Hero of the Game

Last night I was playing a video game called Battlefield Vietnam. It's a first person shooter set during some of the major battles of Vietnam, Hue city, Operation Hastings, the Ia Drang valley, etc.

Last night I was playing Operation Hastings and I decided I was going to be a hero. I stormed a checkpoint all by my lonesome, carrying a single shot rifle and a rocket launcher.

The checkpoint was deserted, or so it seemed. I went into a building, looking for the weapons depot so I knew where it was in case I needed it, and not finding it, I went towards another building. That's when an NVA soldier popped out from behind some trees to take a few shots off at me.

The AI players in this game aren't very good shots, so I shot him at close range with my rifle.

And then I saw two enemy tanks converging on my position.

The tanks are the worst. They have a turret gunner and of course, the big massive gun that makes a tank a tank. If the turret gunner gets you in his sights, you can run away because he's not a very good shot. But if the tank gunner gets you in his sights, you're gone. You're a pile of meat and shrapnel.

The tanks also require three perfectly aimed shots from a rocket launcher to kill. But you can only carry four rockets at a time.

And I had two tanks coming for me.

My heartrate quickening and my butt sliding up on the seat, I managed to get a shot off at one of the tanks with a rocket. I missed. It exploded somewhere behind him.

I zig-zagged my way back to the ammo crate to get more ammo, bullets from the turret pinging the walls next to me, a huge shell from the tank barely missing me.

I found a wall to duck behind, came out and got another shot off. A hit. While I reloaded, I hid behind the wall for cover. I came back out to hit him again. He was closer this time, which made it easier to get a direct hit, but that scared me.

I felt the dread deep down in my stomach. At that moment, I wasn't a guy playing a video game on his computer. I was a soldier in mortal danger and I had to kill these tanks.

Finally I destroyed one of them, but the other one was still after me. I ran into the building for more ammo and barely missed a tank shot. There was a brief flash outside and then the doorway filled with smoke. I wasn't hit, but I was scared.

The next time I stepped out that door, he had me.

I needed at least two more shots from my rocket launcher to kill him so I had to go out there at least two more times and the chances of me surviving even one were just ridiculous.

So what did I do? I growled like Han Solo and ran out of the doorway, straight for a cluster of trees. The tank fired, but he was dialed into the doorway and missed me, and as he swung his turret to get me, I fired a rocket right down his throat. Bam, direct hit, explosions, smoke, sparks. But he was still there.

As my character reloaded, I zig-zagged back to the building. The turret starts swinging back.

Fzzzzzzzzttt! I send him another rocket. It arrives in his mailbox like a cherry bomb and he explodes in a black mass of death.

"YEAH! GET SOME!" I shouted, the real me sitting at my desk. Then I went to the flagpole that marks the checkpoint and watched the meter drain red and then go blue, and heard the voice say something like "Enemy position secured."

A few minutes later, as the fight played out, my side emerged with the victory. A major victory they called it, as opposed to a minor victory if you barely survive.

I should have gotten a medal.

Ten Bucks

To the first person who can name the band, the song, and the album that this clip came from.

No shit. I will send you ten bucks.

Do Not Feed the Troll

Advice I ignored in this thread on Outside the Beltway. I'm Herb, of course, and my last post was directed to a dude named Have a Nice G.A. who had the gall to say this:

If they (the terrorists) have won anything, it's sympathy form the left, and also from the left a great apparatus for propaganda, because these gain votes.

Sympathy from the left? Fuck you, dude.

As I said in response:

"The Left," as you call them, has no sympathy for terrorists or Islamic jihadists. Their ideas (religious extremism, suppression of women, hatred of the west) as well as their methods (terrorism, oppression of their own people) are contrary to our ideas and our methods.

Yeah, sorry to break your bubble, G.A. You've been outsourcing your thinking to talk radio again. Not a good idea, unless you're listening to the sports zoo.

Anyway, the back and forth devolved into more nothingness, and I should have known better. I should have known G.A. was a troll, just trying to piss the liberal off, trying to get him to say something stupid. And you know, I fell for it.

I fell for it hard. It did piss me off, and responding back to him was stupid.

So I laid a little troll trap of my own. Knowing his pathetically predictable biases, I asked him:

Hollywood liberals. Socialist crusaders? Or cutthroat capitalists?

His response?

All of the above, and I think these might be the people who don't understand what socialism means,

All of the above? WTF? The terms are mutually exclusive! It's like having a blind seeing-eye dog!

So my send-off:

Ha! Sorry, no more playing, G.A. Dining room table and all that...

