The Infamous Brad

CoH Has Cool Customer Service People

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:55:45 GMT

Allow me to present an excerpt from the official City of Heroes forums, in a thread about the first rumor to leak out of Comic Con about upcoming features. Dramatis personae: Castle, developer in charge of superpowers. Koschej, a forum moderator. Texas_Justice, player character superhero. InfamousBrad, player character supervillain (moi). Not seen: Back Alley Brawler (BAB), animator; pohsyb, systems programmer; Lighthouse, senior forum moderator.

Texas_Justice, 7/24/08 9:56 pm: "Maybe as a temporary solution ask one of the following, politely of course, to please comment in the thread to get it into the Dev Digest so it can be seen. Castle, BAB, pohsyb, ..."

Castle, 7/24/08 10:13 pm: "As you wish!"

InfamousBrad, 7/25/08 03:38 am: "And then, one day, Texas_Justice realized that when Castle was saying, 'As you wish,' what he really meant was, 'I love you.' ..."

Koschej, 7/25/08 03:43 am:

Koschej: I promise I will not mod you until you reach the end of the thread.
InfamousBrad: That's VERY comforting, but I'm afraid you'll just have to wait.
Koschej: I hate waiting. I could give you my word as a Moderator.
InfamousBrad: No good. I've known too many Moderators.
Koschej: Isn't there any way you trust me?
InfamousBrad: Nothing comes to mind.
Koschej: I swear on the soul of my manager, Lightingo Housetoya, you will reach the end unmodded.
InfamousBrad: Throw me the scroll bar.

Ok, back on topic now please.

"Free to Play:" Variable Pricing, Gambling Trap, or Both?

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:55:56 GMT

I saw in Massively.com today that there's a new massively multiplayer online game coming out of open beta and going officially online a week from tomorrow. And it's one that I feel some minor obligation to at least try out, because it does offer both the number one and the number two most important things I would ask from an MMO: (1) it's not a D&D ripoff, and (2) it's not an ugly and depressing post-apocalyptic world. The combination of those two traits is rare enough I feel like I owe any new game that meets them both a try. This one is called "World of Kung Fu," and it's set in an animé-inspired fantasy version of feudal China. The art direction looks interesting, the animations in the demo video I saw look interesting, and the character classes look at least somewhat original. I like that you can choose to either show your armor (showing off your loot) or pick your own "fashion" costume to go "over" it with no penalty, although I could live without some of the more immersion-breaking obviously modern costumes. I don't know how crazy I'm going to be about the quest structure, which looks suspiciously WoW-like (City of Heroes has spoiled me, I may never be able to tolerate another game's mission structure after CoH), and I won't know how the game play is until I try it.

It is, however, that awful misnomer in the MMO marketplace, "free to play (F2P)," as opposed to "pay to play (P2P)." To be more clear (and more honest), what that means is "supported by 'microtransactions'" versus "flat-rate subscription fee." As you defeat enemies and complete quests, you earn a certain amount of in-game gold that can be used to buy the armor, weapons, consumables, and crafting materials you need in order to keep playing the game. If you feel like you're not getting enough, you can go to the web page, plunk in your PayPal account*, and use the money in that account to buy in-game gold for your character. Expect to see a lot more games adopt this model, and not just because it's been so successful in Asia. Research firm Parks Associates just completed a survey of 2,000 people who self-identify as hard-core computer gamers who aren't currently subscribing to any massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. 98% of them said that there was no way to design any computer game, no matter what intellectual property or feature set, that could persuade them to pay a flat-rate monthly subscription fee. But 14% of them said that if the game looked interesting, they would consider a free-to-play game with micro-transaction support. (Eric Caoili, "Parks: More Free Games Needed to Grow MMORPG Market," WorldsInMotion.biz, 7/22/08. See also Samuel Axon, "Research: Subscription model unappealing to vast majority of users," Massively.com, 7/23/08.) There are talks about this very subject going on everywhere that game developers are talking with potential financiers, because even before Parks Associates' survey, they could see from the industry numbers that overall industry subscription growth rates have flattened over the last year. There may not be very many more potential customers out there to reach. And if that's true, then there are only two ways to make a new, profitable game: either remove barriers to entry, increasing the potential customer base, or wait for an existing MMO to falter and steal their customers.

And on one level, the difference is purely psychological, or at least potentially so. I can't know until I play the game, and talk to a lot of other people who've played the game, but let's assume the worst about World of Kung Fu. Let's assume that they have "balanced" the game so that items wear out, or need to be replaced because they've been out-leveled, faster than you can possibly replace them using free in-game gold that you earned by questing. Let's assume that it takes, say, $15/month worth of gold purchases for the average player to make up the difference. How is having them bill your credit card or PayPal account a flat $15 per month any more virtuous than you logging onto their web page and paying $15, after the first paycheck of every month, to buy your month's supply of in-game gold? Use up that $15 worth in less than a month? Then take some time off from playing, play more next month, when you can afford it. Same fixed rate, no difference ... if you can do it.

Because that's the problem, isn't it? I already see one potential "casino trap" designed into World of Kung Fu. There are items with far, far better stats than you are likely to ever get as free loot. It's not impossible, but the odds are thousands to one against you getting one that you actually need. You can go without. Or at least, I hope you can go without; if the game is dishonest and a trap, you may find out if you try to play it that no, big chunks of the game aren't playable without these top-quality items. If so, quit, because there are only two ways to get them: buy them on the auction house, at insanely high prices in in-game gold, or craft them. And the way you craft them is you buy an item that's expensive from the item store, then try to enhance it through the crafting system -- which has an unknown percentage chance to destroy the item, and an unknown but presumably higher percentage chance to burn through crafting supplies (faster than you get them as loot) without giving you the enhancement that you want/need. And guess what? Crafting supplies are for sale for cash, too. If you burn through however much you have budgeted for the month, and don't get the stats on an item that you need to progress, will you have the patience to log out and not play the game until next month when you're budgeted to pour in more cash? If not, don't play!

Because there's the rub, isn't it? On one level, this can be defended as being the exact kind of thing that brought increased efficiency and wider availability to a whole range of luxury-item markets: variable rate pricing. Pay more to get it earlier, more conveniently. Willing to wait longer, put up with more inconvenience? Pay less, still get it. If it's not evil when it comes to booking flights or paying for hotel rooms, why is it evil when we try to introduce it to computer games? You know, other than the fact that an extraordinarily large number of people of European ancestry are pathologically unable to turn down a bet. Especially when each additional bet is "only" a small sum of money.

* Footnote: I should say this in their defense. They do offer a can't-increase-your-spending way to deal with the Item Mall, one that seems clearly designed for parents who don't want to give their kids their own bank-account-linked PayPal account. It's something developed by PayByCash.com called an Ultimate Game Card, purchasable at some convenience stores, drug stores, and Wal-Marts; give your kid (or yourself) a $15 Ultimate Game Card and when it runs out, that's that until you give them another one, unless they want to go down to 7-11 or whatever and buy themselves another one. It still offers the chance to tempt you into spending too much money, but at least it can't directly empty your bank account and you do have to leave the house to do it. Imperfectly virtuous, because it doesn't remove the underlying temptation. And PayByCash.com is not one of my favorite companies; I had to deal with them back when they were the only company that handled billing for Neocron, and their customer service sucks. But it could very easily be worse; they could require game accounts to be tied to a credit card or a checking account or a PayPal account and make it possible to automatically tap cash out from an in-game screen, something that even City of Heroes now does for a few of its micro-transaction based services.

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 05:07:46 GMT

Happy birthday, becky_zoole!

The Sixth Stage of Grief

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 06:10:27 GMT

I have a trait that most of my closest friends consider a character flaw at best, or proof of yet another, fourth, form of insanity that the doctors have yet to diagnose. It gets me in trouble, all the time. But I can't help it: once a tragedy gets to a certain point, I blow past denial (in fact, that seldom lasts more than a few nanoseconds with me, I'm always willing to believe bad news if it comes with any evidence at all), anger, bargaining, depression, and even acceptance into a sixth stage of grief that is, so far as I can tell, unique to me and to a handful of writers whose work I admire: hilarity.

So I know that you're going to find it evidence of something wrong with me that I laughed so hard my sides hurt, that I laughed so hard I was physically gasping for breath, while reading these two articles and their sidebars (so far) in the "Buyers Betrayed" series on the enviable Miami Herald website: Jack Dolan, Rob Barry, and Matthew Haggman, "Ex-Convicts Active in Mortgage Fraud" and Jack Dolan, "Thousands with Criminal Records Work Unlicensed as Loan Originators." (Found when tracking inbound links to yesterday's journal entry, via alobar's journal entry "Rotten to the Core." Thanks!) And after the weekend I've had (really over-the-top nightmares), I need more laughs, so I just can't wait for the third and final installment in the series. I can't help it. It's just how I am.

