The Problem With Health Care Legislation May Actually Not Have Anything to Do With Health Care

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something most people aren't thinking about, and most people probably don't want to admit (or will admit). The problem right now in today's political environment isn't health care, even though it does seem to be the main focus. Like most major issues, health care is serving as a metaphor for what is really wrong. What's wrong is not health care. What's wrong is that our country is stuck in at a nexus, and NO ONE has a clue where to take it next.

Think about it. The United States has been rudderless for decades now. We've been going on autopilot towards...well, to be honest, no one really knows where we're heading. All we know is that we seem to be reactive against things that we don't want. We don't want terrorists. We don't want unemployment. We don't want wars. We don't want cars speeding up and crashing into walls. We don't want crime. We don't want taxes, bad health care, mean people, too many commercials, men kissing on television (okay, some people don't want that, and others REALLY want that), pirates, high prices, corruption, evil banks, Wall Street profiteers and, well, the list seems somewhat endless, although I'd go on a limb and say we don't want long lists that seem to go on forever.

What we don't seem to know is what we do want. Oh, I don't mean intangibles. I know we all want "peace", money and Megan Fox (okay, some people want that and others REALLY don't want that). But we really don't have a grasp on what we really want and need. Throughout most of the US's history, we were at war with someone, or were fearing a war with someone. I'm sorry, but Iraq, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Osama Bin Ladin, and terrorism is NOT a war. Almost all of those are intangibles that really have no substance. Iraq is a war we didn't want or need that is now a mess we have to clean up. Afghanistan is a cesspool that has needed cleaning for several centuries now and has been a failure of numerous administrations, hegemonies and various dictators. The Taliban is another metaphor that has no substance to most normal Americans anymore than Team America: World Police was an accurate depiction of US Foreign Policy. Osama Bin Ladin is a spectre of an entity that we keep bringing back to scare little children who happen to be Republicans, live in Texas and vote for Sarah Palin. Terrorism? Um, a state of being is not a process of war. Terrorism is something you do to scare governments; it's not a thing you fight anymore than a War on Fear makes sense.

We need direction. And we need some where to actually go with that direction. Once, we needed to go to the Moon. So did Ralph Kramden, but we got there (he didn't). We elected a man who claimed he had a vision for America, but so far, that vision has been more like a new pair of glasses. Yes, it helps us see better, but it doesn't make the picture any more palatable. The kind of direction we need is the kind that leads us to a positive future of tangible benefits, not a potential esoteric plane of existence where we might feel better.

In the process, we have people out of work who need jobs. We have people without health care who need long term care. We have cities that cannot afford to put police officers in the streets, and even when they do, we have populations of people who don't even trust them, teamed up with populations of people who have been fending for themselves for so long that they've given up the Hobbesian perspective of trusting the gatekeepers.

The United States needs a vision of an actual future where tangible things can be worked for. People can work together towards an ideal if that ideal makes sense, but there seems to be way too much "trust me and all will be okay" in current day policy decisions. There is also way too much corruption in the ranks of the people who are supposed to be leading us towards that type of future.

Do I have an actual answer? No. I'm not the person who needs to be doing that in the first place. I never claimed to be a politician, nor do I even claim to have the best interests of the greater good at heart. I just know that listening to self-motivated individuals talk about how they know best about health care is not leading us to answers that will help the rest of us. Obama had one thing right during the election, and that was the concept of town halls. What he's not getting right is how they should be used. We need leaders that stop talking to us with great speeches about how they're going to continue doing the status quo in hopes of making things better. What we need are for those leaders to put together town halls and listen to the people. Listen to those constituents who put them in office in the first place.

Unfortunately, listening in this country involves money and lobbyists. As long as that continues, the cesspool is all we have available to us for future development.

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The Problem is Simple: Lawmakers don't know how to stop spending our money

It seems almost as if lawmakers in this country have no clue that to fix the problems in front of them, they have to stop trying to fix the problems caused by them. An example: Grand Rapids. On May 4th, Grand Rapids is going to ask taxpayers to increase city taxes to solve the budget problems of Grand Rapids. Before that, the city government asked the people of the city to come up with "ideas" to solve the problems of the budget, OR they would have to start cutting essential services. A lot of the comments that were entered by citizens were mainly "stop spending our money on stupid stuff" but that's the problem. The government NEVER sees any of the money it spends as problematic. The problem is always that there's not enough money to spend. So it asks for more.

Well, taxpayers aren't really excited about picking up the additional tab. Here's a story of taxpayers saying just that, in the Grand Rapids Press. You see, the average citizen is being asked to tighten his or her belt but the government doesn't believe it should be held to the same standard. Instead, it believes it needs more money to do the things it needs to be done.

To anyone who has ever worked for a large corporation, or the government, it is not hard to see how this waste accumulates. First off, whenever there is excess money, there is NEVER an attempt to put that money back into the system. Instead, that money is seen as extra, and it spent as part of the extra fund capacity. If you don't believe me, it might be interesting to ask what has happened to the money that was paid back to the federal government from the loans that were made to the national banks. Was that money added back to the national coffers, or was it treated as "already spent" so it because excess? I'd like to think it's the former, but I'm willing to bet a government free lunch on the latter.

The Grand Rapids tax thing is really interesting because it is asking for an increase from 1.3 percent to 1.5 percent tax for those who live in Grand Rapids, and from 0.65 to 0.75 percent tax for those who don't live in Grand Rapids, but work here. What's interesting about that last category is that it increases a tax rate on people who have absolutely no input on the decision whatsoever. They don't live in Grand Rapids, so they don't get to vote here. Ever hear of taxation without representation? Apparently not.

But even so, the city of Grand Rapids is asking for more money to do what it is already supposed to be doing. If it doesn't get it, it threatens to cut off vital services. It's interesting how they never threaten to cut off non-vital services, which is usually the salaries of people who don't really have much of an impact on the city itself, like people who make budget decisions. Sorry, but you're not as essential as you think you are. A cop is essential. A firefighter is essential. A bean counter? Not to essential. But as you are the ones who make the decisions, of course you're never going to cut yourselves.

So the answer is to ask the taxpayers to give them more money. Governments all over the place are doing this, and it's actually pissing off taxpayers all over the place. What they are discovering (and California is my favorite example of this) is that the taxpayers, when asked, say no. They're not interested in more taxes, special levies, or any other legalese wordings that cause them to pay more money. Especially when they feel they are being threatened by their government if they don't pay up.

What government never seems to understand is that it's not really all that essential other than the immediate services. As more and more government gets involved, it entrenches itself and makes itself believe it is even higher on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs than it really is. And people don't tend to support them.

Instead, what seem to see most of the time is the absurd amount of corruption that is taking place in government. In Michigan alone, the amount corruption in the news is astouding. Here's a small sample of just recent stuff:

Grand Rapids school board has no plans for nepotism policy despite member's son Kenneth D. Hoskins' conviction for sex crimes with students

DTE Energy, MichCon suspend energy-saving rebates, but customers still pay surcharge

Grand Haven school board member Brandon Hall found guilty of larceny

Holland Councilman Jerome Thomas-Kobes arraigned on drinking-and-driving charge

Kenneth D. Hoskins sentenced to three to 15 years behind bars for sex with Grand Rapids students

There are a ton more stories, but you get the idea from that little smattering of stories from the last two days. I don't even need to get into the cesspool of government that has been Detroit (although arguably it is supposedly getting better, according to feel good reports coming out of the Detroit Free Press).

The point being: At what point does government feel it is doing a solid enough job to ask for more money? Really. At what point?

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The audience as shadow

You might say I've come to a conclusion of sorts. I realized that the whole online thing isn't really working for me. I have a blog, but no one really reads it. I have a Facebook account, but no one really communicates with me on there, and all I end up receiving are notifications of how someone is having a bad day or how someone found a lost turtle in Farmville or something stupid like that.

For me, the whole online thing never worked out. Never found a girlfriend online. Never found conversations. Never got into online gaming, aside from MMORPGs. Really nothing on the social fabric has been my thing through online.

Yeah, I play World of Warcraft. And I still will. I'm just going to take a different direction on everything else.

I'm not leaving online. I'm just dumping everything social networking that's online. Never worked for me. Adds more frustration than anything else.

I shut down my facebook account yesterday. Figure no one will really notice. Or care.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to start to shed my web site as well. I've been paying $10 a month for YEARS to a company that has been getting my business that amounts to me talking to myself. Sure, I have a friend or two who reads the blog, but honestly, I can hold a coversation with those people in person. I don't need a blog to communicate with them.

The website was an experiment in beta for me because it was how I was going to keep in touch with my writing fans. They never materialized. Neither did my career as a writer. I've been writing for vanity alone, and I'm the only one pretty much reading it. What's the use in that? It's like keeping a diary and leaving it out all of the time in hopes that someone will accidentally read it. What kind of game is that?

