There Shall Be No Peace Until Kirk Lives!

So vows the official Bring Back Kirk website, which maintains that the stupid and senseless death of James T. Kirk in Star Trek: Generations needs to be redressed.

You know, sometimes we lose track of what's really important in this life. Thankfully, there are some people who are out there to remind us.

Our Privacy Policy

An actual sign I saw in a check-cashing store in Somerville today:



"OUR PRIVACY POLICY: We do not disclose any non-public personal information to anyone, except as permitted by law."

In other words, "We will sell any of your data to anyone at any time we like, and if you don't like it ... well, who cares if you don't like it? You're standing in line at a damn check-cashing store."

In these troubled times, though, isn't it nice to know that a company has an explicit policy of only doing what is permitted by law?

The Boston Retinal Implant Project

The Boston Retinal Implant Project is an attempt to create a microelectronic retinal implant. Their goal is to restore vision to patients with age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. They are currently testing their first device, which stimulates the neurons underneath the retina based on visual information acquired by a tiny camera and relayed to the implant using radio waves. The electrode array which interfaces with the neurons is not capable of transmitting much information yet -- there are only 15 electrodes. They clearly have a lot of work ahead of them. But it's a very exciting start.

My question is, how long until I can have one of these things? If someone's going to insert one of these in my eye, I want more than fifteen pixels, that's for sure. My own back-of-the-envelope guess is that prostheses like these will be as good as my own eye in anywhere from 20 to 30 years. Something to look forward to.

Food Force

I really love shooters, but a game doesn't need shooting in it for me to be interested. I think I'll be interested in checking out Food Force from that hotbed of game development the World Food Program. It's definitely a different idea: the player is a Food Aid worker trying to accomplish missions in hostile territory. Although the game appears to be targeted at a younger demo than me, I like the general idea. If it's done well, this could be one of those quirky, non-mainstream sim games that I do, in fact, love (like Orbiter).

W Ketchup

The Republicans' favorite vegetable is back. Just the thing to put on your Freedom Fries! From the website:

"You don’t support Democrats. Why should your ketchup? W Ketchup is made in America, from ingredients grown in the USA. W Ketchup is America’s Ketchup™. Because Democrats aren't Americans."

OK, I made up that last sentence, but you know? That's pretty much the gist of the site. Of course, there's nothing new about exploiting patriotism, or party affiliation, to make a buck. God bless America. As for me, well, I love America and I don't like ketchup anyway.

Camper Strike and Red Orchestra

Camper Strike is a nifty Flash app which gives you a few minutes of the First Person Shooter experience, assuming your MO is being a camper.

On the other hand, if you're bored with Unreal Tournament 2004 already, maybe Red Orchestra can help jazz things up. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks really cool.

Nader's Difference

This cool Flash app allows you to interactively assess the potential impact of Ralph Nader's run on the 2004 Presidential race, making it much more concrete and palpable. Obviously a lot of people in 2000 bought Ralph's line that there was no difference between Gore and Bush. This year, there's really no excuse for that sort of willful ignorance. Yet Ralph persists in that line, for reasons I cannot fathom.

Doom 3

So far I've resisted the temptation to run out and splurge on the new computer I'm going to need to run Doom 3 on. It's not so much about the money. It's not about alienating my wife either: darling that she is, my wife has gone out of her way to let me know she's cool with me getting a new rig (though of course she gets the old machine), and then spending every waking moment for the next month playing Doom.

There, I've said it. I'm not holding out on Doom because I can't afford the money or because it'll cause marital strife. It's just the fact that Doom promises to be a world-class time sink, at a moment in my life when time is my scarcest and most precious resource.

I know I'll get to it eventually. Maybe even this year. I just have to clear a few things off my plate first. Then I'm going to buy a hot new machine, take it home, draw the shades, disconnect the phone, and go to Hell for a while.

I can't wait... but in the meantime, John Carmack's rocket will have to do without my $55 contribution. (I'm sure he's bummed about that.)

(Actually, this coming Saturday, August 14th, would be a perfect time to buy a new machine, since it's going to be a sales tax holiday in Massachusetts for items costing $2500 or less -- but that's assuming I can bring the new rig in for less than that. hmmmm....)

