, including the Chief Justice, basically voted to throw the case out of the Supreme Court ... for now. Ordinarily, a 3:3:3 split means the Court doesn't hand down its ruling, yet, but somehow, behind the scenes, somebody managed to glue together a 6 vote majority by persuading the latter group that since they agreed with the hardcore Republican group about the merits of thiss particular case, that constituted a majority.

And if you look at the official ruling, its defense of this law is pretty tepid. Because what's really going on here, the side that really won (of the three sides), is the side that's on the winning side of a very long argument that's been going on these last couple of years about an entirely unrelated point of constitutional law: namely, the role of the Supreme Court in what are called facial challenges. A facial challenge is one in which someone argues that even though they can't show any one person who's been hurt yet by a law or other government action, and can't even show one actual plaintiff who will be hurt by it, they can still challenge the constitutionality of the law in front of the Supreme Court by arguing that the law is so blatantly awful on the face of it (the "face" in "facial challenge") that it must be struck down, preemptively, to protect the U.S. Constitution. What's going on here, pretty much all of the analysts from both sides agree, is that this is just the latest in a series of rulings, this year, in which the Supreme Court is sending a clear message: they want to get completely out of the business of hearing facial challenges. The three-vote ruling majority (by virtue of the 3-vote non-binding concurrence) as much as says, in the ruling, show us even one voter who's been improperly disenfranchised by this law, bring us a case in which that person has first been harmed by a voter ID law, then proven in a lower court that they've been harmed, and then that person will have the legal standing to challenge the constitutionality of these laws. Until then? They're saying "get out of our ... well, get out of our face," not to make too awful a pun out of it, I hope.

Which brings me to an interesting observation of my own. Note the timing of this ruling: one week, to the day, before the Indiana primary. One week from today, there will be Indiana voters who will have to vote by provisional ballot, then at their own expense travel to the nearest county seat sometime in the next 1 to 10 days and file an affidavit confirming that it was them who cast their ballot. (What, exactly, this proves, escapes me; anybody who impersonates a voter once will quite cheerfully do it twice, won't they? But that, apparently, is irrelevant to this one case, to Crawford v Marion County, IN.) And since there's an existing case, brought up in the footnotes of Crawford, that reminds us that even a $1.50 non-discriminatory poll tax was struck down as an improper burden on the right to vote, if it takes them more than 2/3rds of a gallon of gas to drive the round-trip, then they'll have standing to challenge this law. And isn't it an amazing coincidence that they issued this ruling in time for this new, non-facial challenge to be filed with respect to an election in which the Republicans can not actually benefit from any disenfranchisement that happens? Bet your bottom dollar that the Indiana Civil Liberties Union will be on the ground, next Tuesday, looking for that one victimized legitimate voter. And if nobody changes their votes between this case and that case, then the voter ID laws will be struck down, permanently, by the same bipartisan 6-3 majority, while allowing the Court to make its little political point about how much it hates having to decide facial challenges.

I got distracted by an argument that I'm working very hard to stay out of, to not get dragged into, in somebody else's blog. So distracted I couldn't get anything productive done last night. Fortunately, I have something to offer you that's on a subject near and dear to my heart, and at least as good a read as anything I've done: Kai Wright, "If They Are So Scared, How Come We're The Dead Ones?," TheRoot.com, 4/28/08. This subject needs to keep coming up until everybody, especially everybody in law enforcement, smartens up about it.

I'm a little embarrassed at how long it took me to notice the following.

Barack Obama was a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago when the pastor was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who's said some things that a lot of people don't want a President who believes. Most of them relate to Wright's opinion that God is a god of justice, and that if chronic or widespread injustice gets ignored or papered over long enough, God takes it out on whole countries at a time, and that the US is still a country with enough systematic injustice to qualify. Whether or not you agree with his opinion about every one of those injustices, you cannot deny this: this is a religious opinion, a theological opinion. Wright's also on record has having given at least a tepid endorsement of another religious figure, Louis Farrakhan, former leader of a group that a lot of Americans don't like for their religious opinions, the black-nationalist Nation of Islam. Wright doesn't endorse everything in Farrakhan's theology, just Farrakhan as a person, saying that people don't give him enough credit for the good he's done or for being basically a nice guy; basically, Wright's opinion is that the good Farrakhan has done in his life outweighs any bad you can come up with. And in case that's not obvious, let me point out that Wright's opinion on this is also a religious opinion, just like (for that matter) the opinions of Farrakhan that most Americans abhor.