So, I'm going to be shutting down my web site over the next few weeks. I might blog here and there much as a smoker still tokes up every now and then but knows that he shouldn't, even though he swears he quit the habit a long time ago.

I've found the whole social networking experiment to be interesting, mainly because it works for some people, but it didn't work for me. I'm a writer, not a blogger. I need an audience. It's never been about me or about writing for myself. Without an audience, well, I'm nothing. It's like being in the 1991 August coup in the Soviet Union, being Boris Yeltsin and then trying to stop the coup by talking to yourself in the shower. It might make you feel better at the time, but if there's no one listening, it doesn't do any good. If Yeltsin never had his audience, all we'd know about him and those days in August was that some fat Russian guy danced on a tank. But then, we'd probably not even know that. He'd just be some fat guy with a lot of things to say and no one to hear him.

That's what I feel like. I have a lot to say, and no one ever bothered to listen. Oh sure, a few did, but they were just being polite. And I reciprocated by listening to them. That's social networking, not writing. Never been my thing. It's like small talk. Never did it, and it's probably why I don't handle dates well. I hate small talk. It leads to nothing and is irrelevant. I hate irrelevancy, which is exactly what my web page has been all of this time.

I stared this web site with the idea that the audience would eventually come around. It never did. I thought I had a lot to say about politics, being a strange, anarchist political scientist. No one ever bothered to listen. You have to be someone with media clout. That's not me. I write humor. People find that irrelevant. So nothing comes of it. I thought I had a lot to say about writing, but no one cares, and everyone else ia a writer. Just ask them. They think they are. So who cares about what another one has to say? I thought I had a lot to say about communication theory, but again, no one cares.

And like the Pearls Before Swine cartoon where the pig is constantly being reminded by the rat that his blog is irrelevant, I'm tired of pretending it's ever going to change.

So, if you have any final comments, please do so soon, because soon there may not be a place to do so. It's okay if you don't comment, however. I'm kind of used to it. I can go off into the sunset without the attention. I'm kind of used to it.

If this ends up being my last post (which is probably not the case), I wish you all well and hope you find what you're seeking in whatever venue you seek it out. I'm saving myself $10 a month and going back to realizing that only my stuffed animals ever really cared what I had to say. And sometimes I suspect they're just being kind because they have to live with me.

Stuffed animals can be that way sometimes....

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LOST vs. President of the United States: LOST wins

Turns out that President Obama was going to give a state of the union on February 2, which in case you don't know, also happens to be the date that LOST is going to premiere its first episode of the final season. I think he finally realized that when it comes down to it, the people wanted LOST a lot more than it wanted a speech from the president. So, he decided not to go up against LOST.

There's a much bigger issue here that's not being addressed, and that's the fact that the President of the United States had to change the date of his speech because people actually believe the network premiere of LOST is more significant than his speech. Kind of tells you something, doesn't it? In the beginning, I was going to make this big criticism of the American people about this, but then it also got me thinking. Why would LOST be more important to them than the president giving a speech? Perhaps it has more to do with the realization that the affairs of state are becoming less relevant to the common person so that such a thing might actually happen. I mean, I think about myself, and honestly, I don't really care all that much about what's happening nationally these days, when I used to care a lot. And the reason I don't? Because it really doesn't have anything to do with me, and if you really think about it, it probably never will. Oh, we can make arguments that somehow it's significant, but it's about as significant as the wars of Louis XIV were important to the common person of France. Yeah, it's important, but it's not really.

And that's my thought for today. All I can say is that I'm glad that LOST isn't going to be postponed because of this speech. I'd rather watch the show. Sorry. That's just how it is.

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How far have we come?

While in the process of reading Rebecca Solnit’s “A Paradise Built in Hell”, it has become apparent that one of the recurrent themes throughout the book is not just the negative perceptions that lead to abusive behavior, but a certain socialist perspective she has in pointing out that the major abuses come not from evil people, but from altruistic-appearing, powerful entities who use their stature and power to push their own status quo agenda upon those who might act against them, even if that is just their perception rather than reality.

The San Francisco earthquake example is the first she uses, but what was very obvious throughout this entire section of the book is that all of the major abuses that took place were power play operations that were designed to maintain a certain status quo of power, not necessarily of status quo circumstances. The military responded with force not because of a need to suppress looters and evil happenings, but because of a desire of the local post commander to keep a certain state of power in operation, something that could only be done by having soldiers act with violent actions towards victimized citizens, often as a prelude to perceived threats that were probably never going to occur.

She follows this up by showing that some of the major political figures who existed in San Francisco at the turn of the century were individuals who were already caught up in class politics with challengers, and that the reaction to the earthquake was used as further leverage in long-running battles. The acts of political figures against Universal Railroad and other union suffragists were waged as preemptive strikes to keep power from changing hands, even though much of the power in question was economic, rather than political and military. The political forces in place used the opportunities presented to them from the earthquake to make sure that such economic forces did not act against them, and that when the emergencies were over, that they would not have the chance to rise up again.

The military’s cooperation in this whole mess is scary, because often it is discussed how the dichotomy of the military and civilization power structure serves to keep the United States in its state of citizen-first separation. In her reporting, it is observed that the military often acted with the mindset that the citizens were to be feared and subjected to violence rather than protected. In history books, and especially in the words of the military, the reaction of the US armed services during this period was exemplary, saving the people, but in reality the reaction of the US military was one of violence, where citizens were seen as secondary citizens, subject to the whims of individual soldiers who had little problem with opening fire on citizens seen in the ruins, treating them as looters, thieves and criminals before ever considering why they might be there in the first place. This sort of mentality still exists within the military, and no one ever really questions it, because it is the exact type of wording we receive when we hear that the US military has attacked “insurgents” whenever an air strike takes place where the victims are often unknown because strikes of that nature are not known for their exactness. Quite often, our military treats any skirmish and death as “us versus them” where those who make up the “them” have to prove themselves to be worthy of victim status, or they are forever considered enemy combatants who are casualties of war. That is the exact approach the military took towards San Francisco after the earthquake. Today, many citizens who were shot and killed by soldiers, acting on their own decisions, are still seen as the guilty party. What no one bothers to point out is that soldiers in the United States, even back then, were not authorized to open fire on citizens unless they were acting in the interests of an actual martial law situation. There was no official martial law declared in San Francisco back then; the military acted on its own, taking its orders from a military general who declared martial law in theory alone. The president, the governor, and even the mayor (the last two not actually having the power to do so) never instigated martial law in that emergency. The deaths that were caused happened as a result of soldiers taking the law into their own hands. No, that fact has never really been discussed all that much. It’s not really just a footnote in history, but it doesn’t even get treated as that.

The book, although somewhat condemning in its style of writing, does present a pretty strong case for why we really should be paying more attention to these sorts of things. It took only an unannounced emergency to turn a civilized city into a stomping ground for injustice. When it finally ended, no one was really held accountable, and to this day, we don’t even teach what really happened.

If anything should come out of a book like this, that should be the lesson. We’re still the victims of “the winner writes the text books” philosophies in this country. We haven’t moved that much further than such barbaric actions. Unfortunately, every time we try to take a step back and pretend that we’re some enlightened society that is so distanced from the bad days, we should remember that we’re really only a disaster away from falling down that rabbit hole again, even in the greatest, freedom loving societies all around us.

One of my biggest criticisms of modern name America is that I don’t believe we’re all that as enlightened as we like to think we are. It was only a century ago when we enslaved a great deal of the population, actually arguing that it was the “right” thing to do. It was less than four decades ago that we were quite willing to separate parts of the population from drinking from the same water fountain, convinced that there was some morality involved in such decisions. Every day, we find ourselves facing our own selves in the fact that we do not believe we could ever be like that again, yet everywhere around us, someone is still acting in that type of interest. Granted, the victims keep changing, but the attitudes do not. And the reasoning still exists just as much as it always did. We always claim morality, either through religious grounds or through some other equally mundane process of whatever makes us feel better.

Some day, we’ll get it right. We’re just not there yet.

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The Hobbesian Model in Retrospect: A case study approach to studying creation of government in online games, such as Ultima Online

One of the hidden attributes of philosophy is the realization that no matter how much stock you put into a theory, the chances of that theory ever being challenged by real world circumstances are so miniscule that such events will either never happen or happen so far after someone’s lifetime that criticism is irrelevant anyway. Well, let’s take a look at one of the fundamental concepts of political philosophy that even non-theorists are required to study ad nausea: Why do societies and civilizations come together in the first place?

We all know the Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau models that stem from these conversations, and we all know how one buys into one theory or the other as to why people get together and allow themselves to be ruled over, or why someone gains power in what should be an almost impossible act of acquirement. I mean, what rational person gives over his or her power to some total stranger all in the name of protection from danger and a desire to avoid loss of belongings or life? If you look at that dynamic today, it seems almost ridiculous because why should any normal person feel that others should be in charge of him or her just because one is a part of every day society? Political scientists like to think they have it all figured out, depending up on what their particular bent is on the theory, but what I’ve always found fascinating is how little the average person thinks about these things, because the average person is the one who gave up power in the first place and continues to do it on a daily basis every day he or she does exactly what government tells him or her to do.