(PS: Apparently some people literally think that playing Doom 3 will literally send me to hell, and that therefore Doom 3 should be banned. Actually, I'm about half-convinced this site is a joke, but some people seem to take it seriously.)

The Living Room Candidate

The Living Room Candidate is a web exhibit produced by the American Museum of the Moving Image, and it's brilliant. It's an exhibit of presidential campaign commercials from 1952 through the current political season. I'm not sure if this exhibit carries all of the candidates' ads, but at least there is a good cross-section of them. It's fascinating to watch the ads, and the accompanying commentary is also very good. In addition, the exhibit lets me see the TV ads of George W. Bush and John Kerry, which aren't running in this non-battleground state.

Boring Stuff Like, You Know, Protecting Us

Question: What could the Bush administration have spent 144 billion dollars on, instead of squandering it on a useless, wasteful, and counterproductive war in Iraq? This chart from the New York Times (registration required) outlines just how many ways to actually protect America have been ignored. Things like safeguarding our ports, adding more police officers, protecting airliners from shoulder-fired missiles, and securing weapons-grade nuclear material around the world from theft.

Of course, none of these practical and useful actions would give George W. Bush the opportunity to strut around on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit and claim some weird Oedipal prize from his dad. And none of them would create new business opportunities for Halliburton. Also, none of them would create new terrorists, kill American soldiers by the hundreds, or bog America down in an occupation of a hostile land. So clearly, the war was a much better alternative.

Crystal Ball Time: Predictions for W's Second Term

I don't have any particular powers of prediction. I'm not psychic. I don't have well-placed sources. On the other hand, I do read the news. So for what it's worth, I did make some predictions back in late 2000. I told my friends and family exactly what I thought the next four years under George W. Bush were going to be like. My prediction was: "war and recession."

It was clear to anyone who really cared to look that W's inner circle were bent on a war of some sort, probably with Iraq. They hadn't exactly made a secret of it. I have to admit that once 9/11 hit, and the Afghan war happened, I was willing to say that I'd been wrong. I didn't really think my prediction of war was satisfied by Afghanistan, since I really predicted an unnecessary war of choice, rather than one of necessity. Of course, by now we all know what happened: as soon as 9/11 and Afghanistan were off the front pages, W and his pals went right back to planning the war they'd been planning before 9/11, except now they had a rationale they could sell it with. (Remember the WMDs?) Thanks for the war, George!

By the way, did anyone else notice how an additional $25 billion was just sort of snuck into the Iraq war this week? It didn't really garner much notice in the news, since the media was more obsessed with important issues like Teresa Heinz Kerry's language. This brings the total (publicly acknowledged) expenditure for Iraq to roughly 187 billion dollars!! Anyone who thinks American soldiers are going to leave Iraq anytime soon is living in a fantasy. We're in Iraq for at least ten years. You and I, and our children and grandchildren, will pay many thousands of dollars apiece to finance this stupid adventure, over which we had no say whatsoever. So once again, thanks for the war, George!

As for recession -- well, we were probably going to have a recession anyway. It was all a question of how long and how hard the recession would be. Thanks to W's regressive policies -- a "tax cut" that's really a net tax increase on most of us, a massive transfer of money to the super-wealthy, massive spending cuts -- the recession has been longer and harder than it needed to be. I think by now the economists say we're out of recession, but it sure doesn't feel like it. I'm not rich, but I'm not poor either -- I make a decent living -- but W's recession included the only period of extended unemployment I've ever experienced in my life, and it was scary. We lost a lot of financial ground in those months. A lot of other people did a lot worse. A lot of people who were working in 2000 still can't find work. That's just fine for W's super-rich buddies, who like having a lot of people unemployed: it makes it easier to hold the line on wages. So Thanks for the recession, George!

I think I predicted the consequences of W's first term in office just about right. What about a second Bush term?