So, unsurprisingly, the American voters want to know which if any of those opinions Obama shares with Wright, and by extension with Farrakhan. The Constitution specifically says that the government can't impose a religious-beliefs test or restriction on the Presidency, but there's nothing in law or tradition that says that voters can't decide that someone whose religious beliefs are abhorrent to them might not make good decisions and vote against them on that basis. So over the past month or two, Barack Obama has come under repeated pressure to denounce Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan. In his famous speech on race and religion, "A More Perfect Union," Obama denounced some of Wright's religious opinions (without specifying which ones) but stopped short of denouncing him as a religious leader; he was already on record as having denounced both Farrakhan's opinions and Farrakhan himself.

John McCain is barely a member of any church at all, really, but in order to convince social conservatives inside the Republican Party that he was on their side, he sought out the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who's also said a lot of things that a lot of people don't want a President who believes, about how Catholics are all dupes of Satan and about how much he's praying for all-out war in the Middle East, the whole rest of the world versus the US and Israel, so God will have to intervene. You know, really wacky stuff, but however wacky it is, you can't deny that these are religious opinions. So John McCain is starting to come under some of the same pressure that Barack Obama's been under, to denounce John Hagee. So far, all McCain has done is say that if there's anything Hagee has said that you disagree with, McCain disagrees with that, while agreeing with all the stuff that Hagee has said that you agree with. You, in particular, each and every one of you. Which is such a silly thing to say, so stupid sounding, that the pressure's not really going to let up, is it, until he's denounced John Hagee?

Hillary Clinton, as I've commented before, has her own lesser "pastor problem," namely her membership in a weekly prayer group that's lead by Doug Coe, a man who thinks that all of America's problems would be solved if Christians took "discipleship," which he defines as blind obedience to their pastors, as seriously as the mafia did, or even better, as seriously as the Nazis and the Communists did. And while I think this idea is even wackier than anything attributed to Wright or Hagee, even I would like to point out how clearly and unambiguously these are his religious opinions, as a religious leader. A few people have asked Hillary Clinton about her ongoing relationship with Doug Coe. So far her answers when questioned about it have been pretty dismissive; I think maybe she's counting on her (BS) liberal reputation to get people to think that of course she doesn't believe any of those things, so of course she doesn't need to denounce Doug Coe or his Fellowship Foundation. But a fair number of voters won't be happy until she does.

And I'm embarrassed to say that has taken me months to say, "hey, wait a minute," to realize that I have a problem with all of these demands from the voters. I don't see anything wrong with asking a politician for their own opinion. I don't see anything wrong with quoting their pastor, or anybody on the planet, to a politician and asking them if they, personally, agree with that statement. But hey, wait a minute, as I was just saying ...

Since when is it the business of a future President of the United States to denounce any religious leader in the US? Or, more sinisterly, any religious opinion held by one? Isn't that an awfully ugly thing, an awfully dangerous thing, for them to be doing? Do we really want to live in a country where religious leaders are denounced by the President, and where we judge our presidential candidates by whether or not they're willing to go on record in advance as denouncing them? Because now that I've thought of it in those terms, that sounds like the ultimate in slippery slopes to me, a class A-1 really bad idea. So maybe we should stop asking them to do exactly that, and instead ask the real question, the closest thing to a fair question in there. Knock if off with asking Obama if he denounces Wright or Farrakhan or denounces their religious beliefs; ask him (if you must) if he agrees with those specific opinions that bother you, ask him if he thinks racial injustice in America is so bad that God will punish all of us for it. Knock if off with asking John McCain to denounce John Hagee; ask him (if you must) if he thinks a nuclear war between Israel and the rest of the Middle East is a Biblical prophesy that he should fulfill, ask him if he thinks Catholics are devil worshippers. Knock it off if you were thinking of asking Hillary Clinton to denounce Doug Coe; ask him (if you don't think the question is silly) if she thinks America would be better off if everybody in America was a Christian and if all Christians obeyed their pastors with Nazi-like unquestioning obedience.

Because I've got to tell you: if I wake up and find that I'm in an America where certain pastors and certain churches are openly denounced from the White House's presidential podium, I will suddenly get even more nervous about freedom of religion in America than I already am.

For all that I occasionally ask, annoyedly, that the universe once in a while pretend that it exists for some reason other than to annoy Brad, it looks like the universe, or at least USA TV, is giving me two really sweet birthday presents this year. June 17th is the scheduled release date for Burn Notice season 1 on DVD; I'll be pre-ordering that one pretty soon, you bet. And Burn Notice season 2 starts the actual day before my birthday, July 10th. Sweet.