But before going off on that tangent, who was right? Did we get together to create a society for the sake of community, or was it something even more basic like Hobbes projects, and we just got together because we’re scared to death of each other, feeling that we’re probably a lot better off with some neutral administrator than we are trying to fend for ourselves? Unfortunately, we’re so far into the game that we no longer have to even ask why we got into it in the first place. We’re incapable of getting out of it, so why should it matter why we got into it way back before we even started writing histories about it?

Fortunately, there was a stable platform where this question was being asked, and there were a lot of people participating to give us exactly the answers we might be seeking about this situation. To find the answer, we have to go to the one place that scientists are still apprehensive about going: Computer games.

The problem with trying to test political theories, or even just philosophical theories, with computer games in the past is that they have mainly been seen as an environment that gives us access to children, and of course there is the stigma that we are almost always talking about a game of some sorts. Thus, scientists avoid being seen in that medium, because it then indicates that their science isn’t scholarly, so we miss a lot of information that is both fascinating and ground-breaking. Fortunately, we’re a little more enlightened these days concerning such issues, so a lot of scholarly research is coming from the genre of computer games.

But even more important is that games have evolved into sharing an agenda with another one of those new areas for exploitation, and that is the world of social networking. With the advent of Myspace, Facebook and other networking tools, scientists are now finding themselves with access to a lot of social data that they only conjectured about before. In the past, a scientist would study a bunch of students at some particular college or series of colleges, almost to the point where we probably know more about sophomores in college than any other entity on the face of the planet.

But something new happened in the 1990s, and it passed by a lot of social scientists without them even realizing it was happening. One of these games that came along was called Ultima Online. It was created by a group of computer gaming professionals at a company called Origin, and it was the culmination of a series of medieval setting role-playing games, called Ultima, which had, at the time, recently received resounding success with its seventh version, Ultima VII. It would continue on with several other continuations, specifically Ultima VIII and Ultima IX, but when Ultima Online was released, it was to the fanfare that was created from the global success of Ultima VII, a game where you arrived in the world of Britannia as the immortal avatar, a human who has achieved a sense of full enlightenment and brings that enlightenment to the welcoming, and not so welcoming, people of Britannia. The originator of the series, and the owner of Origin, was Richard Garriott. He would come to be known as Lord British, the sovereign who lived within the lands of Britannia.

Ultima Online was one of the first graphically enhanced multi user dungeons, where many people could play the same game at the same time. To handle the expected player capacity, different “shards” were developed, which housed exact duplications of the world of Britannia. The explanation was that the wizard Mondain had broken a gem that shattered into shards, each one being a different representation of the known world. The entire world of each shard was identical, but once the game went live, the world would change demonstrably, so that if you lived in one shard, you might not recognize the environment in another. An example was an early misunderstanding of this fact when I found a house near the city of Yew that had a training dummy in it I could use to train my fighting skills. Being on another shard, and not recognizing this nuance, I found myself wandering that same area near Yew, wondering why I could not find the training dummy house, no matter how much I searched.

A feature that made Ultima Online unique was that you could be attacked by other players, if you were wandering around outside of the safety of a protected town. In town, the guards would kill anyone who committed a crime, like stealing or attacking another player without cause, but outside of their protection, you were pretty much on your own. In the game, they called this player killing, or “pking”. At one point, a new player would realize that leaving a city could be dangerous, and thus, would either stick close to town, or be very cognizant of surroundings when traveling.

This brought about an interesting dynamic that leads to the focus of this study. At one point, there was the realization that going outside of town might be dangerous, but there was an entire world out there to explore. Either you hid in town and missed everything outside of town, or you took a chance. In the beginning, you took a chance alone, and after some time, you were probably killed by someone who made his or her livelihood by preying on unsuspecting tourists. But slowly, something emerged that acted as a compensation to this sort of behavior: The player town emerged.

The player town was a collection of self-made homes that its owners banded together to create a small society. Leaders were elected, commerce was developed and encouraged, and, most importantly, security was developed. Players did not have the advantage of automated guards appearing in their towns when criminals appeared and acted in such interests, so players had to become the guards themselves, often serving as militias that acted against anyone who worked against the interests of the town. As these towns grew stronger and larger, the security they offered grew as well. If a town member was attacked near town, the town militias would band together and go after the pkers. Eventually, these militias became armies, and from time to time, an attack against town members, or to people allied to the town, would result in a force of players who would travel to the power base of those who orchestrated such negative actions, often leading to deadly force.

In a very short time, players banded together and created small civilizations within the game that had their own leadership, and quite often their only reason for banding together was the protection of all. Others would join to engage in safe commerce, because it was often difficult to find customers outside of major cities, but customers often sought out player cities rather than game-run cities as the venders in player cities were a lot more accommodating to dealing economically than a system that was mainly computer driven (the major cities, which would not allow the placement of player venders).

For years, this was the model of city creation in Britannia. Some cities rose or fell based on how they handled outside elements. Some of them became famous, while others lasted mere moments before disappearing forever. An example of one of these cities that lasted for several years of renown was Shannara, named after the famed novels by Terry Brooks. This was also one of the cities that serves as an excellent case study for the changes that occurred after the introduction of Trammel.

Trammel is one of those concepts that can lead a former Ultima Online player to immediately start frothing at the mouth. It is probably one of the most controversial moves an online gaming company has ever done, short of the New Gaming Experience that was introduced to Star Wars Galaxies by Sony Online Entertainment, which for sake of simplicity, changed an online game so drastically that it is still unclear to this day as to whether it saved or destroyed a game that was seriously suffering in its ability to maintain its player base. Players had been leaving SWG in droves over many changes made in the game by SOE over the years, and this was supposed to fix things, but the controversy over the drastic changes have divided that player community forever, often leading to vehement disagreements between current and former players.

But Trammel was an animal of a completely different nature. Ultima Online was attracting a lot of player killers in the game, and over a particular Christmas holiday season, the number of pkers and thieves, another annoying distraction to players in the game, increased drastically. The UO message boards were filled with angry players who demanded that Electronic Arts (the new owners of Origin who had pushed Garriott from the company after the purchase) do something about it. The result was Trammel.

Trammel was a mirror world of Britannia that was added to every shard. The player would cross through a portal to this new world, and it would be a place where pkers could no longer attack unsuspecting players, and thieves could not steal from anyone as well. Those desiring the player versus player experience could travel through the portal to the old world, now known as Felucca, and everything that happened in the past was still active in Felucca. But Trammel was safe.

So, the majority of the player base moved to Trammel. Felucca became a graveyard, which was fitting because the lands of Britannia were made to appear dark and forbidding, much like a graveyard. Very few players decided to remain in Felucca.

This killed player cities almost overnight because those that existed were now in the “dangerous” land, and some people made it a habit to not even visit Felucca anymore. Then, after a number of months, the developers of the game opened up housing spaces in Trammel in what was a huge land rush that rivaled the land rush that took place in the prairies of the great northwest of the United States. The evening that housing was turned on was an event itself, with almost the entire player base signed on to grab pieces of land that they were looking forward to, finally being able to put down a huge house instead of relying on tiny little houses that had been all that could be placed in what land was left of Felucca in the old days of Ultima Online.

After housing was opened up on Trammel, the first player cities were created there as well. Liberalis was one of the first player run cities to launch on the Napa Valley server. However, after it was created, it quickly died out. Then, with almost every city that came after, the cities lasted a short while and then were abandoned.

What was discovered was that the reason for creating player cities was gone. Without the danger of pkers, without needing a place where people could gather for safety, other than the game’s manufactured cities, there was no reason to put one’s effort into such areas. The guilds that were active during this period slowly dwindled away, players finding themselves playing other games instead of Ultima Online. There seemed to be little challenge left in the game; without a need to band together, the point of Ultima Online was pretty much lost.

Games like World of Warcraft and Everquest helped players of UO realize what was missing in the game, specifically quests and something to do. Ultima Online was one of the few sandbox games, meaning that the players made the environment, not the game designers. Without a need to band together to create societies, which was crucial in the older days of Ultima Online, there was really no reason to continue playing the game.

Ultima Online is still around today, but it is a shadow of its former self, many of its prominent players having gone onto different games, often brining their entire clans with them as well.

For political philosophy, the Ultima Online experience offers a unique opportunity to explore the nature of individuals to band together and create societies and civilizations. Unfortunately, few games since then have offered an environment that produces a similar necessity, so it is unknown if there will be an opportunity to view such a dynamic again. But it is important that social scientists keep their eyes on such possibilities, because like Ultima Online, those opportunities often do not last long, and once discovered can change so quickly that the opportunity may be lost before it was ever realized.