When an industry that's been the victim of fraud (as well as a perpetrator) over and over again throughout human history decides that, in our modern electronic age economy, that kind of fraud is now impossible so they want to not be regulated any more, I ought to find this hard to believe. When I find out that they set out to persuade legislators to set up a parallel unregulated form of the same business for them to move all of their business into, just to evade regulation they think is burdensome and unnecessary, I know that I ought to consider it my top responsibility to bargain with the people who think like this, to try to persuade them to accept some kind of regulatory scheme that meets the minimum requirements. When I find out that the people appointed to do the regulation that's still in place don't actually do their jobs, because they don't see actually doing their jobs as part of their job description any more, I ought to find that depressing. When I find out that this allowed people with federal criminal convictions for running financial scams for the famous "five families" of the New York mafia, and people who've made their entire living to date off of drug dealing or credit card fraud or identity theft, to legally work directly with the customers in the mortgage industry, I ought to find that terribly depressing. When I find out how many people knew about this and decided to do nothing, perhaps the sane response is to just give up, and accept that this is just how rotten the American people have become. I know that most of my friends, and most of the people I admire, never reach the phase of "acceptance" of this kind of thing, but maybe that is the sane response.

But when I read stories of fraud so egregious that you couldn't include them in a comic caper novel because nobody would believe you, and then I find out that even a newspaper was able to turn up at least four thousand such implausibly silly sounding criminals getting away with it for five to six years? When the insanely goofy details keep piling on? I blow right past acceptance into out-of-control laughter. I laugh so hard, and so long, that it hurts to laugh, and I have to get up from my reading and come back. I laugh so hard it's actually an effort to sustain my outrage, to where it takes some small effort to even remember to focus part of my mind and my conscience on the horrible, horrible crimes that were perpetrated on some of the most vulnerable people in this country, people who did nothing wrong and that even the most anarchic of libertarians would agree deserve a government that would protect them from (as the libertarian credo goes) loss of life, liberty, or property through force or fraud. Even when I see that nobody around but me (and, I'd bet, Carl Hiassen) is laughing, when I know that my emotional reaction is inappropriate to the situation, I just can't help myself. The tragedy has reached the level where it's just that damned funny.

I'm a bad person.

You Know It's Not Just a "Mental" Recession Because ...

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:23:17 GMT

How do you know that the economy is in a real recession, not just an imaginary one, one that's all in your head, a "mental" recession? When a Republican is out of work.

A particular Republican is out of work, actually: lobbyist and former US Senator Phil Gramm, the guy who said that the recession was something entirely imagined by a "nation of whiners" -- until he was laid off himself. OK, I'm aware that the newspapers say that he quit "to end this distraction." But trust me, he's out of work, and I don't think there's any doubt that this was a "quit or be fired" moment. Okay, he's really more of an involuntary retiree than the victim of a lay off, and I'm sure he has some rich Republican friends who'll front him his rent and grocery money should it come to that. Still, the fact remains that at this point, the architect of one of the pillars of Reaganomics is radioactive to any potential employers.

Most of the news media have covered this from the inevitable "Presidential horse race" angle, wanting to know what it means to the "contest" between Obama and McCain that Gramm wrote pretty much the entire McCain campaign economic plan; how much of an embarrassment is this to John McCain? And the focus is on that because the top candidates firing, dismissing, cutting themselves off from, betraying, denouncing, renouncing, and/or accepting the only-semi-voluntary resignations of their closest friends, allies, advisers, and staff has been a recurring thread this year, to the point where most news editors and many journalists are begging the rest of the commentariat to throw the phrase "throw (someone) under the bus" under the bus.

But there's a bigger news story here than the wannabe horse-race handicappers trying to juggle the odds on which "horse" will cross the "finish line" ahead of the other, and I'd like to thank the Washington Post's columnist E.J. Dione for calling it to my attention last Friday on Countdown with (No, Really, This Time) Keith Olbermann. Because Dione came very close to predicting this news story, a week in advance, pretty much by accident, with his column for July 11th, 2008: "Capitalism's Reality Check" (registration required). Because in a very real way, the 2008 election isn't about Barack Obama or John McCain. In a weird sort of a way, it's an actual national referendum about Phil Gramm. Because before he was before he was UBS lobbyist Phil Gramm, before he was Senator Phil Gramm, before he was U.S. Representative Phil Gramm, he was Texas A&M University professor of economics Dr. Phil Gramm, whose entire life's work has been about laissez faire economics. He wasn't just the a contributor to the Republicans' "Contract on with America," he was one of the main intellectual architects of Reaganomics, and for him, its founding principle was this:

In the long term, Dr. Gramm argued, it is basically impossible for a business to stay in business by harming its customers, without some unfair form of help from the government. If all government help is withdrawn from businesses, and a free market prevails, then customers will flock to the business that doesn't harm its customers, that business will earn more money than the businesses that do harm their customers, and the bad businesses will either go broke and close their doors or get bought out by the good business. This means that in a free market, any form of government regulation aimed at preventing companies from harming their customers is unnecessary. What's more, the effort that the government spends on checking up on companies that it thinks could go bad costs money, so they have to raise taxes to pay for the compliance checkers, including taxes on those companies. What's more, companies that are having to look over their shoulders at hovering, hostile government regulators have to practice business defensively, have to divert resources that could go into making better, cheaper products into dealing with regulators, have to hire and pay the people who do nothing but placate the regulators, and those costs get passed on to the customer. So according to Phil Gramm (and most other hard-core laissez faire economists) any kind of government regulation of business at all achieves no good end, gives customers no better products or more products than they would have had under a laissez faire market, and does so at a higher cost. Therefore any kind of consumer or citizen or environmental protection by government is an inherently bad thing.

When he was doing his academic work back in the 1970s, American businesses' regulatory compliance costs were at their all-time maximum; from the 1890s to the early 1970s, fed-up American voters had demanded more and more protection from companies by government. And when Phil Gramm was doing his academic work, the US economy was in horrible shape. In hindsight, we can see that this had more to do with horrible budgetary mismanagement during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and the wreckage wrought on the federal budget by the ever-escalating costs of having just lost a major land war in Asia, than it had to do with corporate regulation. But voters, eager for a fast way to repair the wreckage of the Carter-era economy, were willing to listen to the many US businesses who were claiming that there wouldn't be so much inflation if they didn't have to spend so much money hiring people to protect them from unnecessary government regulators. And, in fact, by the end of President Reagan's first term, this academic and political argument had so thoroughly won the day that it not only became a permanent bedrock principle of the Republican Party (where it was no big surprise, as hands-off-big-business had been Republican party dogma since the robber-baron days of the 1880s and '90s), but it even became the majority position on economics in the Democratic Party, as well.

So we've spent the 28 years since Ronald Reagan won his first election to the US Presidency rolling back regulation after regulation, trusting more and more in "voluntary compliance" and "market-based solutions." And even where some regulations were too popular to repeal, businesses in formerly heavily regulated industries like banking, lending, real estate, and finance found ways to shift all of their actual money, all of the actual economic activity, into what had been niches too tiny to come to regulators' attention during the heyday of government regulation. We got exactly what Phil Gramm devoted his entire career to trying to persuade us to want, an almost completely unregulated economy. So it's not terribly surprising that Phil Gramm thinks that our current economy is really, really great; he just wants his side's politicians to make whatever bare-minimum entirely-symbolic gestures are necessary to placate the American voting public long enough for the "invisible hand of the market" to weed out the bad actors and turn the economy over to the good companies, still at a lower cost than government regulation.

But here's what E.J. Dione was writing about, a week ago last Friday: Phil Gramm, and his friend John McCain, and a few equally hide-bound ideologues with no actual business experience of their own, are practically the only people left on the planet who still think so. The same companies that spent the 1970s through the 1990s begging for less and less regulation are now begging for more and more regulation, and so are ever more of the Republican politicians that are beholden to those companies. Not just the American voters, but American companies, are standing up to Phil Gramm and saying en masse, "We tried it your way, and it turns out that it doesn't work." They don't want to hear from some pointed-headed economist turned politician turned lobbyist, who not only never managed a business but who never even worked a day of actual work in his life, how the economy "ought to work." They can see with their own eyes that it didn't turn out that way.

There is, actually, a reason why it doesn't work. It would not be entirely fair to penalize Professor Gramm, Ph.D., for not having foreseen this; much of the math didn't exist during his academic tenure. There have been an awful lot of advances in economics, especially coming out of the application of the school of mathematics known as "games theory," that couldn't have been made without fast and inexpensive computer simulations. But having done the math, and seen the results, there's a perfectly logical explanation in plain English that we can now give. When I do give it, it's going to sound so obvious that you're going to ask, well, sure, why didn't they see that coming? And all I can say to that is, you weren't there, it was a much more primitive world back then. Anyway, here's the reason why it doesn't work: all too frequently, the market doesn't have time to fix itself. Suppose that even just one company cheats by finding a way to make its products more profitable in a way that harms the buyers or that downstreams costs to its non-customers, imposes costs on them involuntarily, and manages to keep this at all secret for even a matter of months, or at most a couple of years. It can then drive prices down to the point where none of its competitors are making any money. They go bankrupt; this company then buys them out or monopolizes the market.

