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This, folks, is what is called a scam. Sure, you get a free iPad, but only after you sign up for a couple hundred dollars in 'discount' offers.

Ask me anything

#Oilspill, or #WhyTheGovernmentNeedsBP

Thirty-five days after the BP oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded into flames, oil continues to spill.

This is an environmental disaster unlike anything that the US (or anyone, really) has faced before, and it has shined a light on some major deficiencies in our government, both in oversight and response capability.

BP has taken the lead so far, because they are the ones with the technology and the people to do work at the ocean floor, a mile deep. Some of the talking heads wonder why the government doesn't have all this brainpower and technology at its disposal, so they could deal with the situation without BP. These morons clearly don't remember the last couple decades, as we've struggled with budget deficits, and trying to balance the spending we already have while cutting taxes and keeping Social Security and other such things.

There is one thing that the government could have done, day one, to stop the spill. In fact, it is a technique that the Russians have used on more than one occasion to stop a spill. What did they do? They nuked it.

Of course, detonating a nuke in the Gulf of Mexico is not what anyone wants to do. Which means that, like it or not, the government needs BP to end this spill.

In the days and weeks to come, there will be time to debate the future of offshore drilling, and how to move forward from here in terms of environmental concerns, renewable energy, and the relationship between oil companies and the agency that oversees them. For now, all we can do is sit down, shut up, and hope BP gets it right, sooner rather than later.

Old People Don't Get It

There are times when I think people over a certain age just don't get it.

Then there are times when I KNOW they don't get it.

For instance, take the movie Kick-Ass. The movie (based on a comic book of the same name) is based on the premise 'Why hasn't anyone tried to be a superhero?'. In it, we follow the adventure of a high school geek who's only super power is "being invisible to girls". When he orders a costume over the internet, and goes to try and fight crime, he promptly gets stabbed, and then hit by a car. The result? He's got metal supporting his bones now, and his nerve endings are shot, so he can't feel pain. And then he goes back out, crimefighting again, becoming an internet sensation, while at school he's still the geek who can't score.

So far, all the critics love the movie, enjoying the close parallel to Spider-man and Peter Parker. Of course, that's only the first twenty minutes or so.

Then we meet Hit Girl and Big Daddy, a pair of costumed vigilantes who are more Punisher than the Batman and Robin they echo. Hit Girl first appears in costume wielding more blades than a chef at Benihana, and she proceeds to destroy the gang-bangers who Kick-Ass had come to intimidate, before Big Daddy takes down the last one with a shot from a sniper rifle through the window.

From that point on, the critics lament and moan how horrible the movie is, with graphic depictions of violence, and the way Hit Girl curses enough to make a sailor blush, all the while being cute and adorable. A review in the local paper actually whined that the movie would have been better if it were more like Peter Parker in Spider-man.

News flash. This movie is NOT Spider-man.

What this movie is actually a more realistic representation of what would happen if people in real life tried to be superheroes, and there is a simple reason why it doesn't portray the main characters as wearing blue spandex tights, flying around, and behaving like an extraterrestrial boyscout. These are real people, with real flaws, and real limitations on what they can do. And nothing they do (with the exception of jetpack-mounted miniguns) is within the realm of human ability.

Moreover, the character of Hit Girl is SUPPOSED to be disturbing! She and Big Daddy have given themselves completely to the 'by any means necessary' approach to bringing retribution to those who are outside the law. Like Rorschach in the Watchmen, they are agents of vengeance, and there is a certain nobility in their almost psychotic behavior, their clarity of vision. They do the things we all wish we could do.

The reason Hit Girl and Rorschach are disturbing is because we have all thought that the world would be a better place if we just took the fight to the criminals, the terrorists, the people who make our lives miserable, and laid waste to them all. But we always hold back, either through fear, or morality, or apathy. We talk the talk, but they walk the walk, and that is what disturbs us. It isn't that we hate what they do, but that we hate the fact that they are doing it and not us.

But perhaps old people just don't get it.

And then there's the recent outrage by commentators and public morality hypocrites over the recent video circulating the internet showing Miley Cyrus dancing up on a guy, grinding on him. Now commentators are bitching and moaning about how she shouldn't be doing that, or whatever.