---

Some time in the next couple of months, probably around the end of June, City of Villains is releasing it's first (and possibly last) really big villain-specific software release. As part of Issue 12: Midnight Hour, they're unlocking two new character classes that can only be played by someone who's already successfully leveled a regular villain to level 50. (And 20 new powersets for the 10 non-epic character classes, but that's not the point right this second.) The new character classes are highly customizable elite Arachnos soldiers: Wolf Spider infantry (who later branch out into Bane Spider special forces or Crab Spider police SWAT guys) and Blood Widow assassins (who later branch out into Night Widow elite spies or Fortunata psychic assassins):

So here's how it affects this blog: I'm thinking of an in-character writing project. My thought is that I'll be creating a Bane Spider and roleplaying him as the Arachnos equivalent of an old Soviet KGB "political officer," someone whose job is correcting the doctrinal errors of his fellow Arachnos troops, standing up for Arachnos political values, and of course spying on members of whatever unit he's assigned on for their superiors. The background I'm imagining is born in the Etoile Islands well after the 1964 Arachnos revolution, after high school one (long ago) tour of duty in the Wolf Spiders, BA and MA in History from Aeon University in New Haven, Cap au Diable, Ph.D. in Political Science from Aeon University, recalled to active duty as a Political Officer during the Battle of the Jade Spider in Siren's Call, Rhode Island, captured and incarcerated as a prisoner of war in Ziggursky Penitentiary, recently broken out by Arachnos as part of Project Destiny and returned to the Wolf Spiders as a Political Officer monitoring the so-called Destined Ones.

And, to the specific point here, I'm thinking of turning the blog over to him periodically, maybe once every week or two. Because the "good guy" politics in this game are so creepy and wrong, it's actually not all that hard for me to imagine defending a Doctor-Doom like supervillain dictatorial regime as the superior alternative, especially from the viewpoint of someone who grew up under that regime and who believes that superhero-dominated America is even worse than it actually is (although how it actually is is bad enough). Imagining playing this character, I'm finding that it's even more disturbingly easy for me to spout, or even write, Arachnos propaganda than it was for me to write the Cthulhu-universe political blog entries I was writing a while back. But I know that few, if any of you, will be interested, so out of courtesy, what I'll probably do is give those posts their own icon, the Arachnos logo, and LJ-cut them.

When I woke up late this morning and opened the news, the first thing I saw was that the undercover cops who murdered Sean Bell had been acquitted on all charges. All I could do, for the next couple of minutes, was sit there in shock, stare at that headline, and slowly say out loud in my empty apartment: "You. Have. GOT. To. Be. FUCKING. Kidding. Me."

Look, there is nothing left that is useful to say about this case. I figured this one out within a week of when it happened, from the ample eye-witness accounts, and wrote it up back on December 3rd, 2006: "Drunken Undercover Cops 'Spray and Pray.'" I see nothing in the subsequent trial record or any other news coverage that would change my mind. One group of drunks got into an argument with another group of drunks at a strip club. When one of those groups left, the other group decided to continue the beef outside, then got stupid, went into circular firing squad formation around the other group of drunks' trapped car, and slaughtered as many of them as they could before the ammo ran out, killing an unarmed man and crippling his equally unarmed friends. And because the group that did the shooting are all New York City cops, they're getting away with it. Because they're cops, the judge let them testify via affidavit without having to submit to cross-examination. Because they're cops, the judge doesn't even notice that they've changed their story even more often than the victims did, didn't factor that in when deciding who to believe.

Un. Fucking. Believable.

Other than that, there really isn't anything else to say about it. And that wasn't anything new, was it? I just feel like I needed to say it, out loud, in public: "Un. Fucking. Believable."

Because there's nothing else worth saying, I'm damned tempted to lock the comments on this entry, and for that matter on the earlier one. This is not a good one to argue with me about. If you think there is something worth arguing with me about, say it on your own damned web page or blog. Oh, and here, here are the links to the New York Times articles on today's verdict; unsurprisingly, the hometown newspaper has the fullest coverage:

• Michael Wilson, "Judge Acquits Detectives in Bell's 50-Shot Killing," NYT, 4/26/08.
• John Eligon & Corey Kilgannon, "Outrage and Uncertainty After Verdict in Bell Case," NYT, 4/26/08.
• Jim Dwyer, "Outside Court, an Unmistakable Police Presence," NYT, 4/26/08.

Un. Fucking. Believable.

True story.

I'm not really close to any of my family, but I hear of one of them rather more often than the others. About once every three or four years, he makes the news locally, in some minor way, and I recognize his name: he's in law enforcement, and he's the officer quoted in some news story about that often. And I notice something every time, without exception. But first, some preface.