As one company cheats, therefore, there are morally crippling pressures on other companies to find ways to match the cheating company's prices; if anybody cheats, they all know within a matter of at most a few months that they have to cheat, too. Nor can they go public with their knowledge that the other company "must be" making deadly safety compromises with their product or dumping toxics onto an unsuspecting public. They know from their own business experience that that's the only way that the other company can be making that product, in the same market they are, with the same raw materials costs and vaguely similar wages and the same broadly-known business practices ... but they can't prove it in a court of law. It could take them years to find the evidence they'd need to protect themselves if they made that accusation and got sued for libel and slander. And they don't have years; they'll be out of business long before then, probably.

Nor does it help that we had a wave of shareholders' rights lawsuits back in the 1970s and 1980s, all with the same conclusion: company boards of directors have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder return in the short run, and since it is a fiduciary duty, they can be sued for not doing it. If there are investors out there (and there are) who think that the company should take insane risks with public safety because their competitors are doing so and thereby returning more value to their shareholders, it doesn't even help if the company that would rather do the right thing and wait for the market to catch up is still somehow minimally profitable, or if it has the cash reserves to wait until the evidence comes out: they'll still get sued, there'll still be a hostile takeover of that company, and new management will be put in that has no such optimistic faith in the goodness of markets.

And all of that makes Phil Gramm what he richly deserves to be: a retiree. At age 66, he's an academic economist who, through his success in politics, actually got to experiment with an entire nation's economy. As a "scientist" who still won't admit that the experiment didn't produce the results that his hypothesis said it would, even after all the evidence is in, he deserves to never work again; he's not just a bad person, he's a poor scientist. So he belongs where he is now, laid off, unemployed and unemployable, living off of Social Security and his US Senate pension, not anywhere near the reins of power; Gods help us, if he could, he'd repeat the experiment again, rather than admit that his model was flawed, in hopes it would turn out differently a second time.

Criticizing a Movie Other than the One on the Screen: WALL-E

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:03:30 GMT

I've been waffling back and forth on whether or not to write this column ever since I saw WALL-E two weeks ago. That here it is, two weeks later, and I'm still hearing a specific criticism leveled at the movie that is just plain factually wrong, that two weeks later some people are deeply angry at this movie for something that isn't actually on the screen and I keep running into this people, has tipped me off of the fence on this one. This journal entry is aimed at people who (a) haven't seen the movie yet, and (b) have read multiple reviews of it, and (c) are, based on the reviews, so angry that they're not going to see the movie. It may also be of some interest to some of you who did see the movie, completely misunderstood what you saw, and are angry at a movie only exists in your head, that isn't the movie that was up on the screen.

For what it's worth, this isn't the first time I've seen this problem. The main reason that one of my all-time favorite movies, Pleasantville, didn't make more money than it did is that they all showed up expecting one movie (a movie adaptation of "Hi, Honey, I'm Home!"), saw another (a morally complex metaphor about whether or not we'd be better off with more innocence or if we're better off with "the knowledge of good and evil," and what if we could choose?), and didn't switch gears fast enough. The same thing happened to me with 300; I went expecting one movie (a Hollywood-ized super-hero version of the battle of Thermopylae), saw another (a live action version of Heavy Metal), and almost didn't switch gears fast enough to enjoy it. Although I haven't gotten out to see it yet, I gather that the same problem has happened to most critics and audiences who saw Hancock. They showed up expecting a comic romp about a drunken bum with super powers, had it turn into an elaborate metaphysical debate over which you'd choose, to have the power to help thousands of people, or to be happy, if you had to choose, and didn't switch gears fast enough, either. And so it is with WALL-E, because nearly every hostile review of WALL-E I've read says the same thing. They all loved the first one third of the movie, but they all complain that there's a major plot twist after that that ruins the whole movie for them. Some of them have gotten quite angry about it. And just as with Pleasantville, 300, and Hancock, I insist that what they're objecting to is a movie that they imagined, that they projected their own neuroses onto, not the one that Pixar made and is showing.

Those of you who've read the hostile reviews, tracked down the spoiler sites, or seen the movie and gotten angry at it, you all know what happens at the 1/3rd point in the movie. WALL-E and EVE travel to the Axiom, a space-going "ark" containing the descendants of the wealthiest survivors of the ecological collapse on Earth; now that EVE has returned with proof that life without life support is possible on the surface of the Earth again, it's time for the human race to begin coming home. And what everybody who gets angry at this movie (except for a few far right-wing nutcases) gets angry about is what we find on board the Axiom, what the human race has become. After 700 years of having their every need tended to by robots, of eating all of their "food" through straws, and of never moving anywhere except via hover-chair (and where each generation comes from if nobody can move out of their chairs, we're not told, unless the robots handle that for them, too), all of the surviving members of the human race have become seriously, seriously fat.

And that's what drove untold thousands of people psycho: the portrayal of all Americans (because whether or not there are other space arks, we are shown that everybody on the Axiom is descended from Americans) as so morbidly obese that they're helpless. Because as everybody knows, human beings only come in one of two shapes: fat, or virtuous. Everybody knows that since everybody around you wants you not to be fat, and since everybody (mistakenly) "knows" that "all" it would take for you not to be fat is to exert minimal self-control and go to some minimal effort to please other people, that means that if you are fat, then you must have no regard for anybody else. And if you have no regard for anybody else, and don't care what other people think of you or want from you, then you obviously must not have any virtues at all. Right? And the fat-acceptance activists, who think that the movie they think they saw or that they heard about without seeing perpetuates these beliefs and mocks the lazy fat people to their faces on the screen, are just as histrionically angry at Pixar as the rest of the country is over the implication that 700 years from now, there won't be even one single American left in the whole human race who cares enough about other people to bother to be skinny.

If that's the movie you're afraid you're going to see if you go? Ignore the rest of this review and go see it, on my word, and if you still think so, come back and read the rest.

If that's the movie you think you saw? You weren't paying attention. It's not just my imagination; there were other critics (I saw at least a couple over at Pandagon) who spotted something that the directors did very, very deliberately, and did at least three times: they very carefully intercut scenes of the adults on the Axiom with scenes of babies in swaddling clothes. Further, when the ceremonial captain of the Axiom has to stand up and walk to save his passengers from a robotic mutiny, his gait is very obviously modeled on any baby's first steps. Knowing that, go back and look at the passengers on the Axiom, and its captain. No double chins. No belly-fat doubled over and overlapping their waists. No skin problems. Completely spherical heads. Almost completely spherical hands and feet with tiny little fingers that don't meet. The message of that part of WALL-E is not "capitalism will make you ugly and lazy and fat." Heck, watch the passengers; they do everything that the ubiquitous robots will let them do, and then complain that there isn't more for them to do. No, the message of that part of WALL-E is that having other people do everything for you, having them cheerfully and immediately cater to your every need, is not corrupting, it's infantalizing. And life, real human life, began for you the first time you rejected help and did something yourself.

You don't even have to project any kind of moral flaw onto the passengers of the Axiom to explain why it came to this. Remember that at least as far as their ancestors know, they may well be the last survivors of the human species, and they're on a lifeboat. Damned straight they did everything they were told by the machines. That's just basic lifeboat survival 101: obey the chain of command, hope that the person in charge knows what orders to give. If you think otherwise, you need to read more case studies of people surviving under lifeboat conditions: the minute everybody starts figuring out for themselves what to do, they start working at cross purposes, and unless help arrives really, really fast, they all die. So when Auto Pilot decided, and instructed everybody through the Steward bots, that it would be safer for the human race if they let the robots do all the work, do everything, since the robots don't make mistakes and endanger the species? Heck yes they obeyed. They come by their seven hundred years of neoteny through no vice, through no lack of virtue, but entirely honestly. They are not to be blamed for having let themselves be infantalized, they are to be praised for recognizing, even when their robotic "parents" didn't, that WALL-E and EVE had brought them proof that it was time for them to begin to grow up.

That God-Forsaken "Responsibility" Speech

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:35:09 GMT

Forgive me if my tone is a bit angry, but Senator Obama is jumping up and down on my last remaining nerve ending. I have long since lost all patience for upper middle class black men who get up in front of black audiences and tell them that the reason black Americans are disproportionately poor and disproportionately in jail is that there's something wrong with black Americans. This crap was getting old already before even Dr. Cosby went out on his national tour on the subject; after being hectored by Bill Cosby for years on this same, tired, old lie I long-since had no patience left for it by the time Barack Obama started in on it. And when he gives it twice in as many weeks, unless I lose track of time again?

Look. I'm told in the news stories about his NAACP convention speech that when he got to "the responsibility speech," the crowd started cheering louder and louder. What I sincerely hope that that crowd was cheering for is their (I think, mistaken) idea that since surely Senator Obama actually knows the truth, what this part of the speech means is, "and I know what lies to tell white America to trick them into voting for me." Whenever I bring up topics related to this, that's what some Obama volunteer from somewhere on the Internet rushes into my blog to reassure me ... as if the prospect of my candidate lying to me were somehow reassuring.