All of the above??? The socialist who is also a capitalist! Heel-larious!

Epic fail, bud. Epic fail.

He responded, and I was tempted to continue the debate, but nope. Not gonna do it. Wouldn't be prudent.

And it would be much like arguing with a dining room table.

His response is laughable:

I guess you don't understand communist millionaire, Hey, but those are your limitations.So if you make billions of dollars that you don't share with the populace pushing your anti capitalist, anti American, anti Christian, anti free market, films, Hmmmm, what does that make you?

Hollywood is anti-capitalist?

You've gotta be kidding me.

Anti-American? Blah. What does that even mean? That they're critical of America at times? So what? I'm critical of myself at times. But that doesn't make me Anti-James. To be more concrete about it, does Hollywood actively root for the downfall of America?

Hell no. Where are they going to get all their money? (Yeah, if you're counting on foreign sales to fill the gap, sorry. We may be down, but we're not out. American markets are not yet obsolete.)

Anti Christian? Is that why there's so many movies with religious characters and religious themes? Is that why Mel Gibson made Passion of the Christ?

Anti free market? The free market is why Hollywood was able to make hundreds of millions of dollars this weekend. (Of which, I admittedly get my small piece.)

I mean, need I say more? This guy is just trying to piss people off. And it worked.

Shrinking States

I'm not thinking of moving or anything, but when I saw this article (Where Americans Aren't Moving), I thought...ooooh, that's where I want to go.

But then I click over and see the list of states.

California
Michigan
Illinois
Ohio
New Jersey
Florida

You know, some of the most populous states in the country...

1 in 10 Million

The last time I was on a plane, airport security pissed me off so much that I could have killed someone. I wrote about the experience here.

A minor inconvenience, for what purpose? Safe from what? Breast milk and bottled water? Ladies with shampoo in their baggage? Dudes in wheelchairs? Digital cameras in the same tub as laptops?

Fuck that. I'll take my chances.

What are the chances, one might ask, of being the victim of a terrorist attack on an airplane?

Nate Silver crunches the numbers:

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Duh!

Of course, one of Silver's commenters makes this minor point:

To say "one incident per 3,105 years airborne" is fine, but we are missing any correlation or causation from the security measures. Maybe the "tens of thousands of flights have been incident free" because of the restrictions? We'll never know.

Perhaps...but let's examine what we do know.

Silver finds "six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner tha[t] landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas."

Six whole incidents.

Vigilant passengers successfully stopped 2 of them, and attempted to stop a third in Flight 93. Airport security didn't stop any of them.

If the TSA has indeed foiled a terrorist attack with their absurdly unhelpful security measures, I'm guessing we probably would have heard about it, especially during the Bush years.

So while I've never heard of the TSA thwarting a terrorist attack (or finding even a second shoe bomb after all the millions of shoes they've searched), I have heard of them totally fucking up their own security.

Just read this article by Jeffrey Goldberg:

On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads Then surely the party of God are they who will be triumphant. The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go. I said, “That’s a Hezbollah flag.” She said, “Uh-huh.”

Clearly what we need are even more useless security measures.

Grandpa Moment

I know it makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but I've had it up to HERE with the ignorant, lazy, and incompetent fools that pass for projectionists these days.

No wonder theaters are trying to go to all-automated systems. It's almost as if they're saying, "Sorry, teenagers. We gave you a chance, and you fucked it up."

You might have heard about a couple of big movies that are playing in theaters this weekend. Avatar, which is still doing brisk business, and Sherlock Holmes. In fact, it's been a record weekend at the box office.

Each time I call a theater to address a problem, I get the run around. I get excuses. I get put on hold and left there.

"We're too busy," is the universal response.

No shit, you're busy, but A) That's no excuse for not doing your job and B) full auditoriums + working ads = happy advertisers, whereas full auditoriums + no ads playing = lost revenue.

These fuckers can't see the big picture if it slapped them upside the face. And hey, I understand. They're young. They're dumb. They're part-timers. They don't work for a living; they work for a little extra pocket money.

But that doesn't give them license to be uncooperative, careless fools.

Fire them all, I say. Hire Mexicans instead. I'll learn Spanish, no problem. Just let me work with someone who gives a shit. Like...anyone but these teenagers!

Rich Lowry's Ghosts

So Amazon sends me an e-mail trumpeting their 70% off sale and I think, "70% off? I like the sound of that."

So I click over and immediately go to the books section, start looking through the "mystery and thriller" category because that's my thing, and what do I find?