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Solving Afghanistan requires knowing what you want to do in the country in the first place

There's an interesting, somewhat irrelevant article on CNN from a former Soviet general who occupied Afghanistan during the era of the Soviet Union. The article makes the mistake of allowing the general to make the argument that the United States is doing the same thing in Afghanistan that the Soviet Union was: Installing a government that is friendly to the occupying country.

And that's the problem right there. The reason the United States is in Afghanistan was NEVER about establishing democracy. Oh sure, we're slowly coming to try to do that, but that's not why we went there. We forget why we went there when we invaded. We didn't go there to conduct a regime change. We went there to kick some ass. Kick some Taliban ass and to kick it all across Afghanistan until we couldn't find anymore Taliban ass to kick anymore. Then we should have done what any angry mob does: Go home.

Our reason for being in Afghanistan was vengeance. There's really no denying that. We went there because we were certain the Taliban were hiding Al Qaeda. So we invaded and slaughtered the Taliban stronghold. Now, well, we're sitting around and letting them come back to power.

What we should have done was wipe them out and then leave. Maybe stop for ice cream, but then just leave.

We've never been all that good at nation building. No one really is. As the Soviet general argues, the Afghans are going to do what the Afghans want to do. So let them. And if they piss us off again, we send in the Air Force, kick some ass, buy some more ice cream and then leave again.

That's really what we should be doing in Afghanistan. Sitting around and hoping they'll get together and make nice is never going to work. Sorry. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.

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Living in Interesting Times

As the old Chinese curse has finally become a part of our every day lives, we now live in interesting times. Living in a country that has not been in an official war in many decades, it is somewhat ironic that we are now living through a number of wars in name only, like the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, and most recently, the War on Terrorism. We have soldiers stationed overseas in numerous areas, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, depending upon where you place Afghanistan on your version of an official map. Some of those troops are stationed in peaceful environments, while others are part of sweep-up operations, and others can arguably be considered to be part of actual wartime conditions. But ironically, to use that Morissette-inspired word again, we’re not in an actual war right now. We’re just in places with guns and a readiness to use them, and unfortunately sometimes in a necessity to use them as well.

Which brings me to the subject of this little scribe, and that’s the recent act of violence that occurred on US military property, the attack that took place at Fort Hood, Texas. I don’t think any American argues that the incident was a definite act of criminality by a very disturbed individual who had been entrusted as an American soldier. And I don’t think very many Americans would disagree that this individual is probably someone who was acting in a definite mode that could be construed as illegal, and possibly even of an escalatory nature that would lead to a state of war, if we could actually attribute his actions to a country that was working against the United States. Unfortunately, the culprit was an American, working for the United States, who went nuts and killed a great deal of Americans all in the name of some psychotic delusion that he was fulfilling a personal vendetta against demons that most Americans will probably never understand, nor will most ever even try.

What is truly disturbing is that there are those who feel it necessary to attribute this man’s actions to the state of terrorism, hoping to somehow link him to some ideology that they dislike and hope to cast further distaste upon by making such a connection. There is little doubt in my mind that he was probably aligning himself with some religious idealism and movement that he believed was righteous and virtuous in his mind, and I would also not be surprised if he somehow hoped that might one day be linked with their movements and ideals as well. However, that does not necessarily mean there is an actual connection to those organizations, other than circumstantial and fanciful in nature. Yet, there are those who are attempting to make it seem as if this lone gunner is tied to terrorist actions because a dictionary definition can somehow equate his actions with bad linkage, much like Saddam Hussein was linked with 9/11 just because it served a political purpose to make such an argument.

It is that same type of linkage that appears to be making its way into political rhetoric today. And this is unfortunate because in order to truly deal with this pseudo war on terrorism means an actual ability to actually pigeon hole it enough so that such connections can be made; otherwise, linkage is useless other than as a rhetorical rallying tool. As a mechanism to actually get things done, real linkage is necessary because if there is a real connection, which there is not, then by attacking the foundation of the circumstances that led to the attack, we might actually fundamentally serve to defeat the very nature of terrorism. And unfortunately, that will never happen if we were to do so. Think of it this way: If there is no connection ever made, and it’s doubtful that there ever will be, then if we manage to discover what drove this person into psychotic levels of disturbed behavior, and we manage to eliminate the causes, then all we have managed to do is fix the problem from happening with someone in the military who is acting on disturbed behavioral traits. While this would be a good thing to attack and eliminate, we must realize that eliminating such behavior will do nothing to eliminate actual terrorism. However, if we believe the opposite, then if we ever do succeed in eliminating such causes, we will fool ourselves into believing we have done something to eliminate terrorism, when in reality all we have done is set up a false sense of security so that one day we will get attacked again, and like usual it will hit us in a way to where we find ourselves asking similar questions over and over, like “how could this happen?” and “why didn’t anyone see this coming?”

This is why we must be vigilant against such fake moves to equate bad behavior with terrorism in hopes of furthering political movements, which is the only cause that benefits from making such connections. Recently, I’ve been monitoring a number of anti-Obama individuals who find it necessary to make any attack against Obama possible, and this has served as an easy mechanism to do so. What works better than rallying the troops behind a claim of a president who cannot handle terrorism happening during his administration? Unfortunately, while this might benefit political actors with really low level goals, it also hurts the country with long-term effects. The solution is to ignore stuff like this, but unfortunately, when it works as such a strong rhetorical tool, the chances of that happening are slim to none.

It is the same rhetoric that was used during the beginning of the war or terrorism; any attempt to criticize it is immediately used as further ammunition to push the cause that much deeper into the national psyche. It plays on the simplistic argument of fear mongering without any actual costs involved. When it is finally defeated by a stronger counter-narrative, it is usually too late, and the political circumstances have changed or reversed so that the original benefactors of the original discourse now benefit from reversing the message.

That’s where we are now. The discourse has reversed (a new party is in power) so the people who defended the regime are now taking the rhetoric of the original complainers (who used the original complaints to cast out the previous regime), which can only serve to uproot the new regime that has taken charge. Unfortunately, the one thing that gets lost is the truth and basic ethics. If ever there was a time for moderates and moderation, it is now; if ever there was a forum where moderates are ignored and cast out as irrelevant, it is also now.
Kind of sucks, if you think about it.

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The Revolution May Be Televised But There Not Be Anyone Watching the Station

A friend of mine and I were discussing revolution the other day, and an interesting comment was made of how "well, that sort of thing can't happen here", and it got me wondering how many people actually think that. And it then got me to start thinking about the reality of revolution and how most often so few people ever see it coming.

Think about the American Revolution. Sure, we talk about it in such grandiose terms, but at the time the people who existed back then probably had no idea it was going to be as instrumental as it was. I can imagine that some farmer was probably thinking that the result of the armed conflict was still going to lead to another season of farming and the hope that he might make a bit of money to survive through another year. It's not like these things are planned by a secret cabal that sits in a darkened room making these things happen. They generally happen at an unspecific time when things just sort of fall apart.

Revolutions are weird animals. In the 20th and 21st centuries, we tend to think of them as social revolutions, but throughout history they used to be disgruntled revolutions, where a bunch of people decided they were fed up, fought the establishment, and then the system collapsed around them. Quite often, the conclusion was a reinstitution of government that was very similar to what happened before, but for some people there was change. For others, it was more of the same.

The world of revolution is one of those that has certain actors as influential and others that sort of play along with whatever happens. That former category is the one most history books discuss. That latter category is made up of most of the people who have ever existed in civilization. They matter little, and unfortunately, they are usually the ones who pay the most in the conflicts (with their lives, their livelihoods and even the surrender of their ideas).

I think of the Peasants' Revolt in the Middle Ages as an example of revolution and how it impacts the average man or woman. A bunch of local people got pissed off that they were being taxed by the government and the Church, so they rose up, burned a couple of churches and attacked a couple of tax collectors. They weren't planning any great ideals or futures for themselves; they just didn't want to pay any more money at one particular time. And they practically overthrew the government. Until the government's soldiers showed up and killed a lot of people.

That is how most revolutions tend to exist in civilization.

So, my question is directed in a different way. Why are we so comfortable now that we believe that revolution cannot possibly take place in the United States? Is it because we haven't had one for so long? Is it because our police and soldiers are so strong that we just don't see it lasting long enough to grow steam? Or is it because we're fooling ourselves into a false sense of security?

I plan to revisit this subject at a later time. I just thought I'd open it up to some initial pre-thoughts. That's all for now.

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New Novel Begun

The National Novel Writing Month has begun. I started this morning with my new novel, temporarily titled, Plato's Perspective. It's a mainstream novel that has a bit of a futuristic setting to it, although it is not really science fiction but a political novel that has to do with Plato's Republic and his attempt to integrate education with the concept of the myth of metals (each person falls into one of 3 metal classes). My first jaunt into writing it has resulted in 1875 words. The goal is 50,000 words (about 200 pages), so let's see how this all works out.