Anyway, I'm not surprised that the cheering was muted for the first 2/3rds of the speech. Skim it yourself, and you'll see it's the same old Democratic boilerplate. It really can almost be summarized as this: the Republicans told us they had a better idea than the New Deal, so we tried it, and found out that it sucks, so let's stop doing things the Republican way, and go back to what worked before. Good enough. And he's right about that, and it's why I'm still voting for him. Probably. That is, as long as I keep reminding myself, to paraphrase the legendary "wit" of Donald Rumsfeld, you go into the November elections with the candidate you have, not with the candidate you wish you had. That's the only way I can tolerate voting for a man who keeps giving this speech ...

"So yes, we have to demand more responsibility from Washington. And yes we have to demand more responsibility from Wall Street. But we also have to demand more from ourselves. Now, I know some say I've been too tough on folks about this responsibility stuff. But I'm not going to stop talking about it. Because I believe that in the end, it doesn't matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose, or how many government programs we launch – none of it will make any difference if we don't seize more responsibility in our own lives.

"That's how we'll truly honor those who came before us. Because I know that Thurgood Marshall did not argue Brown versus Board of Education so that some of us could stop doing our jobs as parents. And I know that nine little children did not walk through a schoolhouse door in Little Rock so that we could stand by and let our children drop out of school and turn to gangs for the support they are not getting elsewhere. That's not the freedom they fought so hard to achieve. That's not the America they gave so much to build. That's not the dream they had for our children.

"That's why if we're serious about reclaiming that dream, we have to do more in our own lives, our own families, and our own communities. That starts with providing the guidance our children need, turning off the TV, and putting away the video games; attending those parent-teacher conferences, helping our children with their homework, and setting a good example. It starts with teaching our daughters to never allow images on television to tell them what they are worth; and teaching our sons to treat women with respect, and to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one. It starts by being good neighbors and good citizens who are willing to volunteer in our communities – and to help our synagogues and churches and community centers feed the hungry and care for the elderly. We all have to do our part to lift up this country."
-- Barack Obama, Speech to the 99th Annual Convention of the NAACP, 7/14/08

... instead of the speech I wish he'd given:

"But even after we do all of those things, I can not promise you that the American Dream will work for all black Americans. Still, I am here to tell you that if it doesn't work, neither will anything else. Everybody in this room knows, even if too few people in America know, that every 10 to 20 years, another batch of swindlers comes along with a new lie, steals everything that black Americans have saved, and gets away with it clean because so far, no court has ever convicted, no legislature has ever been outraged; as long as when any scam collapses, if it's black America that disproportionately gets the shaft, justice has never been served. And like everybody in this room, I know that that, not some dysfunction of our families, is why generation after generation of young black men, after watching their fathers and uncles and grandfathers get humiliated over and over again, want to think that they should try some alternative to the American Dream, like professional sports, or professional music, or organized crime. And we have got to make it clearer to them than we have ever done that the odds there are even worse. Not one black man in 100,000 who tries will ever make even a middle class living off being a celebrity or a gang banger; it just doesn't work.

"Nothing works reliably in America but the good old fashioned 17th-century American Dream, and we have got to keep reminding them, and each other, and every new immigrant, and every American of this amazing engine of personal and national wealth. Stay in school as long as you can. Get the best grades you can, and stay out of trouble. Get married and stay married. Take any job you can get, work hard and reliably at it, and go the extra mile. Spend as little as you can, save every penny you can, and invest it in only two things: not jewelry, or fancy cars, or expensive shoes and clothing, but your neighborhood, and your own kids' education. And if you do these things, you will get ahead, and your kids will get farther ahead than that. No other way of life you can try can offers you anything like the odds of the American dream.

"But you have also got to tell them, to make sure they know, what no school will tell them: every 10 to 20 years, another swarm of white people in ties will come along with a seductive new lie called 'the next big thing' or 'the new economy.' They will explain to you in words so sweet that the reason the white people are wealthier than you is because they knew to invest early in this 'new economy.' Friends, when that man darkens your door, that is Satan himself talking through him. Treat him accordingly, and then pray your hardest that none of your friends or family members listens to his lies. Because if they do, then only a couple of years from now, you're going to lose everything you saved bailing them out after he's long gone, and their money is gone, and this 'new economy' is revealed to be what it has been every 10 to 20 years since Emancipation: a pyramid scheme that is running out of suckers, or else they wouldn't be peddling it in the black neighborhoods.

"And that's why, as your President, I will make absolutely sure that the Justice Department investigates those who peddled the last worthless dregs of the 'teaser rate' home loans on massively overvalued, essentially worthless homes, who sold you loans that they knew you'd never be able to refinance or pay off, because they didn't want your loan payments, or even your house after the 'gotcha' in that paperwork sucks all the savings you have out of the bank; they wrecked your life for one more loan origination fee. They were willing to destroy two million Americans' lives for a relative pittance, because they were that sure that the country would let them get away with it as long as so many of the victims were black. That has got to end. I can not promise you that I can get you back your money, although I promise you I will try. I don't even know if I can promise that I can save the houses you invested in, although with the help of Democrats in Congress, I will move heaven and earth to try. But while I'm trying to do those things, what I ask from you in return is that you learn to recognize a pyramid scheme, and you teach your children not to fall for them either, so that the American Dream can work as well for black Americans as it has always worked for all other Americans."

I can dream, can't I? This is the man who told me "there is nothing false about hope."

But I do know this: I will never again let pass the lie that it's black Americans' fault that they keep giving up on the American Dream until I start seeing racist scum "investment" peddlers serving hard felony time. Or as the authors of Get Your War On put it four years ago, before the latest round of outrages, when we still hadn't done anything yet to any of the scamsters behind so many completely worthless dot-com stocks, and Bush still thought he was going to get away with destroying Social Security:

Who Puts the Boom in the Boom De Ah Dah?

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 05:28:50 GMT

Too little sleep two nights in a row, cleverness a might thin upon the ground. So instead, I leave you with something that I wasn't song virused on ... until yesterday. Specifically, the Discovery Channel "Boom De Ah Dah!" channel promo, which I could take or leave. Until I saw it redone as an even better City of Heroes and City of Villains machinima:

Because nothing says "Boom De Yada" to me like a tier-9 Area Effect extreme damage attack.

P.S. Double XP Weekend: 10am Friday July 18th to 8am Monday July 21st, Central Daylight Time.

Birthday Thoughts: Math Problem, Solved

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:04:57 GMT

Forty eight years old. Still not dead. But this year's different than every year for the last seven: this year, I think maybe I know why. I have to explain this again, because I know that my obsession with this question sounds macabre. And I was reminded again this evening at dinner that I really haven't explained well enough, not even to most of my closest friends, what my question has been for the last seven years, and why it was so important to me. So let me start at the beginning:

By the age of 13, I'd come within in an inch of my life three times already, and each time, I'd survived by a combination of skill and luck. And around the time of my 14th birthday, thinking back on this, I realized something: sooner or later, the coin comes up tails. So I did some back of an envelope calculations, assuming that because of my particular distinct problems I would face a 50/50 chance of death every 4 years or so. I already understood, instinctively, the difference between dependent and independent probability, so I graphed it out: how many years can I last? How many times in a row do I have to throw "heads" to make it to a certain age? And I saw the graph had a distinct "knee" at about age 35, that the odds of my making it to 35 were about on the order of dozens to 1 against (as best as I recall, and I'm too lazy to do the math again), and the next multiple of four to five years after that were on the order of a hundred to one against. So I concluded, based on my math, that anything I didn't get done by age 35 almost certainly wasn't going to get done. And if I did make it to 35, I'd better be damned sure to spend the time from then to the next catastrophe getting as much done as possible. I needed to leave no dependents, I needed to leave no projects undone, and I needed to make for damned sure, every day from about age 25 or so on, that everybody I loved knew that I loved them. Simple math.

I made it to 40.

And when I made it to 40, I went back over my life history, totaling up the catastrophes that stood at least a 50/50 chance of killing me, every accident, every disaster, every bad decision, every doctor who wouldn't listen to what I was saying because I couldn't figure out how to get him or her to understand or believe me, every person in authority who massively over-reacted to the irreducible weirdness of my various mental disorders and threatened to shoot me or who set out to wreck my life. I wasn't wrong, as a kid: it's been about every 3 to 7 years. And every single one of them was a close call of some kind. So for seven years now, I've been trying to figure out, with something akin to desperation, why am I still alive? How in the hell do I keep throwing heads? Can I keep doing this? Or am I just playing Russian Roulette with a Tommy gun with one dud bullet in a full drum? Do the odds stay 50/50 the next time? And the next time? And the next time? From now until my luck runs out? Or is there a fundamental flaw in my theory?