I've scarcely seen him at all since a family holiday event a smidgen over 25 years ago. I was back from college, he was a recent college graduate working for the county police department. And it came up in conversation that he'd been recently assigned to the vice and narcotics squad, working undercover. Knowing what I knew about vice and narcotics work in general, and about the then truly awful reputation of the county's vice and narcotics squad, I expressed my sympathy, and assured him that most officers find it pretty easy to rotate out within at most a year or two. He demured, and stated right out loud that he'd asked for the transfer to narcotics and vice, and intended to make a career out of it. I couldn't square that with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family, as someone with zero taste for any kind of moral or ethical compromise, couldn't see how he could do work that compromises you ethically and morally even in the cleanest of departments, which the county vice and narcotics squad absolutely wasn't at the time. He couldn't understand what part of it was confusing me. So after talking past each other for a while, I brought up all the scandals I'd seen in the past year's worth of newspapers, asked how a guy who felt the way he did could make the ethical and moral compromises necessary to do undercover work at all, let alone participate in cover-ups of criminal activity by fellow officers and superior officers, and not want to escape it as fast as possible?

I think I was expecting some kind of nuanced answer. I did not get one, nor was I braced at all for what I got: an explosion. Incoherent, angry raving and screaming. To which, being no more mature than any other 20-something, I responded by trying to yell over him to try to ask him what he was yelling about, which, of course, only made things worse. The family began to steadily gather around us from other rooms, to see what the yelling was about, just in time for he and I to figure out exactly what the point of conflict was between us:

My relative is firmly of the opinion that it is flatly never acceptable to place your own moral judgment above that of anybody in authority over you. Ever. Not only is it never acceptable, it's never moral. Not only is it never moral, it is never even legal, he insisted. Not only is it illegal, but it's a sign of a sick mind; only the most twisted and psychopathic and immoral of perverted reprobates says that their moral judgment is more reliable and more trustworthy than that of any authority figure over them. If someone in authority over you tells you that something is moral, then either that settles it, or you're the kind of criminal monster sicko that guys like my relative have sworn to protect society against. And when he got that across to me, I lost my temper even bigger than he had. I reminded him of the Fourth Nuremberg Principle, as I'd been taught it all the way back in first grade: "I was only following orders" is not a defense, it's an indictment. I reminded him that we had sent Nazi and Japanese war criminals to long prison sentences for not exercising independent moral judgment when given immoral orders by their superiors. Within seconds, we were both screaming apoplectics, and that's when the whole family stepped in to separate us. Both his mother and my father said the same thing: "There is no way for you two to ever talk to each other ever again, if that's how you both feel." And we've both stuck to it, even at my parents' funerals; he stays over there, I stay over here. Even though he's almost one of the only living relatives I have in the local area, we never, ever interact, and it suits us both just fine.

And the thing is, in the immediate aftermath of that screaming match, my parents said something to me that took me decades to even grudgingly accept the possibility of: they told me that both he and I are completely insane on this subject. Someone who can never accept another person's moral authority when that person is in authority is just as crazy as someone who can never question it, they told me; the sane course is to know when the other person's moral authority is more trustworthy than your own, and to know when to question it. Some days, I can even intellectually accept that. But I cannot make myself actually believe it. I can be persuaded, when no moral issue is at stake, to follow orders I disagree with, because I accept that sometimes it's just not up to me. When moral issues are at stake but those in authority decree that there is to be no punishment for the path that's abhorrent to me, I can usually pretty effortlessly persuade myself to suspend judgment on others, usually even mind my own business, especially in cases where the people who're accepting the moral mis-steps are themselves the only ones being ripped off or hurt. But I can never, ever, ever judge right and wrong, especially as it applies to my own actions, by any standard other than my own moral compass.

Chalk it up as more evidence that I'm crazy, I know. But here's the thing I notice, every time he's in the news: he's gotten another promotion. Every couple of years, he moves up in rank, moves to a more prestigious department, or both. My particular insanity on this subject has rendered me unemployable, made enough actual and potential employers and co-workers uncomfortable as to have explicitly cost me three jobs, for not being unethical enough. Even when I was willing to go along to get along, people felt judged. His insanity, on the other hand, has been steadily lucrative for him, a lifetime source of satisfaction and prestige. And that makes me uncomfortable in ways I can't even begin to express, not all of which I even understand myself.

I'm from Missouri, born and bred, lived here my whole life, it's been where every bit of political activism I've ever done has been. And my growing up years in politics coincide very thoroughly with the era of John Ashcroft, aka "the Deacon:" Missouri state auditor 1972-1974, assistant Missouri attorney general 1974-76, Missouri attorney general 1976-1984, Missouri governor 1984-1992, Missouri US Senator 1994-2000. Those of us here in Missouri, especially those of us at all active in politics, saw an awful lot of "the Deacon" over those 28 years, and we know him well. I can't say that I know the man personally, myself, but I do know a bunch of people who do know him well, people who served with or under or alongside him in his various offices, people who've worked on his various campaigns, people who've worked with him on various charitable projects. And here's the thing that everybody who knows the man personally says about him, even his most determined political enemies: John David Ashcroft is flat-out one of the nicest guys in American politics.