I've seen the video, and honestly? It is painfully obvious that the people who are outraged haven't actually been to a high school dance in a couple decades, at least. News flash, people, that was pretty tame for what teenagers do. Hell, at my high school prom I saw much worse, and that was back in '02.

This is simply how people dance now. Or did you think teenagers went for doing a nice waltz, or perhaps a square dance? Did you think that they were somehow more pure than you were when you were a teenager? Don't tell me none of you got freaky growing up in the 60s and 70s!

Old people just don't get it.

Kill the Primary System

America has always been a place of strong opinions, and strong differences. There has always been heated debate on the floor of the Congress. But it used to be that people could disagree upon the issues without being unpatriotic. It used to be that having an idea for a program didn't draw comparisons to Nazis. It used to be that politics was civil, despite ideology.

The last few decades have seen a steady erosion of the civility in politics, to the point where now we find ourselves locked in perpetual campaigns, every sound bite dissected, and politicians publicly saying that a bill would mean the end of the world.

What caused our political system to fall to the point where you see more civility in kindergarten?

In short, the primary system is the root of a great many of our country's political woes.

The primary system forces politicians to pander to the fringe of their parties, because only the fringe can be bothered to vote in these minor ballots that decide so much. And before you start, this is a bipartisan problem. Democrats are beholden to the far left crazies just as much as Republicans are beholden to far right crazies. For the fringe, the system works great. It is everyone in between who gets the shaft.

The essence of politics is compromise. You wheel and deal, and you take two opposing viewpoints and try to find something in between, that both parties can live with. Hell, the reason we have a House of Representatives and a Senate is because of a compromise! Compromise makes laws stronger.

But in the primary system, politicians who reach across the aisle to compromise are vilified by the extremes, so anyone who actually tries to get things done, rather than put things in a deadlock, finds themselves with the fringe booting them out of office in a primary. Even when the majority of Americans favor compromise on an issue, politicians are too scared of losing their job at the hands of the nuts in their own party to do the people's business.

And this is not limited to Congressmen and Senators. Even Presidential candidates must play to the crazies of their own party through the primary process, before moving to the middle for a general, opening them up to well deserved accusations of hypocrisy.

The only solution I can see is to kill the primary system. Open up the ballots in the elections to whoever can fulfill the requirements, and let the people pick from the full spectrum of the candidates out there. Sure, there may be some craziness as you see more run-off elections, but I see that as a good thing. Instead of having primaries for each party, where the extremes choose the candidates everyone is stuck with in the general, open up the general to everyone, and have a run-off between the two with the highest vote counts. The eventual winner would be a compromise, of course, but why is that bad?

Compromise candidates may lead to more compromise in legislation. And that is a good thing.

Success in the War on Terror

In wars past, victory involved ticker tape parades, celebrations in the street, and a sailor kissing a young woman.

Anyone expecting such things in the war on terror is sadly mistaken. Success will not come heralded by the roaring crowds. There will be no articles of surrender. Anyone looking for the end of all terrorism against the United States will be sorely disappointed. There have always been terrorists, and there always will be.

What, then, will success in the War on Terror look like? It will look a lot like what we have right now. There will still be attacks, some broken up ahead of time, some foiled due to incompetence, and every now and then a successful one. Short of making this country into a police state that would make Soviet Russia look positively like anarchy, there is no way to prevent a lone extremist from driving a car bomb into New York, or flying a plane into an IRS building.

Success in the war on terror means that large groups such as Al Qaeda are so scattered that they cannot draw together to produce the sophisticated, devastating attacks like we saw on September 11, 2001, not that terrorism is gone forever. Israel has some of the best anti-terrorist intelligence capability in the world, and they are still hit with terrorist attacks. There is no way to eliminate terrorism completely.

Success means that the terrorists are reduced to these simple, unsophisticated attacks. A little trouble, in a small, mean way, capable of killing to be sure, but being few and far between, with no real organizing principle behind them.

Success means not the absence of attacks, or even the absence of successful attacks. Success means the absence of coordination.