Now do you understand? Good. Because I think I do have an answer, now. Maybe. I at least have a hypothesis, and that's more than I had seven years ago: I had one truly lucky day, and that one day changed everything. I've told the story in more detail before, and my friends have all heard it in full florid Technicolor: the story of how I accidentally bought a house. My divorce from my deranged ex-wife left me fragile, and more to the point, friendless: she had spent three years making sure that I didn't have a single friend in the whole world other than her. I didn't know it at the time, but it should have been obvious from the math that I did, in fact, have yet another disaster in my short-term future, about three years out. Had nothing else changed, that disaster would still have happened, and this time, there would have been no one to help me; no one would have even known when I lost everything, had nowhere to turn, found myself homeless and starving and sick, and shortly thereafter died -- right on schedule, at age 36.

But one day when I was 33, sitting in my apartment alone on a weekday because I had vacation days I had to use up or lose, in a fit of boredom I decided to spend an afternoon looking at other people's houses that were for sale, and mentally mocking their stuff. Through a chain of events so improbable and funny that they make a good story in and of themselves, 18 hours later I was the owner of my own house. And not just any house: I had, by insanely implausible luck, stumbled into a house that was almost completely perfectly designed for entertaining. It was also a house that was way, way too big for me. And I was, at least temporarily (I being a network engineer, and this being at the beginning of the dot-com bubble) making a hell of a lot of money, by my working class standards, more money than it could reasonably cost to keep me in food, clothes, and toys. So I did two things, both of them entirely selfish on my part.

First of all, for the next three years, any time an even mildly pretty girl that I knew became homeless, if I had a spare room, I offered it to her. I asked nothing from them; I got my payment because I just plain like having pretty girls around. Creepy, but there you have it. I never missed the tiny amount of groceries any of them ate, they never even showed up as a blip on the utility bills, they were using rooms I seldom used and one of the too many parking spaces outside, and in exchange for this absolutely nothing on my part, I got to eat the occasional dinner with or eat breakfast with a pretty girl. Win. Didn't hurt that I tended to pick them for being well read, artists (I'm a total sucker for artists), and/or good conversationalists, either. None of them were mine. Which was fine; I wasn't looking for a girlfriend, and never minded their boyfriends. (Well, twice. But they were both total jerks, and I think I was more than adequately polite to both of them, enough that I know that they both liked me.) I just liked having the company. And because I've had serious problems with inappropriately-felt gratitude before (it wrecked the closest thing I've ever had to a stable poly triad), I always made it clear to them that they owed me no favors, that just being there was as much a favor to me as the room and board was a favor to them.

Anyway, the other thing I did, for equally selfish reasons, was started throwing parties, and I mean a lot of parties, one every 6 to 8 weeks for the next three years. The Infamous Brad Parties, they came to be known as, because I put hard work and scientific study into trying to figure out how to throw good parties. Although honestly, I hardly had to work at it: I know that my pretty roommates, my fun-house house, and the couple of hundred bucks of free food and booze I threw out every six to eight weeks were the main attraction, not me. Those parties ran me ragged; I don't think I ever once had a good time actually at one of my parties. For me, the fun was over about half an hour after the door first opened; all the fun was the time up to that part, plus an hour or two of "post mortem" and "lessons learned" the next day over breakfast. That part, on the other hand, never stopped being fun, and I sometimes miss it terribly.

And then, sure as heck, as regular as clockwork, disaster struck. I won't go into the details again at this time, but my career was over, as dead as any Kennedy. I got offered more help than usual, but that's not why I survived, that time, not least of which because I turned down most of the help I was offered. I got through that one on my usual combination of determination, skill, and holy frelling cats the tiniest ever sliver of last-second luck I ever had. The money to start my next career was tied up in the house, and had closing been delayed for another six hours, that money would have gone to bankruptcy court, not me, and I might well have ended up under that bridge abutment that's been lurking in my future all this time, waiting for organ failure or violent death. I never want to have that close a call again, I count that one as narrower than the time an armed gang tried to kill me and the only way I survived was to convince them their first blow had done the job.

But the next time, the disaster came early. My own poor planning and lack of skill combined with some truly awful luck to kill off yet another career, plus six layers of emergency backup plans laid in advance, and I limped back to St. Louis with almost nothing, and promptly had almost all of the remainder stolen, first by a couple of teenage car thieves, and most of the rest by two corrupt cops on the St. Louis City Police Department. And when I wore out the welcome on my last couch to crash on after that ...

It got weird.

People came out of the woodwork, including people I didn't even know all that well, including people who I'd barely met once or twice and couldn't pull out of a police lineup (but then, I'm bad about that), people who'd never even met me. And with a level of determination usually only seen in intensive care wards (and one of them is, in fact, an emergency room doctor by trade, perhaps not a coincidence), they would not let me die, long past the point where I cared if I made it through that particular disaster or not. And since then, half of them have stuck around and keep reminding me that they are just plain never going to let me die. Some of them would even grudgingly admit that I'm not much use to much of anybody, any more, but it doesn't matter, nor does it matter that I did get done everything I ever wanted to do in my life by age 40; I'm going to end up as a brain in a jar on Futurama and there just isn't anything that any enemy, or any disaster, or any disease has to say about it, or that even I get to say about it.

Because on one day, so long ago that some of you were still in grade school, I had one incredible freaky lucky day. And my own selfishness in the three or so years after that established a reputation that no long chain of selfish acts has been able to erase, a reputation for goodness and generosity. I have tried to beat that reputation to death with a club of facts and self-revelation for years, because it's just not true, but it just won't die. And that's why I'm alive: because some freaky electrical signal in my bored mind one day, or some mischievous god, put it into my head to look at one house nobody in his right mind would have looked at on the very day the owners put it up for sale the second time at exactly the price I couldn't turn down. Luck. Permanent luck, the kind of luck that no statistics can predict in advance, the kind of luck that changes futures forever. And it probably is forever; because I have that reputation that won't die, people keep putting me in positions to help other people, where it's clearly in my own selfish interest to do so, and keep giving me the resources to do it, and then inexplicably giving me the credit for all their work.

The actuarial tables tell me, based on age, weight, zip code, income, diet, social class, (lack of a) daily commute, and flawed family and medical history that I've got about 30 more years of this to go. I'm about due for another disaster, any year now at the earliest, three to four years from now at the latest as such things go, and then another one every 3 to 7 years after that, so call it another six disasters before total permanent organ failure of some kind overtakes me. But I now have so much more help than I could have predicted was possible back in 1974, the odds are not based on the 2 to the 6th power to one odds against my throwing heads six more times. The odds are that three of those times, I'll throw heads, and the other three of those times, people who think that I'm this great and generous guy will bale me out whether I want them to or not.

I may actually be beginning to be at peace with the idea.

Wow, Sorry about Burn Notice

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 08:18:02 GMT

I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all the people to whom I hyped the USA Network show Burn Notice, to all the people I encouraged to tune into Thursday night's season two premiere. Because that? Was crap. I hope you saw some or all of season one, or else you must think that I have no taste, no brains, no sense. If you did see some or all of season one, you must be thinking the same thing I am: how in the hell did that great show turn into this mind-numbingly stupid show?

What in the hell happened to Jeffrey Donovan and Gabrielle Anwar during their time off? Partial lobotomy? Massive addiction to quaaludes? All through season one, they sparkled, even in their bad times together. This season, Michael for all practical purposes comes back to her from the dead, scant hours after saying what they both assumed would be his last ever goodbye -- and he doesn't even smile at her, let alone hug or kiss her? His first, last, and pretty nearly only words are all business? No surprise she tries to punch him in the face. But then she turns into the dutiful, obedient soldier that she never was in season one, does everything he asks her without complaint? Granted, the actress was given some of the most leaden dialog in the history of television, but if you'd given the same dialog to that actress a year ago, should would have found some way to liven it up. What happened?

And in the mean time, where in the hell did Matt Nix's brain go? Because there literally wasn't anything about the plot of season two, episode one, "Breaking and Entering," that wasn't as stupid and evil as just about everything in season one was clever and heroic:

Instead of getting to meet the people who burned him, Michael gets a "client" dumped on him that he can't turn down: a guy whose family have been kidnapped by the people who burned him. It's their plan to use this guy's wife and kid as blackmail material to get Michael to do a job for them. And lest we doubt that they're serious (or evil), they did it in a way that killed two innocent people and left Michael to take the fall for the murders. What they want Michael to do (other than escape from the cops) is to break into the offices of a mercenary company (conveniently, if not entirely implausibly, located in Miami) and steal a copy of all the data on their mainframe; give them a copy of the data, they'll give the "client" his wife and kid back.

So how would the Michael Westen of season one deal with this? Obvious. Episode starts more or less the same way: Michael finagles an introduction to the client -- and then recruits them to help him go after the people who burned him. They cook up fake data to hand over (how would "Carla" know?), they help him spring a trap on her during the hand-off. Maybe it fails and we go on to episode two, maybe it succeeds and we find another layer is behind Carla, either way, Michael is the good guy: he screws up life for the murder/kidnappers and protects their victims.