This does not change the fact that his politics are deeply, deeply scary. John Ashcroft earned his nickname "the Deacon" not just because he is (or at least was? not sure if he still is) a deacon in an Assemblies of God church, but because in some ways, that's all he is. It is almost the entirety of his personality. When John Ashcroft uses the phrase "the founding fathers," he doesn't mean guys like Tom Paine and Ben Franklin and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, he means guys like John Winthrop and John Cotton and Roger Williams and John Endecott, people that most Americans have never even heard of -- the Puritan founding fathers, the organizers of the 1620-1640 Puritan Migration that provided North America with its first truly large-scale white population. No, contrary to what he feels obligated to say, Ashcroft's level of commitment to founding US principles like the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is nominal, at best; this is a man who believes that the only point in there even being a United States of America is to be New Jerusalem, Christianity's global capital, one nation entirely under Jesus Christ. He pays lip service to the idea that nobody should be forced at gunpoint to be a Christian, but he sees absolutely nothing wrong, or even out of the ordinary, about all levels of government tilting the playing field that way as hard as possible. He is the absolute epitomé of the Taliban wing of the Republican Party, an absolutely dangerous man and we are all much safer now that he is retired from public office, hopefully this time for good.

But all of that being said, even people who understand everything about why the man's politics are so scary, those among them who know him personally are without exception huge fans of his friendliness, his personal manners, his personal style, his sincerity, his legendary honesty, and his long reputation for personal kindness. And knowing all of that makes this widely-linked headline over at Daily Kos all the more interersting: Elsinora, "John Ashcroft Yelled at Me Tonight. No Joke," under "State of the Nation," 4/22/08. Capsule summary: on a very liberal college campus, the 6-person Campus Republican club raised enough money from the surrounding town, $15,000, to pay John Ashcroft's speaker's fee to come and address an open meeting of the Campus Republicans. What they couldn't have known when the issued the invitation and he accepted was that he would be appearing only a couple of weeks after ABC News broke the story that John Ashcroft is a war criminal: Jan Crawford Greenburg et al, "Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'," ABC News, 4/9/08. So when he walked onto a very liberal college campus, it is entirely unsurprising that almost all of the questions he faced in the Q&A session after his talk were about torture. And something truly remarkable happened: he lost his temper, completely lost it. And that's something that John Ashcroft is legendary for never doing, certainly never for so long, and absolutely certainly never in public.

Something very weird is going on here. And if John Ashcroft remembers his time as a prosecutor, and reflects honestly on how his own behavior resembles that of suspects he's held in custody before he rose to the top, even he must recognize something about himself: if any of the co-conspirators is going to crack, going to confess and testify against the others, it's him. He is clearly losing it. So I'm hoping that those of us who'd like to see almost the entire top ranks of the Bush administration brought up on charges somewhere, ideally at Nuremberg or The Hague but at the very least in front of a US federal court, on war crimes and crimes against humanity charges, not just liberal activists but some very serious and non-partisan constitutional scholars, I'm hoping that we manage to keep the pressure on him about this. He is, after all, the one who is also reported, in the same news coverage, to have been the only conspirator to express moral qualms about this at the time. And now he's the one who's acting out, emotionally, in ways he's never done before. Any police interrogator, any prosecutor, would tell you what that means: for now, stop questioning the rest of them; lean on him, because he's the one who's about to crack. And if he cracks, it'll blow the whole case wide open.

Time for another quick update to this list, since I just discovered another one: I don't mind lending books, but I've lost track of who even has the following eight books from my library. If one of you has one of these, could you let me know, and give me some idea when I can have it back?

• Camden Benares, ZEN without Zen Masters
• Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice
• Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed
• James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me
• Wolfgang Lotz, A Handbook for Spies
• P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores
• Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone

All of them books that I really do want back, eventually, and one or two of which may actually be tricky to find even used.

So, once again while looking for something completely unrelated, I stumbled across a 3+ minute trailer, and about 15 minutes of developer walk-through, of a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that's under development called The Agency. (I am not going to link to the official web page for it. It's Flash-heavy and content-free.) And watching those videos, I'm struck by how many of the things that I wish were different about MMOs are things that they seem to be planning to include, how many of the things I've complained that other MMOs do wrong they seem to have figured out, too.

For example: no "gritty, realistic" MMO has ever broken through; the really successful MMOs are all set in almost cartoonish, fun-looking places to spend your time; the mass audience isn't looking for a depressing place to be depressed, they're looking for a fun place to have fun. For example: if your game doesn't have something to do that you can actually get done in 5 minutes or 15 minutes, that's as much of a problem for a lot of your potential customers as it is if you don't have something to do that they can get together with their friends and spend all evening on. For example: no matter how much fun you make it to run around shooting things, your customers want other things to do, too -- but those things have to be just as much fun, and they can't take the equivalent of a junior college course textbook to learn how to do.