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The Reactive World Provides Few Solutions

Unfortunately, we leave in a reactive world. What does this mean, and why is it important? It means that we're rarely proactive but only reactive. This means that instead of looking for solutions to problems that might happen, we seek to solve problems that already occurred.

Think about it. 911 was one of the wake-up tragedies for the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. Were we prepared? No, not at all. We were taken completely by surprise, and ever since then all of our politics have been about reactions. We reacted to the Taliban in Afghanistan, going after them because they were harboring the killers who attacked us. We attacked Iraq because of what we claimed they had done; let's face it, as much as we'd like to think we went into Iraq to stop them from doing things in the future, the war was sold on a linkage to 911 that never existed. Oh sure, we can pretend that lie wasn't sold back then, but it was, and it was sold well. Again, it was a reaction.

I was reading a story today about San Francisco. The Bay Bridge has been closed down because of part of it collapsed, again. The fix that proved to be a bad fix was a fix to a collapse during the San Francisco earthquake. More reactions. No preparations. So, now the bridge is closed, people can't figure out how to get across the bay, and people are all upset. All reactions. If people would have thought this out, they would have had a contigency plan in place for when the Bay Bridge goes down. Their solution? Take BART. Only, they don't have enough trains running, and BART's continuous reaction to all things politics in the San Francisco area has been to raise rates whenever anything happens. Expect a new rate soon now that BART has to work harder. They just raised it a short time ago because BART didn't have enough money. And then they raised it after that because they realized they had to pay their workers more because they wouldn't go back to work and threatened to strike. Great reactions. No proaction.

A young girl in the Bay Area was raped the other day by at least 10 gang members. The reaction? Shock. Claims that this sort of thing shouldn't happen "here". This morning, young people from the school where she was raped complained that the reaction has been so negative towards them, stating things like "What about the good things?" Well, sorry, but when a young girl gets raped and EVERYONE ignores what's happening to her, except for the few that jumped in and cheered on the rapists, well, sorry young people, but it's pretty hard to "think about the good things" that happen in your school.

Years ago, I used to serve as a security expert in the military. I used to complain that every time there was a huge terrorist action (this was during the 1980s when there was one happening every week in Europe), the US soldiers would go on alert, we'd start investigating every car that came onto post, and then two weeks would pass by and we'd go back to being morons again. Then terrorists would attack again, and no one would expect it. It was like playing security games with people who all had long term memory loss disorder. But it would keep happening. And I would keep complaining, and then they'd go back to what they were doing before. But that didn't bother me as much as the fact that someone would ALWAYS say, "no one could have expected that" when there were a few of us who kept saying: "Stop putting your heads in the ground and do something!"

I feel that way now. Gangs are pretty much ruling entire neighborhoods in some cities, and no one does anything about it. Oh, they talk about doing something about it, but they rarely do. Or they turn their police loose on the population for a few weeks and then tone them down again. Then the criminals come back out of the woodwork and do their thing over again. It's like the riots that took place after the big moments in time in the last decade or so, like the Rodney King verdict. People went nuts after that and started attacking innocent citizens on the streets. African-American gangs practically went to war against Korean businessmen in Los Angeles because...well, I don't actually know what were the actual reasons, but I guarantee they had nothing to do with the Rodney King verdicts against the police officers that were exonerated by the local jury. People were angry over other things, and as much as people kept warning that something bad was going to happen, no one cared. And then when it happened, people started in with the infamous, "No one oould have expected that" when everyone should have expected that.

That's part of the problem of living in a reactive society. We don't do anything to prepare for bad situations but hope that things will last long enough for us to retire or die before the powder keg goes off. Like social security. It's been falling apart for decades, but no one wants to do anything about it. Or health care. Or the recent problems with the national debt. It's almost as if we imbibe ourselves on American Idol long enough, we're convinced that the payment will never come due.

Well, it will. But it will happen when you least expect it, because that's how these sorts of things work. But honestly, we all know no one could have expected that. I mean, how could we have possibly have known?

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Fox News and the White House War Against Fox News

You know, I don't doubt that the White House has it guns out for Fox News, as there's always been an antagonistic relationship between the left and Fox News, but one thing I found really demeaning was how Fox News chooses to engage its customers in this debate. Take the following poll they listed here:

I'll include the poll here so you don't have to go to their page.

You decide:

The White House is still attacking Fox News, 10 days after its original comments. Why?
They want to shoot the messenger
They don’t have a good case to make
They confuse News and Opinion
I don't know

In case you haven't noticed, the option of "Fox News is out of line" doesn't show up. You either get to choose "They want to shoot the messenger, they don't have a good case to make, they confuse news and opinion or I don't know". If this was a scientific study, which it obviously is not, it would get laughed out of academia and science in general.

If Fox News really wants to complain, perhaps it should stop skewing its surveys so that there's nothing for the White House to complain about in the first place.

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Why Government Keeps Getting Bigger in the USA

What is funny is that people keep trying to blame one or the other party in the United States as being the culprit. In fact, both are to blame, but only because they hang onto rhetoric that is decades old, and the common person is too set in his or her ways to realize what happened.

The problem started in the 1960s and is only now at its zenith of problematic proportions. Prior to the 1960s, for the most part, Republicans (or the right) were content with control over state governments. They never saw the federal government as useful, or (and this really important) prosperous. The benefits of being a member of Congress were pretty dismal back then and prior to that period. The Democrats, having solidified power in the federal government (not the presidency, as that changed constantly), started to look at their positions as something they should reward, so they did. They made Congress such an attractive place to work with all of the benefits they added, that Republicans, who were more concerned with taking care of their businesses back in the states (where the real money was for them) that they started to see that Congress might be as beneficial financially as staying home and running the state governments. So, from the 1970s on, you started to see an upswing of Republicans. The Democrats had a power base back then, but they rarely had any resistance from Republicans (aside from the territories that don't switch at all because they've always been so partisan based). Well, what kept the Democrats in power was the money they received from their union funding and general assistance PACs. Their PACs were ALWAYS willing to reward someone already in office, but rarely a challenger. The Republican PACs, however, were willing to find either an incumbent or a challenger. It doesn't take a lot of math to figure out that Republicans were going to be armed with a lot more PAC funding than Democrats, and slowly they were going to start knocking them out of federal government representative positions. This went on until the 1980s when the Republicans took back Congress. It's been wavering ever since, and has only pushed in the Democrat's position because everyone was so pissed off at the Republicans over the Iraqi War that it was bound to happen.

So, with all that information in mind, it should not be hard to see that Republicans who now see government as "good" are going to be willing to grow government, where they see it as part of their power base now, rather than something to complain about. The Democrats have always been pro-government and government growth, so that didn't take much of an impetus. So, we have two parties that NOW believe larger government is a good thing.

Those who are against big government don't have representatives anymore. There are too few members of Congress who represent them. All that is left are the ones who are from areas where they have never been challenged by anyone else, so they're still in office. But the power brokers in Congress are all about making Congress stronger and government bigger.

It's not going to change with either party, because both parties are now part of the problem and complicit in its continuation.

So, what's the answer? Well, if you want smaller government, the answer is to throw out practically everyone and put in new people who don't want larger government. The problem? Each congressional district's constituents consistently respond the same way in polls: "I like my member of Congress but think all the rest should be thrown out". Think about that one for a moment. And then realize why it will never change.

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Remembering 911 and other annual dates

I suspect this may not be taken very well, but it's one of those things I've been thinking about saying for awhile. It has to do with the remembrance of particular events that are revisited on a yearly basis.

One thing that always fascinated me when I was a counterintelligence agent was how often a yearly remembrance of some event would serve as the impetus for destruction many years later. During the 1980s, there were some huge riots taking place in South Korea. People in the states who talk about riots here have no idea what a riot is until they've seen one of these. During most of the year, at least back then, things ran quite smoothly, and then there would be a remembrance event of some police crackdown from a year ago or several years ago, and next thing you knew there were college students throwing Molotov cocktails through business store windows and groups of people overturning police cars. There would be spontaneous groups of tens of thousands of young people running and screaming through the streets. If you were a foreigner, and recognized as one, you could expect to be attacked at a moment's notice because a mob mentality is just that, a mob mentality.

Every time I think about a yearly remembrance event, I think about these riots. I think about how IRA splinter groups would celebrate the annual passing of an important event with a new attack. In the Middle East, it was quite common for a small war to break out over the remembrance of an annual event (from whatever side).

So, 911 has reared its head again, and people are starting the whole "where were you at when 911 happened" thing again, and it makes me suspicious most of the time I hear something like that. I mean, one of my friends posted it on her Facebook page, and to me, that's innocent. But it's the ones that start up all sorts of political causes that all seem to have something to do with remembering 911. From the protesters of the Iraq war to the people who want to protest Obama's health care ideas, people have a horrible tendency to take these things too far and try to link them with nonsense.