How does Michael Westen of season two deal with it? He makes no effort to find out why his new masters want this data or whether or not the mercenary company are bad guys or not. He assumes they are, but doesn't really care. Wait, what? I know what you might be thinking: of course they're evil, they're mercenaries? So is Michael. Why should Michael assume that his fellow private security guys working for the US government in the war on terror are bad guys, as bad as or worse than the people who burned him? Why is he okay with going after them? There is a line in Michael's meeting with them where their boss suggests a willingness to massacre Kenyan rural villagers for a buck, but it feels very glued-on, like it only occurred to the writers at the last possible second that they had to include something to make what happens to the mercenary company look fair.

Once this season's Michael copies the data, he blows up the mainframe on his way out. Why? It wasn't in his instructions. Nor did he do it in such a way as to conceal the hole in the security enclosure or the exposed wires where he and his "client" had induction-tapped the data cables. No, that would have actually made sense, left some actual doubt in the mercenary company's mind if their data had been compromised. In order to ruin their lives? That doesn't make any sense either. In that same meeting earlier, the boss of the mercs had explained that the data was all stored in an automatic tamper-resistant burn vault, which suggests to me that they were just okay with losing it all, if that was necessary. No, it's just pointless explosions, the kind that this show has generally been smarter than to include in any way so obviously and stupidly contrived.

And how does this season's Michael protect his "client" from retribution by the mercs? By framing them for the murder of the guys who were going to help the "client" escape from Michael's new masters, by planting the guns from that attack in their vehicle and luring in the ATF. Uh, what? Come on. The merc company is rich, they have no motive, and they almost certainly have alibis for that day; they'll be out on bail within an hour, and have the charges dismissed within a month. And given that Michael was planning on smuggling the "client" out of the country anyway, what was the point of further and gratuitously going after the merc company? None. Completely pointless. Entirely unlike season one's Michael Westen.

And speaking of "entirely unlike Michael Westen" -- fundamental to the way the character has been presented in every episode other than this one is that Westen doesn't work directly for any agency, and didn't stay with the US Army, because he sucks at following orders, right? He's fiercely independent, has high initiative, does things his own way, makes his own decisions about right and wrong? Did he even consider disobeying any of his new masters' orders? Even one? The total extent of his rebellion was keeping a copy of the data he sent them, and they had to be able to foresee that. No, he was the perfect good little soldier -- for the bad guys.

I can haz bak season one nao, plz?

I'm going to give this an episode or two more to explain these contradictions and for the actors to get back to work. (Other than Bruce Campbell, who was note-perfect. But then, when is he ever not?) But if the writing and the acting in this season don't pick up in a heck of a hurry, I'm going to treat this whole season as a bad idea, and season one as a disappointing reminder of a show that could have been great if they could have kept up the quality.

Massively Multiplayer Online (Fill-in-the-Blank) Games

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:41:26 GMT

I hardly ever log into any City of Heroes/City of Villains (usually abbreviated CoX, for "City of x," pronounced "sea oh ex") server except for Virtue, the semi-officially designated "roleplaying server." I get my 33 month veteran badge a week from Monday, and in those 33 months, I can count on the fingers of one hand all of the times I've seen actual role playing, like you'd do in an ordinary tabletop role playing game or live action role playing game, in my favorite "massively multiplayer online role playing game" (MMORPG, pronounced "muh-MORE-puh-guh" or "em em oh").

There are some game mechanical reasons for this. Hardly anybody can type as fast as they talk, and CoX doesn't support voice chat yet. (We're assuming the feature is coming at some point, the parent company licensed the tech a few months ago.) Nor do very many people want to stop playing the actual game long enough to stand around typing at each other. If nothing else, the 1/3rd or more of us who are achievement-oriented want to keep pushing on, on, on along the experience-point treadmill, without wasting time chatting, and they easily pull the rest of us along. But during some angst over this in the most popular cross-faction "out of character" channel, Virtue United (join "VU2008"), this evening someone explained that roleplaying sucks, since it consists of (in his words, as best as I can recall them) nothing but a bunch of people standing around a bar reading their character biographies to each other. It was an unfair cut, but it did raise an interesting and fundamental question that applies to attempts to roleplay in all MMOs: what do our characters have to talk about?

Well, let's say that you go to a happy hour in a bar on an "industry night," one where most of the people in the bar are in the same industry you are, but you only know one or two of them from Adam's off ox. What do you talk about? "Hi, what do you do?" Well, that's a problem. Because let's say that you're a superhero or a supervillain in CoX and you describe the last crime you committed or the last crime you foiled? The problem is that when you claim to have been the one to do it, you've created a roleplaying problem for everybody else, because roughly 1/3rd of them who are at or above your level have done it, too. So let's say you try to strike up a conversation with some people at the bar in Pocket D, or in the lobby of Wentworth's Fine Consignments. Somebody asks you what you've been up to lately, and you say, "Well, we just tracked down Frostfire, the leader of the Outcasts, and busted him. It was amazing what he'd done to his hideout with his mutant powers. Kind of cool, actually." Well, that's one of the most popular missions in the game, half the people there have busted Frostfire, too. What are they going to say, "Oh, yeah, we did that last week"? Kind of a put-down. Sure, it could be worked around. But then you have the other problem: not everybody in the bar is the same level. Some of the people there are a lot farther along in level than you. The last thing you want to hear is that from their perspective, Frostfire made bail months ago, that they've tracked down where he was getting the occult talismans his gang were selling to the Hellions, and oh, yeah, that's actually part of a sinister conspiracy by ... well, spoilers enough, you get the idea. And that's assuming that the people around you can even stay in character, and not say things like, "oh, yeah, I remember that one, cool mission."

Now we may get an alternative to this, at least somewhat, maybe in December. They've dropped a hint that there's a major announcement coming this summer about a planned (for later) upcoming feature: player-created content. It'll be your chance to be the game master to however many players find and play your hand-created story in the City of x universe. As best as we can tell from the few hints that have leaked, they hope to offer us the ability to create our own custom instance maps and upload them to the server, but even if they don't, by my estimate, the game already has about 600 or 700 custom instance maps to choose from. You then specify which faction occupies the map, name the end boss, write the beginning and end of mission briefing texts, and see if you can write content as compelling as, say, their stories "The Mysterious General Z," "Ubelmann the Unknown," "The Revenant Hero Project," or "Project: World Wide Red" on the hero side or "Oh Wretched Man," "The Aeon Conspiracy/Echo Down the Aeons," "The Cult of the Shaper," or "The TV Report/Video Killed the Radio/The TV Invasion" on the villain side. Anyway, these may at least offer the chance that you and your team might have something to brag about that nobody else in the bar has heard of. If, in fact, any of the players writing the missions are at all good at writing roleplaying missions, themselves.

But let's say that you're not going to talk about your own adventures, or express (or feign) interest in other people's adventures; Eris knows, there's nothing more boring than listening to someone narrate a gaming campaign you didn't play in. What else is there to talk about? Well, what else do you talk about at parties, with casual acquaintances? The weather? There is no weather in City of x. (So far, the development team is sticking to their belief that weather that did affect game play would be a pain in the backside, and weather that doesn't affect game play is a waste of development resources.)

Sports? In the City of x universe, the number one sport everybody follows is Superhero Arena League competition; that's why so many of the people you walk by on the street are so oddly familiar with your exploits, you're an actual or potential sports star. And the player-run Player versus Player Events Committee (PvPEC) does run a series of roughly bi-weekly, cross-server, ranked, rated tournament competitions on the "Training Room" test server, which people can copy their regular characters over to at any time. But those matches are not televised, not even on the web, let alone in-game where people could sit around and watch them in the bar later, nor does the technology to offer this exist. (It could be done. The tech is in-game for the referees to record matches as they watch them; all that would be necessary would be to build in the tech to convert that to streaming video and multi-cast stream it to certain textured spots in game. It'd be nice if it happened. I'm not holding my breath.) So what that leaves for in-character "sports" conversation, as far as Arena League is concerned, is for people to discuss whatever little they've heard about other people's arena-league fights on the web: sparse content, kind of boring. Other sporting events? Nobody has ever mentioned any other sport in the in-game canonical text. If Paragon City has a sports stadium for any other sport than Arena League superfights, we haven't seen it yet, unless you want to count a few neighborhood basketball courts, and we've never seen or heard of anybody playing on them. We have seen pretty much all of the Etoile Islands, and the Rogue Islanders don't even have so much as a single soccer pitch or a single basketball hoop.

Movies? TV? We know that people in-game watch TV; as I alluded to above, there's a great set of homages to television shows in a set of villain-side story arcs where your character (or team leader) has been brainwashed by Television into doing Television's bidding. The non-player characters mostly even seem to be watching the same TV shows we see in our world -- mostly. They do not, obviously, seem to watch the same superhero TV shows and superhero movies that we do. So while I guess it would be in-character to discuss what was on TV the night before, and what your character would have thought of it, you would run into a couple of problems: other than the superhero shows, what TV shows and movies can you assume the people you're hanging out with in City of x might have actually seen? Still, it's at least workable; I suppose I should remember to use that next time a lull in the conversation comes up in game. (God's miserable wooden dentures, am I going to have to start watching American Idol as roleplaying research? Gaaaagcccch.)