For example: there's room to lure people away from existing MMOs, maybe, if instead of telling them that once you've ground your way through two weeks' of play to get to level 14, or 20, or 30, or whatever then you'll be having real fun, instead make your game something that's fun to start out. For example: there is no point in even trying to compete with Blizzard in the D&D-ripoff DikuMUD-style MMO business, because there's nothing you can do in a medieval fantasy setting with D&D-like character classes that level up by grinding that would be sufficiently different from, let alone better than, World of Warcraft to give people any incentive to leave World of Warcraft. (I saw a really good essay on this subject by Cameron Sorden over on Massively.com: "When will the players leave WoW?," April 17th, 2008.)

I'm also struck by how clever some of their systems are. For example, take their stealth system. Instead of rendering your character transparent, the characters you're trying to hide from build up evidence that you're there, as they get glimpses of you, as they hear your footprints, and you can make that take longer by using cover and keeping your distance. Or you can wear a disguise, an equipable costume, and it acts like ablative armor against being recognized as a spy: the longer they look at it, the more details that are wrong they notice, the more they notice how unfamiliar you are, the more they notice that you're not acting quite like the kind of person you're pretending to be. Very nice, very slick, almost nobody needs it explained to them: here, put on this biker costume before you go into the biker bar. See little green dots over the NPCs heads that mean they haven't noticed you're out of place as you try to sneak through the bar to the back room. Wait, there's some yellow dots, somebody thinks that you don't belong -- trigger a costume action that's in character, like going over to the bar and ordering a beer, recharge the ablative armor on your costume. Very intuitive, very cool, a nice alternative to having to shoot your way through everything in the instanced mission.

Although, as you see in the trailer, if that's more your style, and you can pull it off, go for it.

Trailer here, if I can get LJ to embed a video from GameTrailers.com (or if I come back after hitting Post Entry and edit in a cruddier copy of it I've found up on YouTube):



The walk-through's on GameTrailers.com's web page for The Agency ... but the default playlist has them in the wrong expletive-deleted order. Here, watch them in this order (standard definition, Flash format links provided, higher definition and/or other formats on the web page):

1. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 1
2. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 2
3. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 3
4. CES 2008 Developer Walkthrough Part 4

Now, aside from the standard disclaimers that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo, and that nobody in his right mind gets all excited about a game that isn't even in beta test, yet, there's one other reason to fear that this game is going to turn out to suck, and it's spelled S.O.E.

Sony Online Entertainment is putting up the money for this and planning to publish and run it, and they've had adventures with two other non-D&D MMOs with a cheerful, cartoonish graphical look and unique, entertaining-looking game mechanics already: Star Wars: Galaxies and The Matrix Online. And the same thing happened to both of them. In both cases, Sony did the same stupid thing to both of them. When they decided they'd spent enough money on them and waited long enough, they demanded the developers ship them, no matter how broken they were. In SWG's case, half the combat system hadn't been balance-tested; in MxO, it was still buggy as heck and 3/4ths of the missions weren't even done yet. It took players about 3 months to realize that Sony was no longer providing the Star Wars: Galaxies development team with enough manpower and resources to ever actually finish the game; it took The Matrix Online's customers less than a month. Will Sony turn out to have learned their lesson, or will the dog return to its vomit yet again? I can't shake the suspicion that it's the latter.

Which will be a shame, if true, because I could really enjoy an MMO based on a light-hearted cross between a Cubby Broccoli James Bond movie and an Erin Esurance commercial.

Magnitude 5.4, Friday, April 18, 2008 at 04:36:56 AM at epicenter, right on the Illinois/Indiana border NNW of Evansville, Indiana.

At about 4:40 am, I was jolted out of bed by about 20 or 30 seconds of high, rolling motion. Every dish in the house rattled, all the smaller furniture bounced around a bit, the church bell up the block rang continuously from the vibration. No damage at this time, here. But for the love of the gods, "here" is 206 kilometers, or 128 miles, from the epicenter.

I was finished getting dressed and heading for the front door when the vibrations stopped, and needless to say I was completely unwilling to even think about going back to bed until the USGS announced the epicenter about 20 minutes later. I was half convinced it was the New Madrid quake, finally come. At 5.4, that's the most powerful earthquake I've felt here since 1974, when one almost that strong went off just across the river from here when I was a kid.

At 128 miles away and not on any major faultline, I can go back to bed now and stop worrying about aftershocks. Not that I'm likely to. I'm awake now.