First of all: call me a conspiracy theorist, but even though the election currently seems to favor Kerry, I think the odds are in favor of Bush getting elected (not "re-elected", as he wasn't elected in the first place), through some combination of three possible events:

1. Osama gets caught just before the election! What amazing timing! The Republicans are good at October surprises, and they will literally try anything. They are currently leaning hard on Pakistan to produce the big guy; of course, for all we know, they already have him and they're just waiting for the right moment to pull him out of their hat.

2. Osama strikes again! They've been talking this one up non-stop, too. You can almost hear the hope in the voices of various Republican shills, because they expect a terrorist attack will make people rally behind Bush; and they might be right about that. (Of course, they have also floated the idea of suspending elections in such a case -- which I wouldn't put past them, if they didn't think they could game the actual results of the election like they did in 2000.)

3. The computer ate my vote! Of course, a lot of us won't actually get to vote in 2004 anyway. Thanks to a combination of tricks, like throwing people off voter rolls for having a name "similar" to a felon, etc., we are poised to have more than one Florida this year (including, naturally, Florida!). And since many states are now using electronic voting machines such as those manufactured by Republican-friendly Diebold, there won't be an opportunity to perform any inconvenient recounts -- because the machines don't actually record votes, they only record totals. There is every possibility that the Supreme Court will deliver this election for Junior, as well.

So unless Kerry opens up a wide margin, and soon, I am currently predicting this election for Bush. What about W's second term? What does that hold in store for us?

War and recession, only much more so.

There will be another war. The Bushies have previously discussed the idea of a war against Syria. Lately, they've been floating the totally fucking insane idea of attacking Iran. While a war in Iran would be a disaster, both for America and Iran, that doesn't mean they won't try.

War serves so many of the current regime's purposes so well, there's every reason to believe they've gotten a taste for it. War is a huge business opportunity, for certain types of businesses: arms manufacturers, private security firms, construction companies, oil-service companies, and so on. Dick Cheney knows all about this. $187 billion is a lot of business! War is also a huge political opportunity, allowing Bush, Cheney, and the politicians around them to prosper at the polls by pretending to be war heroes. (Think flight suit and "I'm a war president"; apparently, that gets votes.) War in the Middle East serves the ideological ends of a certain subset of the New Right, and bizarrely enough, a certain (and influential) subset of the Religious Right, who believe that a general war in the Middle East is necessary to usher in the End Times and the Second Coming. Finally, of course, war serves another important political purpose: it provides a distraction as well as political cover for all the other initiatives the administration advances for destroying civil liberties, environmental protections, labor protections, and anything else the Republicans find inconvenient. It's easy to keep things secret in a war; it's easy to intimidate or silence political opposition in a war. For all these reasons, and for the reason that Bush will not be constrained by the necessity of having to run for another term, it's easy to predict another war.

Expect A Draft. The Selective Service System says it's not getting ready to institute a draft. Rather, it's "...prepared to manage a draft if and when the President and the Congress so direct." Well, that's not exactly a denial, and there are no denials coming out of Congress or the White House.

Our military is stretched really, really thin at the moment. There's no way we can handle another war, certainly not another occupation, without a lot more manpower. If North Korea attacks South Korea, or China invades Taiwan, or if the neocons get the next war they so desperately want, we will simply need more people in the military, and it's hard to see how they could get the bodies they need without a draft. We may not even be able to "stay the course" in Iraq without a draft.

When they do start up a draft, remember who gave it to you: Mister Rich Preppy Draft Dodger Himself, George Bush Junior.

More Recession. All these adventures, unfortunately, cost a lot of money, and we didn't even have the money to pay for the mess in Iraq. Bush had already turned a monster surplus into a monster deficit with his tax cuts for his friends. (Later on, in a perfect example of the kind of useful war can be, Bush would claim that the deficit had nothing to do with the tax cuts -- it was all because of al Qaeda!) Meanwhile, the real economy is sputtering, and there is every indicator that it's about to slump again. Don't expect Bush to help.

You don't need to be psychic to see what's coming. Just read the news. The next four years are going to be bad ones, unfortunately regardless of whether Bush has a second term. Bush has dug a hole for us that will take us a generation to get out of. But if he has a second term, the next four years will be a living hell for ordinary people. You've been warned.