Politics? It drives me insane to point this out over and over again, but in the four and a half years the game has existed, Paragon City, Rhode Island hasn't seen a single election. We don't even know the name of the current mayor, governor, or President. And we've asked; apparently, it's not even in the official top-secret developer-eyes-only story bible. Celebrity news and gossip? We meet a few celebrities in missions, rescuing or kidnapping them. They are not the same celebrities as in our world, or even recognizable parodies mostly; we're never told what they're famous for, or anything that they've done lately. If we were, it would be a one-time thing built into the mission text that still won't have changed five years later, so unless it's a brand new mission in the last update, what players would still be talking about it? Books? Same problem as talking politics: something tells me that a world that's been dealing with real magic using villains openly and in public since 1930 doesn't have a Harry Potter series for the rest of you to talk about in-character, we're not told what the actual game-world best sellers are, and most of the rest of what I read, at least, is about history and politics and current events that are specific to our world's history, not the game world's.

But honestly, what the game needs is a developer-provided regular in-character newspaper. Because one thing that players do spend a lot of time discussing is "what's going to happen to the game world next?" A tiny amount of this information is provided in-game, and in-character. But the bulk of it is in out-of-character rumors by the development team on the official forums. And unsurprisingly, since they tend to have the preliminary features list locked down by about a week after each of the every-four-months major content releases comes out, there is someone at NCsoft Northern California who knows, already, what the story line for the next issue is going to be. They don't know every line of dialog, and they may end up dropping story arcs at deadline to put them off until later (the way that ancient Rome was dropped from the first time travel feature and implemented in the next major release). But they do know enough that if they were good game masters, they could take a couple of hours off every week from scanning the forums to write a couple of paragraphs' news story, giving hints and rumors of what might happen. That, plus the clues that people discover inside the new missions from the previous release, would give people stuff to speculate about in-character, especially if that newspaper was readable in game. (There is an in-game newspaper. But only on the villain side. It's called the Rogue Isles Protector, it shows up under your Contacts list or with the /newspaper command, and it shows you three randomly-generated crime stories related to the Rogue Isles zone you're in. They're missions. No two people will ever see the same newspaper at the same time. So much for that giving people something to talk about.) They used to at least post a single monthly newspaper story about recently released or about to be released content to their website, under the name The Paragon Times. But even then, it was only visible to people who read the forums or regularly checked the website. And even it hasn't been updated since September of last year, when the developer who had been doing it changed jobs. Bring it back, please? And pad it out with Arena League scores and sporting reports about the matches, and made-up book and TV and movie reviews and celebrity gossip from your world, please? And give us a command to bring it up inside the game, so we can refer to it while we're chatting with other players?

Seriously, my word to not just NC NorCal but to the whole industry is this: There are at least hundreds, probably thousands of us in every online role playing game (remember, you do advertise these as role playing games) would would love to keep paying our monthly fees to spend some time in non-combat spaces role playing, if we only had something to role play about. And seriously, we're not even talking about one person's full time job; aren't there enough of us as actual role players who play your game, aren't there enough customers who stopped paying the $15 a month for the lack of this, to pay one writer to work on it one day a week? For crying out loud, please find some way to spend a little bit of the money we're sending in to give us, as the lady sang, something to talk about!

Deny this, idiots.

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 08:56:24 GMT

Does this (David Kravets, "Hans Reiser Leads Police to Nina's Body," "Threat Level" on Wired.com, 7/7/08) mean that finally the blogs I depend on for tech updates and other real news will stop trying to "prove" that the case against Hans Reiser, author of the ReiserFS file system offered in most Linux versions, in the murder of his wife, was "only" circumstantial? And ideally drop the subject altogether, since if I wanted true-crime news, there are plenty of other places I could look for it?

News flash: once the weight of it rises to a certain level? And in the absence of any other plausible suspect? And given motive? "Circumstantial" evidence is actually the best evidence there is, better than eyewitness testimony. In this case, the word you were looking for wasn't "circumstantial," it was "forensic." There was never any meaningful doubt that he did it, and I will be completely damned if I have the slightest idea why that was so hard for nearly every tech journalist to believe.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:00:33 GMT

Happy birthday, bakadragon!

A Melancholy Fourth

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:40:31 GMT

I had a very introspective, mildly depressive Independence Day Weekend. That's not to say that alienne and her roommate didn't do a wonderful job of hosting a barbecue and evening of shooting off fireworks to celebrate my upcoming birthday, and I appreciate it, and I had a good time. I just wasn't really in the mood.

I noticed that this has been the biggest year since St. Louis County outlawed fireworks for illegal home displays in my neighborhood. No, really, the amount of illegal class-C ordinance that people in St. John fired off this year was absolutely unprecedented, easily three or more times as much stuff going off as in any of the previous seven years I've lived here. My first, bitterly satisfactory thought was that maybe they were doing what I was doing, namely celebrating the timely (if insufficiently unpleasant) death of one of the most bitter, vicious, hateful, murderous and destructive racist bigots in the history of American elective office, Jesse Helms. But that's probably wishful thinking on my part. My practical thought is that more people stayed home and spent $100 or $200 on fireworks because it was cheaper than the gas to drive to and from wherever they usually go for the Fourth, down to the lake or to some out of town relative's house or whatever. But along about 11pm on the 4th, a chill voice in the back of my head said in the sepulchral voice of a (faux) premonition, one so improbable that I hesitate to even write it down: "They're celebrating all-out because they, too, sense that this will have been The Last Fourth of July."

Other people have irrational fears of spiders, or of germs, or of knives. I have irrational fears about the end of the democracy. And I know that they're irrational fears. This nation has survived worse than George Bush and come back better than ever afterwards; cripes, if this country survived Calvin Coolidge, it can survive anything. I could give a hundred reasons to believe that my fear is irrational. The election will be held in November, George Bush will not win it, someone other than George Bush will be sworn in in 197 days, and no matter who wins, the country can begin to heal. I'm even reasonably optimistic that the margin will be so wide that even the Republicans can't steal it. But knowing all the reasons that my fear is irrational has not helped me shake this sense of impending doom, a dread so palpable I can only compare it to my early childhood years at the peak of the Cold War, when we came home after a week of duck-and-cover drills to set off fireworks wondering if we'd be able to spot Russian bombers through the fireworks smoke in time to make a futile dash for cover if we had to. This burning need to do something, anything, to somehow prepare for the day that the forces of tyranny move to end the democracy, to cancel all future elections, to cancel all future Fourths of July.

Crazy, huh? But having thought about it way too much this weekend, I think I know why I can't make this fear go entirely away. There is no doubt in my mind that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were stolen. To quote the late George Carlin, "George W. Bush will always be Governor Bush, to me. Because that's the highest office to which he's ever been elected." But it takes more than a stolen election to rattle me, especially a stolen close election. After all, there's even less doubt that the 1960 election was stolen, that JFK was never actually elected President, either, that he was appointed president by Chicago mafiosi who had failed to notice how tightly his brother had converted over to the Reform (anti-mafia) Democrats. But here's the difference between 1960 and 2000, between 1960 and 2004: in nineteen sixty, there was outrage over it. And Bobby Kennedy wielded that outrage like a hammer to crack open the mafia in every city they ruled, to dig them out of their holes, and to crush them like itty bitty bugs. It took decades to finish the project. But still, to this day, people talk about the stolen election of 1960 and there's real anger, real outrage, at least among some of them.

Where's the outrage over Florida in 2000? Where's the outrage over Ohio in 2004? Why hasn't even one low-level person involved in any of the dozens of clearly documented voter suppression drives in both of those races been indicted? Remember, we don't require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to indict; why has no prosecutor even offered to look at the reams and reams of evidence that Robert Kennedy, Jr., and Greg Palast have accumulated? The 2000 "white collar riot" occurred on national television, with the faces of the paid professional Republican staffers who were assaulting police and besieging an election board clearly visible on video; why hasn't even one of them been charged with something, anything? Politics? Well, d'uh, of course. But why are the voters okay with this? Look at your polls, man; it sure as heck isn't out of love for George Bush or the Republican Party. So if no prosecutor will indict, and the people hate the party that stole the elections, then why can people like Antonin Scalia, Karl Rove, Kathleen Harris, Ken Strickland, and so forth walk our streets without a security cordon six blocks wide?

Why aren't they afraid?

If they were afraid, I'd be less afraid. If the people who conspired to steal the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were showing even the slightest nervousness about possible consequences of their past treasons, it'd be easier for me to calm my irrational fear, the little voice in my head that says, "Brad, if that was what they did to change the outcome of a close election, one that they could easily steal? What will they do if it turns out not to be close enough to steal inconspicuously? What will they do when they're desperate? And with so much of our Army and National Guard overseas, and with so much new power granted to the Department of Homeland Security, and with the American people showing so little outrage over the last two stolen elections in a row, if they do try something truly monstrous, who's going to stop them?" I don't quote a lot of song lyrics, but I feel a powerful urge to quote songwriter Stephen Stills, "For What It's Worth:" "Paranoia strikes deep: / Into your life it will creep. / It starts when you're always afraid. / You step out of line, the man come, and take you away." Which friend of mine was it who said that the thing she hates the most about the Bush administration is how much they make her feel like a paranoid, or something like that? But it's not the Bush administration that's got me feeling so nervous, so depressed, so paranoid; it's the voters themselves. I always thought that they valued their freedom, their franchise, enough to be outraged when both were taken away from them, and I'm ever so deeply nervous that they don't look nearly angry enough.