I couldn't begin to tell you why I watched the debate, except maybe that I thought maybe I could get a clue out of it about how the Pennsylvania primary is going to turn out, as if I wouldn't have been just as well off waiting and checking the polling data in a couple of days, same as everybody else. What can I say, I got curious, and it wasn't terribly demanding.

It was interesting watching Charles Gibson try to trap both candidates with a two-part trick question. Step one: He cited John McCain's claim that both Clinton and Obama are going to raise middle class taxes, and tried to get both candidates to pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, which for the purposes of his question Gibson defined as anybody making less than $250,000 per year. Clinton went along with it. Obama waffled, saying he wasn't entirely comfortable with that $250,000 figure, that he'd have to look up his actual number, but that it was somewhere between $200k and $250k -- but that subject to that caveat, he not only promised not to raise taxes on them, but went further and promised to lower their taxes. Then Gibson sprung the trap: both candidates have at least floated the idea of raising the cap on Social Security taxable wages, which is currently $97,500 per year. So a two-earner family, both making $98,000 per year, would have an income of $196,000 per year. Raising the Social Security taxable wage cap would increase their taxes! So does that mean that both Obama and Clinton just promised not to raise the Social Security wage cap?!?

(Which, of course, is very interesting to a network news anchor, who I'm pretty sure without even looking it up makes more than $97.5k/yr. Basically, he's hijacking a statewide debate in order to ask about his own personal taxes. Disgusting self-interest.)

This left Clinton, who had just promised exactly that, twisting in the wind, left to come up with a lame excuse about turning the issue of Social Security solvency over to a bipartisan commission and letting them do whatever needs to be done, that if the cap was raised, it wouldn't be her fault, she'd just be the one signing whatever the bipartisan commission told her. Obama, by insisting on the right to move the number to somewhere between $200k and $250k, dodged the trap altogether. Why? Because Gibson's only half right. Yes, this year the Social Security taxable wage cap is $97,500 per wage-earner, everything above $97,500 per wage-earner this year is Social Security tax-free. But neither Clinton nor Obama will be sworn in this year. And next year? The cap automatically rises to $102,000. Which, for a two-earner family, means that they'd have to be making at least $204,000 per year to be affected by raising the wage cap.

You're going to invoke wage differential? One of them might be earning $105,000 and the other $45,000, therefore bringing their combined wages to $150k, but the person earning $105k has his taxes go up? Fine, be that way. I'll point out that Gibson phrased the question as people earning $200k per year or less. Not families, but persons -- which means that either Clinton, or Obama, or for that matter McCain could raise the Social Security taxable income cap by 50% or 80% or more and still not break the pledge, as literally worded. Man, Gibson sucks at this. Really, all the questions last night were this lame, in one way or another.

I don't know if I'm coming down with something, or what. But since Sunday, I'm sleeping 16 to 20 hours a day, and I'm groggy and headachy pretty much the whole time I'm awake. The obvious question is, has my depression come back, especially since I've got some trivial SSDI paperwork to do -- but I'm pretty sure that's not it. The paperwork involved is trivial, I don't feel at all depressed. I'm just, I don't know, just wiped. New symptoms for my recurring depression? New allergies? Creeping migraines? Some kind of weird flu? A micro-stroke? Or just having a bad week? *shrug* It's just annoying that last week, I was groggy and couldn't get anything done because I couldn't sleep; this week, I'm groggy and can't get anything done except sleep. Surely it's got to even out, got to average out between "can't sleep" and "sleeping the day away" at some point.

I see in the news, this week, that former President Jimmy Carter is holding his own private meetings with the leaders of Palestine's Hamas "party," the winners in the last round of Palestinian elections, in an attempt to get his beloved "two-state solution," the "Middle East Peace Process" for which he won his Nobel Peace Prize, back on track. He has even offered to oh-so-informally ferry messages between Israel, Hamas, the Fatah Party (who lost the elections but who the US and Israel are still pretending to be the government of Palestine), and the US. This is, quite reasonably, being mocked, because neither Israel nor the US has any intention of negotiating, even informally, with a political party that still endorses world-wide genocide against Jews, and Fatah has no country to be negotiating on behalf of. (Beth Marlowe, "Carter offers to be Hamas go-between," Associated Press, 4/15/08.)