911 was a horrible event. But the attempts to compare it to Pearl Harbor and other such ineffective comparisons actually diminish the impact of the event itself. Some superpower did not just launch an attack and wipe out our entire Pacific fleet as a surprise attack. No, some really bad, hateful people decided to default on their humanity and treat innocent people as victims of their stupid cause. Basically, we were acting like an isolationist superpower country that had just been woken up by some kid prodding us with a stick, when in reality we weren't all that isolationist; we were just somewhat clueless as to how to handle ourselves on the international stage. The world had changed a lot since the days of Vietnam, World War II and the Cold War, but we were still in that same mentality. People watched news shows about how US soldiers fought with other countries or combatants, but the common person had never been required to personally acknowledge that there are some bad people out there. 911 did just that, and unfortunately, the US went off half-cocked after that until its people woke up and realized what they were doing. Honestly, I don't blame them, but unfortunately hindsight only happens AFTER a series of events.

My worry is that this attention on particular dates will lead to what it tends to always lead to: More anger and more justifications for things that don't need to happen. When you focus that much energy on wanting to "remember" what happened on a specific date a year ago, or years ago, you fall into the trap of continuing aggression when that aggression may not be necessary any longer.

My fleeting hope is that if people want to continue to remember 911, they'll do it from the perspective of how we can make things better, not so that we look back at it as how we're still angry. And there's nothing wrong with memorial services for those who lost their lives from the unjust attacks. You just have to be cognizant that there are those in the crowd who would love to use such events for nefarious purposes, and quite often we don't recognize those moments until the ship has sailed and we're suddenly realizing what our grief has brought us.

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The Bear, the otter, and the fox: The Art of Deflection in Writing

To those who have read James A. Michener’s Poland, the mention of a bear, otter and a fox might make complete sense. To those who have not read this wonderful book, it probably makes little sense. So, some explaining might be necessary.

You see, in politics today, politicians have become experts at a technique called deflection. Rather than focus on the issue at hand, they create an issue that seems much more important and then focus on it instead. Hopefully, this results in people forgetting about the original issue. Quite often, the secondary issue sounds important but has little ability to be resolved, like the infamous “War on Christmas”. Yeah, it sounds big and dangerous, but it’s really a paper tiger. Critics claimed that when President Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal started pointing towards impeachment hearings, suddenly there was a need for NATO to bomb an Eastern European country, and that was all the White House could talk about. So, deflection has been with us for awhile.

But when it comes to writing, it’s different. Some writers attempt deflection in genres like the mystery novel, where you believe that something is happening but eventually you realize it’s something completely different. However, Michener did something in Poland that few other authors have ever achieved, and few actually attempt.

In Poland, a noble family domesticates a bear, an otter and a fox, and these three animals live in harmony together. Meanwhile, huge events are taking place around them that involve political intrigue, military threats and epic squabbles between different families. Yet, the three animals live in peaceful harmony together. From the story’s perspective, any number of connections can be made between these animals and other entities both in the story and outside of it, but what’s most significant is how Michener handled this unlikely, triangular connection. If you read the story, you find yourself hating the continuous, repetitive story of the three animals living in harmony together. I remember getting really disturbed every time he got back to those three characters together, thinking, come on, get on with the story. And then, during a scene where soldiers are attacking the noble family that owns the animals, the family is killed, the animals act like domesticated animals and come to their rescue, and are killed one by one as they try to protect each other from men with guns. It is over in moments, and I remember being left with a nagging in my chest, saying, “You can’t do this! Not to them!”

It was such a brilliant technique that I have looked for it ever since, and even tried to include it in some of my own writing over the years. The author makes you hate a particular character by continuously droning on about that character and then with a sweep of a pen, they’re dead and gone. And it’s almost as if you need grief counseling to get over the shock of losing those characters that you came to hate so much but now realize how much you really needed them.

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What I Learned from Computer Games About Foreign Policy and War

In 1983 and 1985, two computer games emerged that created a buzz in what would be a continuous projection of foreign policy and war, in which computer games might simulate actual real world situations, eliminating the need to actually go to war to experience the effects of war. Before this, from the 1950s, with A.S. Douglas’s simulation of tic tac toe in 1952 and William Higginbotham’s infamous “Tennis for Two” in 1958, numerous games emerged that helped evolve the genre from mainframe systems to personal gaming systems in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was Bruce Ketchledge’s 1983 game Geopolitique 1990 and Chris Crawford’s 1985 Balance of Power that really changed the industry in the eyes of potential foreign policy usage.

The two games were similar. You spent the majority of your time in negotiations between international powers, and in the end you ended up with a high score or thermonuclear war. The real difference between the two games was that Ketchledge’s game played out the nuclear war in all its 1983 pre-CGI glory while Crawford’s game ended with the prescient words of "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." As a player of that game when it first released, I can tell you that when you received that message, it had a much stronger impact than any computer graphic series of explosions ever could have.

What was unique about these series of games was that they used a series of negotiations with foreign entities that can now best be described as a tit for tat strategy, where you continue to reward your opponent until you achieve your goals. The difference was that the computer saw each negotiation as separate and distinctive, meaning that previous successful negotiations did not necessarily create a much more conducive environment for future negotiations. You had to treat each series of negotiations as unique and untied to anything else. The only exception is that negative steps in the negotiation process managed to lead to a much more hostile set of relations between your country and the one that might eventually be your nuclear opponent. It is a lot like negotiations with North Korea, to be honest. One mistake, and one set back, sets you back years, and the new series of negotiations pretty much start you up as if you’ve never been on a positive path before.

Since those series of games, there has been a belief in computer gaming circles that simulations can be designed in such a way that they might emulate the actions of real nations in the world. A number of games have been released that attempt to do just that. One well known entity has attempted to take a more historical approach, and it has been very successful, both in implementation and in sales as well. Sid Meier’s Civilization series takes a leader from the creation of a city to the development of an entire empire that can span the globe. The terrain used can be pretty much anything from barren wastelands to an actual excellent representation of the planet Earth. The game has gone through several sequels to itself, including the colonization of both the New World, and a planet of the star system Alpha Centauri. But what makes Civilization so unique is that even though it includes famous, and infamous, leaders of Earth history, any number of chances can change the entire course of one’s civilization.

Civilization IV is the latest in the series of this game, and there is something those who study foreign policy and war can recognize as an unexpected benefit. To explain this benefit, let me just tell a small story of a particular game I was playing.

In this game, I was the most powerful nation on the planet. There were ten or eleven strong opponents against me, representing all sorts of different civilizations, like Catherine of Russia and Lincoln of America, for example. In this scenario, I had gone to war against Catherine of Russia because of reasons that are not really important for this discussion, but at the end of the war, I managed to wipe out Russia’s civilization. This left me in a position of peace with the rest of the world, because Russia was my only real adversary for many game years of playing. However, something started to nag at me as I conducted peace with the rest of the world. I had developed this humongous army to finally wipe out the Russian empire, and now I was sitting on it, and it was doing nothing. I started to focus my economy on peacetime needs, and as I continued the years moving forward, that huge army that was now sitting there doing nothing just seemed like it was waiting for me to do something. Anything.

And isn’t this very much how the world is as well? After World War II, the United States was this behemoth of massive military proportions, and that military industrial complex ended up dictating a lot of our foreign policy from that point forward. It would not be a hard argument to make that we had this huge army that was just looking for some place to put it. Even today, with two wars having just been fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea that this army needs to be used for something never escapes the thought process of those in power. An idle army is a scary entity for a lot of countries. Sometimes, an idle army is the reason a country collapses, or falls into civil war. There are so many scenarios that can go bad, yet in the United States, we ignore what has happened to so many other countries and throughout so much of history, often by stating, “well, that can’t happen here.”

A final lesson, at least for this essay, is that of the human factor. We often look at statistical projections and number projections and make determinations of economic circumstances, but quite often it’s frowned upon to do that with political behavior. Political science used to be a science where the belief was that projections are not part of the science, because anything can happen. However, more and more political scientists are becoming tied to statistical research so that it is not surprising that a lot of foreign policy projections coming from political scientists, or political economists, also now start projecting future international behavior. Very dangerous, and quite often very wrong.

An example comes from a very interesting world domination game called SuperPower. It uses very real world information to make up the countries that come against you, but at some point in the game Belgium goes nuts and tries to take over the world. This example is why political scientists are wise in avoiding projections in international affairs that rely on statistical argumentation. The thing that is missing in the game is rationalization. The reason Belgium has not taken over the world is that people are involved, not numbers on a computer. Yet, when you crunch numbers with no concern for the thought processes of the people involved, you come up with all sorts of funky answers.

These are just some of the interesting connections that can be made between computer games and international relations. Unfortunately, scholars are very apprehensive about connecting themselves to a medium often considered the canvas of children. Therefore, it is very possible that many great insights can be achieved by computer games and the study of those games, but like in so many similar situations where history is doomed to repeat itself because no one remembered what happened before, we might be too proud to ever realize the answers were found in a place no one of importance will ever see.