What made September 11th so devastating was not that an attack happened, it was that an attack that was the culmination of years of planning, years of gathering the proper credentials, and years of training all came together, and became an event so spectacular that we could not help but be scarred by it. There had been hijackings before 9/11. There were planes that blew up, or were forced to crash, or were taken hostage. None of these had the same impact as four planes, simultaneously, hitting three buildings, completely destroying two of them and killing thousands of people.

But what have we seen since then? Every attack has been less sophisticated than the one before. From hijacked planes, they regressed to train bombings. From train bombings, they regressed to sending guys with guns to run around a tourist city shooting as many people as they could before they were killed. From there, they have regressed to the point where they rely on a lone extremist with so little training that he forgot to open the valves on the propane tanks.

Is there more to do? Of course. And it is clear that some lessons learned from the Times Square attack have already been put into practice. Airlines now have to check the no fly list within two hours of a change being made, rather than within 24 hours, like it was before. Are there more lessons to learn? Of course. Each attack, whether it is broken up, flops, or is successful, teaches us new lessons, allows us to refine our methods.

This is what Success in the war on terror looks like.

Champions Online

Readers of this blog know that I'm a self-professed geek, and gamer. So when, a couple years ago, I heard that Cryptic (the guys that created City of Heroes) was bringing out Champions Online (CO), I was pretty stoked. However, due to the budgetary constraints of being a broke college student, I didn't have a chance to try it until now.

To start, CO uses the Champions setting, by Hero Games. Champions is your standard super-hero setting, focused around Millenium City (formerly known as Detroit, thank Doctor Destroyer's version of 'urban renewal' for the name change). And while it may not be anything groundbreaking in terms of superhero settings, it has something that CoH didn't have: an established mythos to build off of.

Let's be honest here, the whole storytelling aspect of CoH and CoV tended to be formulaic and repetitive, which is what happens when you're building a world from scratch. With CO, however, they were able to build on an established universe, with decades of plots woven into the setting. What does this mean for the person who's never played in a Champions game? It means that, unlike CoH, you get characters who have a lot more depth to them, right off the bat, such as the villainous (and deranged) Foxbat, who uses a custom made gun that fires ping-pong balls. Ordinary, unmodified ping-pong balls. I kid you not.

Beyond the mythos of the setting, there are some vast improvements over CoH when it comes to the game itself, starting with character generation (chargen, for short).

CO takes the basic costume designer from CoH, and improves upon it, adding in more options, and more ways to customize your character's build. Even better, gone are the days where you had to wait to level 20 to get a cape, or play a certain amount of time to get a trenchcoat, or craft wings to put on your costume. There are costume pieces you can unlock via different items and achievements in game, but the big things, such as being able to play the cloaked hero, or the person with angel wings is open to you right at the start.

Then comes the 'crunch' of chargen, picking powers and abilities. In CoH, you pick an archetype, pick one of a few 'themes', and you had your starting powers assigned to you. If you saw one Cold type blaster, you've seen them all. Not so in CO. Starting right at Chargen, you can dispense with archetypes, and mix and match powers based on what you want to do. Perhaps you want your energy building attack to be using twin swords, and your special attack to be a lightning bolt? Done. You want to make that lightning bolt red, and have it come out of your chest? You can do that, too.

One of the other major problems with CoH was that they gave you movement powers like you got your mount in World of Warcraft. At level 7, you could get a basic power that allowed you to slowly hover in place. It wasn't until grinding through to level 14 that you actually got to fly. And if you wanted to do an ice slide, or rocket boots, or an energy disk? Yeah, not so much.

In CO, you get a travel power once you leave the tutorial area, and you aren't limited to just Leaping, Super-speed, Flight, and the like. Tunneling? We got that. Teleporting? We got that, too. And this isn't a crap power that'll have you eating a tortoise's dust. This is an actual movement power, allowing you to fully explore the zones.

Ah, the zones. You know how CoH had mobsters on every street corner, accosting people and stealing purses, even when they were strong enough to beat the crap out of rookie heroes (if they ever ventured out of Perez to go to Atlas), and you'd just go around beating them up until you got what you needed? Sure, there are mobsters around Millennium City, and yes, you do occasionally see them menacing civilians, but its no where near as bad as you see in CoH.