But a funny thing happened to me over the weekend, regarding this story: I heard it wrong, in an interesting way. Someone who was at the St. Louis Polymunch asked me if I'd heard the story that Jimmy Carter had agreed to meet with Hezbollah. "Iranian Hezbollah?," I asked incredulously -- and then I was struck dumb, with what must have been the most bizarre expression on my face. Yeah, I know, it turns out to not be true. Nor is it likely to ever be true, given that the current President of Iran has been identified by several of the US Embassy hostages from 1979 as one of their captors, and that for entirely legitimate reasons a main street in Iran's capital city is still called Death to Carter Avenue. The idea that Iran's president, or any high ranking member of Hezbollah, would sit down face to face with former US president Jimmy Carter, and vice versa, was so mind bogglingly radical that I sat there, completely pole-axed, for several minutes trying to parse the consequences. And then my face broke out into a beatific smile.

Oh, sure, even then I realized that the person who asked me this had to have heard it wrong, as it turns out that they did. But if it were true?

Because what is true is this: over the course of the Carter administration, the US and Iran treated each other abominably. Jimmy Carter was complicit in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds, maybe thousands of Iranian communists, socialists, and Hezbollah members, back when Hezbollah was a relatively peaceful political party advocating (along with their coalition partners) a return to democracy in Iran. In response to this, a student activist group within Hezbollah, within hours of the revolution that overthrew the Shah, lead a mob rush against the US Embassy in Tehran; the Marines guarding the embassy, uncertain if their orders permitted them to machine-gun thousands of civilians even if they were attacking our embassy, retreated and were captured along with the embassy personnel ... and, notably, the CIA station chief for Iran, the man who'd really ordered the capture and torture-murder of all those dissidents, who himself is said to have confessed to this under torture himself before being murdered. And for the next 444 days, with the permission of the Iranian government, those militants continued to occupy our embassy, in total violation of all the norms of international law, and held our diplomatic staff hostage demanding that we return the Shah (who had fled to New York when the revolution came) and all the money he'd stolen from the country if we wanted our hostages back. And there they sat, until the next President, Ronald Reagan, "solved" the problem by bribing the government of Iran to return our hostages by having promised them a large shipment of anti-tank missiles in return.

And neither country is anywhere near ready to forgive the other for this.

And so on Saturday, when someone who'd misheard the news on the radio in their car asked me what I would think if Jimmy Carter were going to sit down with Iranian Hezbollah, what I worked through in my head was this. What if Jimmy Carter were to hold such a meeting, look the Ayatollah and the President of Iran in their faces and say something like, "OK, look, I admit it: I screwed up. When I gave the 'island of stability' speech that the Shah took as my permission to keep doing what the CIA was telling him to do, I had no idea what the CIA was actually telling him to do. If you look at my record back then, you would see that if I had known, I would never have permitted it. But it was my responsibility to know. And what's more, I should have thought to ask, when all my staff were telling me it was so important that I not deviate from the speech they handed me. And at the very least, I should have realized that if I didn't know why they were telling me that, I needed to not improvise my own lines until I found out what they were so worried I was going to say. All I can say in my own defense is that it was a long day, and I was tired, and I got carried away and I shot my mouth off without thinking. That was wrong of me, and I know that hundreds, maybe thousands of innocent people died because I did. But please believe me when I say: I didn't know, and if I had known, I would have stopped it, and I am terribly sorry that I didn't. Will you forgive me?"

And in my fantasy, the Ayatollah looks at the President of Iran, and they nod at each other, and the Ayatollah says something like, "Mr. Carter, we didn't know that you didn't know. And this idea that everybody else in the world has about the sacredness of embassies is, well, because of the way they put it, offensive to us spiritually, and I don't know why it isn't offensive to you, too, since nothing is sacred but Allah, or as you call Him, God. And we really believed that you were intentionally taking the Shah's side after he'd kidnapped, tortured, and murdered so many of our friends and family members and co-workers, and our anger hardened our resolve to the point where we could not back down. And we still think that that money you have frozen in Iran's former bank accounts in your country is all money that the Shah stole or intended to steal, and surely you must realize that by now, and it really does belong to the Iranian people. Nor are we ever going to forgive your country for taking Israel's side against the entire Islamic community, not even you, because just because you want to give the Palestinians back half of their land doesn't excuse your wanting to let Israel keep the half of their land that Zionist terrorists stole from them during the British Mandate. On this, our countries will never agree until you come around to our point of view. But we now admit, especially in light of your generous apology and your humble explanation, that what we did to your embassy and its staff was wrong, too, almost as wrong as what the Shah did, and unlike the Shah, we have nobody to blame for having given us such bad advice as your CIA gave him. For the atrocities the Shah committed in your name, for the orders he mistakenly thought you had given him, we forgive you. Will you forgive us for holding your ambassadorial staff hostage for so long?"

Not much of a start if it were to happen, and it's never going to happen. But just as a fantasy ... my gods, what would change if for the first time since 1979, Iran and the United States didn't so fervently hate one another? What else could change? How much good could spread in the world if those stiff-necked religious old men would apologize to each other and ask each others' forgiveness?