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Why it is so easy for Republicans to Derail Obama's Health Care Agenda

Some people may be amazed at how easily the Republicans are being able to derail Obama's health care agenda. Some people may think back to Hillary Care and wonder if the same thing is happening. In a word, yes. In several words, not really.

What is happening is something Democrats really need to understand if they're ever going to get any legislation of merit passed EVEN with a majority, and EVEN with a filibuster proof majority. What's amazing is that the Republicans aren't doing anything new; they're playing a card right out of mass communication theory, and they're doing it really well, even if the majority of THEM have no idea why what they're doing is really working.

What they're doing is so easy to do in this country because of one simple reason that so many people don't seem to understand. Getting people to say no is much easier than getting people to say yes. Many, MANY studies have been done on persuasive tactics, and one of the agreed-upon conclusions in so many of these studies is that if you want to be the victor in a debate over a complex issue, which health care is definitely a complex issue, choose the negative side. Republicans have become experts at negative campaigning now for decades. How many elections have we seen that weren't "vote for me" but "don't vote for the other guy"? It's become so successful that even Democrats are doing it, although I suspect that neither side realizes why it works; they're just glad it does.

It plays into the distrustful perspective of most Americans. We don't trust anyone, even though the majority of us would never admit that to anyone, including ourselves. This makes it so easy to take the negative side and then beat down the issue with ridiculousness because the beauty of such a tactic is what the health care people (and Proposition 8 people who wanted to stop the amendment against gay marriage in California) don't understand. You see, the trick is to make up ten ridiculous statements about the issue you want to defeat. The other side spends all of its energy defeating each one of them, and might successfully defeat 8 of the 10. But that's where the beauty comes in. It only takes ONE to defeat the issue, and when you cloak something into conspiracy clothing, the logical stuff can be defeated, but it will always leave ONE or TWO issues still clouding the issue. And that's what causes the negative to vote against it.

So, they can claim that health care reform is going to kill your grandma, and you can refute that by saying it's stupid, but they're still going to win because one person believes Obama wants single payer, even though the person might not even know what single payer is, and one other person thinks that doctors will quit the medical profession. Neither one of those things will likely happen, but you don't have to convince both people on both issues; only one has to slip through in the myriad of issues that you throw into the negative possibilities.

I'll let Democrats in on a little secret of how to negate the negative offensive. Responding to EACH allegation is only going to lead to defeat. It's like a debate team that spends all of its 1st affirmative time impacting their arguments with so many examples and arguments that the negative has to spend all of its time just making sure they don't forget to address the 10,000 arguments that were brought up. In debate, you collapse their arguments into similar sounding arguments so you can address 1 through 5 as one argument, 6-10 as another, and then so on. Otherwise, you end up collapsing from straight out exhaustion.

The response to the Republican campaign is not to appeal to the arguments, as the Democrats keep doing (hello being shouted down in your own town halls, Democratic leaders) but to do what I call appealing to the audience through a stronger narrative (or counter-narrative) so that the ground is never given to the other side to keep arguing on their own ground. A Cheshire cat offensive is never going to allow you to give a constructive counter-offensive, or even an adequate defensive, because it will keep changing its argument to make sure that you never have a chance to get back any ground.

What you have to do is show that their foundation never had merit to begin with, that the two of you are not even arguing the same dilemma. If the Republicans argue that the issue is "doctors quitting", the response is NOT to poll a bunch of doctors and look for some who say they won't quit. The response is something along the lines of "Insurance companies are evil and want to kill patients to save costs" or whatever. The point is: You have to be on the ground yourself making arguments, not trying to land on the battlefield that's already being waged in your name in countries you aren't fighting to protect.

There are two examples that show how this should be done (one obscure and one that shocks me that no one seems to even give it any attention). The first is my favorite example because I did work on it, and that's the 1991 August coup in the Soviet Union. Yeltsin beat the hardliners by showing that his vision of Russia's future was more believable than the one concocted by the Soviet hardliners. End of story: Yeltsin wins and hardliners get thrown out of government. The second is the actual election between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Hillary was trying to make the whole issue about a great past (the Clinton era) while Obama was trying to make the issue about a better future that would emerge with him at the helm. Obama's rhetoric defeated that of Clinton's no matter how hard she tried to make her brand stick. We got Obama as a result, and that narrative carried through to an election that was literally the second part of his offensive against Hillary. McCain never had a chance.

That's what's needed now. The Democrats, or the Obama team, needs to construct its own rhetoric of a positive future rather than let the Republicans win by running on negative campaigning, about the only thing they know how to do these days. Otherwise, we'll end up with no health care reform and thousands of dissertations about how no one saw it coming.

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Trying to find a reason

I'm sorry I don't have a link to a story to have you read instead. This happened to me. Today. In the morning. On the way to BART to travel to get my medication at Costco.

You see, the medication thing has been a drama that should have a thread of its own. It involves all sorts of things like lack of health care, the incivility of dealing with Kaiser Permanente, the civility that exists in dark corners of Kaiser Permanente, and how come a pharmacy can't communicate with a hospital without adding all sorts of extra drama. Well, that was taken care of, and I was on my way to get my medication when I turned the corner of the main street to walk up the stairs that leads to South Hayward BART.

There were three African American young men sitting on the stairwell railing when I turned the corner (you really don't get a warning...you turn the corner and you're there). Before I could even acknowledge them, the first of them stepped forward and clocked me. I mean really hard. I've taken some pretty hard hits in my time, but this came from nowhere like Mike Tyson finally found an ear he hadn't bitten yet. Next thing I knew, the three of them were on top of me beating the living **** out of me. No kidding. I can hold my own with the best of them, but this was the first beat down I ever had where I got in ZERO hits in response. This continued on for about two minutes as they pretty much robbed me blind. I mean that figuratively because they took my glasses, smashing them as they did so. I didn't have much of value other than my iPod Touch, but they ripped that out of my ear (literally ripping the cord as I kept trying to fight them off). Basically, my fight consisted of making sure I wasn't killed rather than actually trying to get in a lick or two of my own. I'll be honest but most people I know would be in the hospital right now after what I went through.

Then they ran. I stumbled back up, realizing I couldn't see **** because of my lack of glasses. Finally, I realized I needed to get to the BART station and report this. Other people had watched them run by and after the danger was gone, they were nice enough to report that they had seen these guys run by them with my bag and belongings.

So, I spent the next half hour with BART police debating with Hayward Police as to who had jurisdiction over the crime. Never mind the bleeding veteran. Jurisdiction was a conversation that required no less than ten police officers. No one was actually looking for the suspects. They wanted to know who had to write up the report. But as I say this, I will admit that even with that complaint, they were friendly and cordial to me, so this isn't a miff against the police in any way. Just one of those legospaceman rants.

The sad thing is: I used to feel pretty safe on this path to BART. I only live about five blocks from BART. Now, I don't feel safe at all. My main concern is that I'm going to do what comes naturally and start carrying a knife with me, or something like that, and I'm going to take out one or more of these guys next time it happens, which knowing my luck will land me in prison for a good part of what's left of the rest of my life. But I don't know what else to do. I don't perceive getting any protection from the police. I can try fending them off hand to hand, but these guys were smart and knew EXACTLY when to ambush me (or anyone else for that matter). I doubt there's ever going to be a fair fight, which brings me back to the obvious again.

So, now that the incident is over, let's go back to the original question. Three young black men ambushed a white guy. Is this a racial thing? Is this a societal thing? How do we stop this sort of thing from happening to more people? More police? More education? What drives me nuts is that I don't think anyone, and I mean ANYONE is trying to solve this type of situation. Oh, don't get me wrong. Politicians are building careers on talking about it, and sheriffs are cementing their careers by talking about how they'll eradicate something that they never seem to eradicate. But what is there we can do aside from take the law into your own hands?

Oh, by the way, I wasn't kidding about what I said on most people probably being in the hospital after this. I didn't get out of it unscathed. Lots of blood and let's just say that I wouldn't be surprised if I have a concussion as my head feels like a jackhammer just went through it.

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Health Care Is Only A Dream Away

Health care is all the rage in the news these days. President Obama's health care plan is going to revitalize the entire country. Complacent doctors say it will destroy the very foundation of medicine in the country, causing all of us to become troglodytes who will have to turn to witch doctors to be cured if "socialized medicine" gets passed in this country. Love it. Hate it. Whatever. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and in reality, no one really cares.

What am I talking about? Well, it's one of those issues that people have a stake in because it's political. It defines your party identity, so people take sides based on what they believe in. Most people arguing, and most people who are being listened to, are people who already have health care, and they don't need it. It won't affect them; it will affect those who really have no voice, and to be honest, no one really wants to listen to them in the first place.

Last time we tried to have universal health care, or something like it, we ran into the personal story defense, which is one of those fake defenses that makes people think the sky is falling based on one or two examples. In other words, if ONE person is affected negatively, then they can throw all sorts of fear tactics around and the people will blindly turn out against it. That's what happened with the Harry and Louise defense. Basically, what happened was this fictitious husband and wife were played by two actors, and the Republican Party made them pretend that they were going to be completely destroyed by President Clinton's health care initiative. The plan failed and has been forever linked with the failure that is Hillary Clinton, even though she tried to put that behind her as she ran for president unsuccessfully.