Missions. There are still missions, of course. You've got three basic types: manhunt, collection, and escort. Manhunts are when you go around a certain section of the city (or, more rarely, in a building) and hunt a person, or group of people. Collection missions are when you find a certain type of item (either lying about in containers, or as loot from defeated enemies). Escort missions are the bane of your existence. You typically end up following along behind a person who has little fighting skill, and if you die, or they die, or you get too far apart, or you get jumped by a patrol, you fail, and have to start over. And the people never walk faster than a slow stroll.

Still, gone are the days of nearly identical building maps with goons from different gangs in almost the exact same positions. For the most part, you don't go into the buildings, and when you do, each one I've seen so far has been a unique layout, with different challenges.

I could go on, but then there'd be nothing for you to discover in the game. If you're looking for a new game to play, pick up Champions Online, for either the X-box or the PC. You won't regret it.

An Open Letter to Glen Beck

For those of you who don't know, Glenn Beck is a conservative radio host who spoke at the recent CPAC conference. If you haven't heard his speech, here's the transcript. While reading it, please remember that while slamming your head against the desk in frustration may feel like the right thing to do, try not to hit it so hard that you damage the desk, or your head.

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Dear Mr. Beck,

I would like to start by saying that you are clearly a very intelligent man, who fervently believes what you are saying. Unfortunately, that also means you are clearly either ignorant, or insane.

At the CPAC convention on February 20th, you made some remarks that showed this quite clearly.

You rail against government taxes, and government programs. You say you got your education for free, because you went to the public library and read. While I certainly applaud you for reading, I suggest you do actual research into something before you speak. THE LIBRARY IS NOT FREE! The only reason you were able to go into the library and get all those books for free is because the library was supported by, you guessed it, TAXES!

And lets not forget that the reason you were able to read at all is because of a public school system that is paid for through taxes.

You say that Progressivism is a cancer that is eating our Constitution. You decry all the supposed evils that the progressive movement has given us, like taxes, but your logic fails, I'm afraid, on a few key points, and the only possible explanation is that if you either skipped the 'History' section of the library, or you ignored the parts you didn't agree with, and didn't think you could use to support your agenda.

First, you speak of the framers of the Constitution as though they were a united block, all believing exactly the same things. Take off the rose-colored glasses, Glenn. Even when they were writing the Declaration of Independence, there were deep divides in the country, even amongst those who wanted independence.

Even a cursory glance through Wikipedia will show you that, at the beginning of our nation as it now stands, there were opposing camps inside the constitutional convention. You had the Virginia and New Jersey plans, before The Great Compromise combined them. And the question of what to do about slavery was so contentious that it threatened to derail the entire process. Which is why, if you read the actual text of the Constitution, as I'm sure you've done, you'll find a section expressly allowing the importation of slaves.

Furthermore, as someone who has read the actual text of the Constitution, you should know that the power to tax is one of Congress's primary powers, laid out in Article I, Section 8. The ability to do an income tax was always there. The only thing the 16th Amendment did was change the ability to tax so that it could be split amongst individuals, whereas before the taxes each state paid were equal regardless of the population or economic conditions of the different states.

And what has the progressive movement done for us? Well, let's take a look, shall we?

Abolition of Slavery - The abolitionist movement was a progressive movement. A progressive movement that spawned the Republican party, I might add.

Child Labor Laws - It is because of the progressive movement that you don't see kids working 15 hour days in sweat shops in the United States any more.

Voting Rights - It was progressives that extended the right to vote to blacks. It was progressives that fought to allow women to vote. It was progressives that fought to remove white-only primaries, poll taxes, and other barriers to allowing people to vote.

Social programs to help the needy - I'm talking about Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Yes, they have problems, but they at least make it so that when you get too old to work, you don't have to mooch off your kids, or starve. Or perhaps you'd like your kids to put you out on an ice floe when you get older, like the Eskimos do?

I could go on, but you get the point. Is there an extreme fringe to the progressive movement? Of course. But then there's an extreme fringe to the conservative movement, as well. Judge not, lest ye be judged yourself.

Sincerely,

Stuart Grosse

Independent