Maybe Obama Actually Means It: Faith-Based

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:04:17 GMT

(Editorial note: Happy American Independence Day, or Fourth of July. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interrupt this two-part series and insert a traditional, even for me, bit of patriotic glurge, because I really am like that. Fortunately, I came to my senses. There is nothing more patriotic, during a Presidential election year, than actually discussing with my fellow Americans what principles we want to be governed under for the next four years. So screw glurge; politics is my patriotism.)

This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives legal immunity to the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying on in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.

And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?

What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.

But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.

So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.

Maybe Obama Actually Means It: FISA

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:31:54 GMT

For the last couple of days, the news has become increasingly unwatchable to me, because it drives me stark raving nuts when everybody, and I mean everybody, who's speaking up on a news story has it wrong. Or, in this case, two news stories: Barack Obama's announced support for telecom immunity, and Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to reform and expand the Bush Administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, elevating it even higher in importance in his administration than it was in this one. And all week long, almost every single reporter and analyst, regardless of their politics, has read these two stories the same way. Senator Obama, they have concluded, is "tacking towards the center," announcing policy positions that he doesn't believe or doesn't care about, in order to distance himself from the (presumably unpopular) Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, to make himself appear to be more "moderate" and therefore less "radical" or "liberal" to the (presumed to be anti-liberal) American voting public. Analyst after analyst has quoted the axiom that all Democratic nominees change their positions to appear more liberal while they're campaigning for their party's primary and then, once they have the delegate lead sewed up, change their positions again to be more "centrist;" that supposedly the Republicans do the same thing, tacking right in the primaries and tacking center-ward after the primaries.

Because obviously Barack Obama can't possibly mean what he says when he says he supports the warrantless wiretapping program that allows the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on any phone call, as long as what they at least say that they're trying to do is only pay attention to the calls that are between (actual or suspected) enemy agents and (actual or possible) enemy contacts overseas, he can't possibly really accept the argument, implicit in this bill, that if the NSA secretly tells a telecom company that the President approved this tap, the company should secretly and immediately comply, right? It's got to be just election-year posturing, right? Keith Olbermann and John Dean have both been going on all week about how they're just 100% sure that it must be a secretive conspiracy on Barack Obama's part to lull the Bush administration and the telcos into a false sense of security, then spring the trap on them with criminal, not civil, prosecutions next January. Right?

Wrong.

I think he actually means it.

And I'm a little bit disappointed, but not terribly surprised. And I'd rather he didn't, but I don't care enough to base my vote on it, not least of which because on this issue, there's no meaningful difference between him and John McCain. But that's not the point that I want to, that I feel that I need to, explain. Let me explain why I think he means it. (Again. I explained most of this, in part at least, when the warrantless wiretapping program first leaked to the public, I'm pretty sure.)

The fact of the matter is that going all the way back to the deployment of the telegraph, all the way back to the Civil War, in every war the US has ever fought, our spy services have spied on Americans in total violation of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But rather than detail it war by war, let me point out to you the history of the NSA's original warrantless wiretapping program: Operation Ivy Bells, 1957 to 1975.

The National Security Agency as we now know it was founded by President Truman in 1947, to collect most of our WWII signals-intercept capabilities into a single agency and retool it from spying on our German and Japanese enemies on behalf of our Russian allies (and ourselves), to spying on our Russian (and Chinese, but mostly Russian) enemies on behalf of our German and Japanese allies (and ourselves). You can't entirely keep a secret that big, certainly not once a department gets big enough to get its own huge headquarters building, but for the first roughly 18 years of its life, the long-standing joke was that the acronym NSA stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything." Rumors got out, but officially the very existence of the NSA was classified Top Secret. During the Cold War they mostly specialized in intercepting and decoding radio signals, but they did have one very, very ambitious phone-tapping program. It used customized Navy submarines to "tap" the trans-Pacific phone cables. Originally they only tapped a local underwater cable, but it expanded to tap all deep water telephone cables going into the Soviet Union. Yes, all calls from anyone, including any innocent civilians, who called anybody in Russia, including ones they had no 4th Amendment right to hear, were recorded, brought back, skimmed for useful intelligence, translated, and if any was found, it was put to use; then the tapes were erased and reused. The program only ended in 1975 when one of the NSA's own people sold the secret of the program to the KGB for cash. But even then, the American public didn't hear about it.

Why do we know anything at all about the NSA, officially, now? Because in 1971, President Nixon ordered the NSA to eavesdrop on all anti-Vietnam-War groups, too, also without a warrant, on the shallow excuse that some of them might secretly be controlled by Soviet spies. This so offended someone, and we're still not even sure who, that they blew the whistle, eventually leading to Congressional hearings in October, 1975: the famous Church Committee. It was in the Church Committee hearings that the government was grudgingly forced to admit that the NSA even existed, and that it had been used to spy on Nixon's political opponents. Even then, Ivy Bell never came up, not until long after the statute of limitations had run out. But no further attempts to set up any program even vaguely like it were set up until 1978 or later. Why 1978? Because having abused the privilege of spying on Americans for political reasons, the NSA was put under a figleaf of court oversight, and I do mean a figleaf, their own captive and pretty much entirely complaisant Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. At which point the NSA went back into the business of spying on Americans, in total secrecy, without ever being turned down once, despite never having to turn in anything resembling enough evidence for a real search warrant, for a bit more than a decade. And that whole time, there were people mounting legal challenges to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, arguing (quite correctly) that it was a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution. And they got nowhere. You know why they got nowhere? Because the American government, including the courts, are run by grownups. And their attitude was, "who cares?"

They allowed FISA and the FISC/NSA to go forward, spying on Americans, because they knew that the real safeguard on Americans' actual liberty wasn't the FISC. It was the teleco employees themselves who'd have to install and maintain the taps, or who would inevitably discover them in the course of their work. It was the NSA's own employees, its own culture, who were trusted because the one and only time any White House ever abused the NSA for political reasons, somebody blew the whistle. And when they did, Nixon didn't have the guts to even try to make up a plausible national security reason for why he'd tapped Democratic Party offices and anti-war activists. I remember my Dad, and other adults I knew at the time, disgustedly arguing that if Nixon'd had the guts to say, "Yeah, I did it. I had evidence that wasn't good enough to get a warrant or to make a public accusation, but too good to completely ignore, that there was a Soviet spy in there somewhere, and I had to find out if it was true. So I had spies break into that party's offices. It turned out it wasn't true, so I didn't tell anybody because that would have unfairly tarred them with a false accusation, and we didn't use the information we got improperly. Would you rather I had ignored rumors of Soviet spies inside a major political party?", then he might have successfully finished his second term.

But anyway, afterwards, as far as everybody in any kind of a position of authority in Washington was concerned, the Watergate impeachment hearings and the Church Commission hearings proved that the FISC was a pointless exercise; that the real precaution was the guaranteed certainty that so many people would know if the White House was abusing its spying capabilities, one of the people who knew would have a conscience attack. And that's what's so uncomfortable about the whole Terrorist Surveillance Program at AT&T and other telecos, the warrantless wiretaps that let the NSA skim the entire Internet backbone and all long-distance phone lines for evidence of al Qaeda plots: nobody, and I mean nobody, has come up with even a suggestion that anybody in the NSA used those taps for anything but legitimate purposes, or even a hint that any information that they weren't supposed to be looking for was passed to the White House, or even a single clue that any actual American's privacy or political rights were impaired in even the tiniest way ... but somebody blew the whistle anyway. And that's not actually supposed to happen. Implicit in the relationship between America's spy agencies and America's telecom companies that goes all the way back to the original American Telegraph system in the 1860s is an agreement that everybody would keep their mouths shut unless something went wrong, and that agreement was breached.

So if you think that no matter what he was told or how famously fair-minded a man he is, Barack Obama can't possibly be really okay with a bill that forgives every telco for participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program if they claim that they at least thought that the President had ordered it? That he must only be claiming to be okay with it for political advantage, for fear of being called soft on terror, or to reassure swing voters, or to establish the appearance of some distance between himself and the left-wing blogosphere? I'm pretty sure that you're wrong.

(And an irrelevant aside: my Bush Countdown Clock from NationalNightmare.com reminds me that there are now only 200 days left in the Bush Administration. And for much of that time, Congress is going to be in recess. Rejoice that there's really not much harm that the man can do in that little time, with no more resources or authority than he has left.)

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:40:27 GMT

Happy birthday, theferrett! Keep showing me how it's done, man.