Well, that same sort of thing is happening again, but it's turning into more noise than anything else. And what people don't realize is the true fear of universal health care this time around is that the new program may not actually do anything different than what we're already doing. In other words, we may spend billions of dollars, but in the end we'll have a little bit of the same of what we already have. Those in the middle, people like me, will still have no health care, and the only ones that qualify will be those with steady jobs or those who have figured out how to game the system, something most of us in the lower middle class have never been able to do.

So what about me? Why am I talking about this as if I'm in this strange category of people who have no health care? And why should someone like me really matter?

Well, if you watch the way events will unfold, people like me are unimportant, and no one really does care. I don't say that to seek sympathy, but to pass on that people do not care for those who shouldn't be in a bad situation; like a lot of our class arguments, people blame those who don't end up coming out on top, almost as if it is a failing in their own abilities that they are starving to death and dying from lack of proper medical care in the country that has been the shining beacon for so many others before in the past.

Yes, I'm one of those without health care. How did I get there? Well, I had health care when I was working full time for a hospital system. Then I went back to school to do graduate school, to be able to better myself and get a step up in the academic community. So I had health care while going to school. After school, I took a job in South Korea where I still had access to health care (universal health care in South Korea). Then things turned bad. The job I had stopped paying me, and my only recourse was to return to the United States without employment. Since then, I've been unable to find a job, so the little bit of money I had accumulated is slowly dwindling, and my lack of health care has started to make itself known by the fact that I take a number of medications for an ailment that is part of my medical history.

Not having health care is a very interesting dilemma to be in. It is like being one of those turtles that has overturned itself and cannot get back up on its feet again. You keep thrashing over and over again, hoping somehow that someone will notice you're there thrashing, but people just point and stare, sometimes commenting on how bad it is that the turtle has fallen on its shell and can't get up again. This continues until the turtle eventually dies of starvation because it can never make itself upright again.

That's how being without a job and health care is for someone that isn't comfortable being without a job and health care. I walked to BART today to catch a bus that leaves from there, and while I was there, I was accosted by no less than five beggars, asking me for money. That is something I told myself long ago that I would never do, and the activity disgusts me, but at the same time I'm starting to see these people as possibly smarter than I am. I mean, they're not pretending that they're going to turn things around; they realize they're screwed, and they just stand there at the BART station asking people for money. They gave up. And they're probably making more money per day than I stand a chance to anytime in the very near future. So who is really the foolish one here?

I went to Kaiser today because they used to be my old health care provider. It's amazing how unhelpful the system is when you're no longer one of the "members". All I really needed was a copy of my prescriptions so I could at least find out what medications I've been taking (unfortunately, the prescription information of mine was lost in transit, along with my military DD214 (proof I served) and tons of personal paperwork that might make this whole situation a bit easier). Member services at Kaiser is annoyingly rude to most of its members and people like me. They seem to see everyone that shows up as an antagonist, so the attitude is immediately one of hostility (you could sense it when the one woman at her desk kept lecturing people for not waiting until she said she was ready to see the next person...imagine being spoken to like a prisoner at a detention facility, and you get the impression of how it feels to be in need of information from that type of a gatekeeper).

This ended up putting me into the emergency room of Kaiser because that's the only place that will see you if you're not a member. And they're not like other emergency rooms. They want money, and lots of it. I'm not talking about small amounts of money. They wanted astronomical figures. An example is drugs. The drugs that I take cost about $600 for a month's supply from Kaiser Permanente. The same drugs for the same period of time, bought from Costco, would cost me $37.50. But that's where the fun begins, because just getting the prescription from Kaiser to Costco was one of the quests that would have made the computer game Myst proud (for those who do not know...as one of the first real puzzle games, that game confused the crap out of tons of computer players when it was first released, causing more than one computer screen to end up with a broken beer bottle sticking out of it by the end of the night).

Anyway, why am I talking about all of this? Well, the argument for universal health care is waging in Congress right now, and in the end the chances are pretty good that nothing is going to come of it. Oh, they'll probably pass something, but it will be what's called feel good legislation, where they can claim victory without actually doing anything. The taxpayers will spend many billions of dollars, a few people will get outrageously more wealthier than they already are, and nothing will change. Why is this? Well, because people in Congress already have the greatest health care you can possibly get. And they get it for life. They don't need it. So why should they care? Sure, it sounds good to seem like you care, but at the end of the day when they're arguing numbers, what they care about is getting re-elected and becoming more powerful. Those of us slipping through the cracks don't matter. We're irrelevant. We can't die fast enough.

So, here's where I say something that hopefully will get you to think (I am addressing this to the two stuffed animals of mine who make up the readership of my blog). There is massive dissatisfaction with the government today by more and more people are finding themselves out of work and losing some of the basics of everyday life, like health coverage. There is a tipping point to where the amount of people falling out of the system start to become opponents of the system. We're not there yet, but we're moving there. And the problem with that is, and the problem that has ALWAYS caused, is that when this antipathy starts to turn to anger, there's no warning. Nor is there any smart seer on a hill somewhere with his or her pulse on the attitude of these people. When they rise up, they sweep pretty much everything out of their way as a movement that takes a life of its own. We've seen it happen so many times in the proto-modern times, and we've started to see it happen a lot more since the post-communist world where groups of people have become important variables that cannot be tracked until they've already done their damage.

Part of the problem with Obama is that he was seen as some kind of messiah, a response to what was considered a horrific period for the liberal ideas of mainstream America. Well, he's starting to show himself to be as regular as any other person, and that momentum that brought him to power is starting to show lots of kinks in the armor. People said they wanted change, but that's not what they really wanted. They wanted prosperity as part of a desire for accountability. They're receiving neither, and nothing indicates that anything being done today is going to lead to just that. I wish I was wrong, but I'm not.

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Why we'll never get health care reform in the USA

Right now, people are somewhat talking about health care in the United States. I mean, they're talking about it, even though they're probably not going to do anything about it. Really. In case you haven't figured it out, that's how politics works in the United States. We talk about things. We get outraged at things. And then we realize how hard it is to change the thing we're outraged about. So then we get indignant. And then we hear about something ELSE that gets us talking, outraged and then indignant, subsequently forgetting about the thing that we were first talking about. In case people don't realize it, and they do, but they just don't want to talk about it, we talked about, were outraged and then indignant about health care several times before we forgot about it and moved onto other things, like wars overseas, genocide in Somalia, anger about puppies being slaughtered and then outrage at how the Chinese may have cheated in the Olympics. And then we forgot all about all of these things and then started talking about John and Kate (whoever they are) and who might win American Idol this time around.

Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political hack, has an article about how we're outraged but no one is covering it. Well, they are covering it, but the problem is not involved in the coverage, but how it requires television to cover it, and honestly, talking about health care is boring to news people on television. If there's no fire to show pictures of, it turns into a bunch of talking heads complaining, and while that might get people going for a few hours on Fox News, the rest of the country turns that sort of thing off. While Fox News may like to talk about their great news ratings, even the BEST news ratings pales in comparison to the WB's worst prime time programming (okay, think they're calling themselves the CW now...hard to keep up with a TV station that has no one watching it).

So is this going to be a problem for health care? Of course it is. No one is covering it because it's not a great television story. If it's not a great television story, they can't guarantee news ratings. And if that's the case, don't expect to hear much about now. Now if some senator had an affair with a porn star, THAT'S news. But have that same senator talk about some common person in New Jersey who can't afford to have health care, and the rest of the country starts yawning before turning to some world wresting smackdown with big buff guys yelling at each other before they go to a commercial that sells us products to enhance our genitalia or grow back the missing hair on our scalp.

America is in dire need of health care reform. And not some fix it that doesn't fix anything but moves some money from insurance companies to congress members' pockets. The system has been broke for a very long time, and as long as we have to rely on the current form of media coverage, it's going to continue to break even further. The tough choices to be made won't be made because the people who need to make those choices have more to gain by doing nothing (they actually get reelected for doing nothing) than doing something (the other guys will knock them out of office if ANY chance is taken because the spin is always easier than trying to explain complex economics to the general voting public).

So, don't expect any solutions any time soon. Expect lots of bluster and lots of talking about the issues by people who won't do anything to change anything. Expect some legislation that pretends to do something big and may even be named THE HEALTH CARE SOLUTION but actually does nothing. Unfortunately, we here in the United States are not very good at reading the fine print. We're not very good at reading the actual print either. We're just good at believing we're making a difference by talking about and complaining about things.

Like I just did. Expect the solution to be as solvent as my article. It feels good to say it, but it still won't get us anywhere. But then, I'm not an elected leader. I'm just some kid with a computer.

Stumble It!