A book called Banquo's Ghosts by Rich Lowry. The title piqued my interest first, but then I recognized Lowry. Lowry is the guy from the National Review who went all "starbursts" over Sarah Palin. I've seen some of his posts on their blog, the Corner, but they always struck me as right-wing drivel.

But maybe his book is different. He's credited with a co-writer, Keith Korman, and it is a novel, so maybe it's just genre drivel.

But alas, that does not seem to be the case. From the Publisher's Weekly "review":

National Review editor Lowry (Legacy) and Korman (Swan Dive) have written an exciting, intelligent novel that delivers the thriller goods and tosses barbs at do-gooder politicians, government obstructionists, reporters and a wide array of liberal weenies. Unlikely hero Peter Johnson, a mildly buffoonish writer working for the Crusader, a left-wing magazine, is recruited by CIA agent Stewart Banquo for the assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist. Banquo figures no one would ever suspect Johnson, known for his drunkenness and willingness to take a bribe, to be working for the CIA. Johnson, who accepts the job for a variety of reasons, heads off to Iran. A series of double crosses lands Johnson in the hands of the Iranians and sets up the rest of the plot involving a chillingly plausible terrorist attack. A major thread left untied points to what should be a much anticipated sequel. Expect a boost from author appearances on Hannity's America.

My question: A boost to who?

No, let's just dissect this for a minute. I haven't read a word of the book but I don't really like what I see. Peter Johnson? What kind of lame-ass generic name is that? You're writing a novel. You can come up with any kind of name you want. And you pick Peter Johnson? Why, because Ward Cleaver was taken?

And the "left-wing magazine" is called "the Crusader." Because you know those lefties are on one crusade or another save the trees, the whales, the giant earthworm from Montana that no one's ever seen. Right-wingers never go on crusades. Unless the crusade involves communism, gay marriage, the unborn, or Muslims, of course.

But I digress...

The plot, as far as I can tell, involves "the assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist." Now maybe I'm missing something, but isn't the "top Iranian nuclear scientist" kind of like the bottom nuclear scientist in any other country? I mean, you're the guy who specializes in something your country doesn't yet do. Sure, we're playing around in a right wing fantasy-land here, but why couldn't it be a top Russian nuclear scientist working with the Iranians? Better yet, a dissident Pakistani nuclear scientist with sympathies for Al Qaeda working for the Iranians?

I digress even farther...

I love this part though: "A major thread left untied points to what should be a much anticipated sequel." Oh yeah? You sure the guys who didn't come up with "Peter Johnson" of the "Crusader" didn't fuck up and just leave that thread hanging cuz they didn't know what to do with it?

No, it's set-up for the sequel, cleverly called World War III. In bargain bins everywhere next year.

So Much For That Idea

Looks like I won't be getting on an airplane anytime soon. I was thinking about finally flying somewhere next year, but you know what?

Fuck that.

I refuse to be treated like a terrorist.

I refuse to participate in "security theater" measures that DO NOT PROVIDE SECURITY but do provide major inconveniences to all the non-terrorists flying the not-so-friendly skies.

I will take a train or drive or just stay here in Colorado if I want to go anywhere. But I'm not getting on a plane unless it's going to a saner place and not coming back.

Updated: Kevin Drum made me laugh with this:

Apparently al-Qaeda doesn't need to bother with real terrorism anymore: just light off a firecracker on a plane and the U.S. government will react as if a major city had been leveled. Why not just ban air flight entirely and be done with it?

Don't Get Sick and If You Do, Die Quickly

I couldn't pick folk-rock singer Vic Chesnutt out of a line-up, never heard one of his songs, or even his name. He died this week from an overdose of muscle relaxants, but I'm not sure if it was intentional or not.

But the closing paragraphs had some resonance viz-a-viz the healthcare debate:

Chesnutt had recently struggled with a lawsuit filed by a Georgia hospital after he racked up surgery bills totaling some $70,000, the Athens newspaper reported. He said he couldn't afford more than hospitalization insurance and couldn't keep up with the payments.

The problems baffled his Canadian bandmates, Chesnutt said.

"There's nowhere else in the world that I'd be facing the situation I'm in right now. They cannot understand what kind of society would inflict that on their population," he said. "It's terrifying."

I'm sure some Republican out there is saying to himself, "Well if you didn't want to pay for $70,000 worth of surgery, you shouldn't have gotten $70,000 worth of surgery," as if surgery was some kind of optional luxury good like a flat screen TV and this guy was out getting butt fat injected into his cheeks.

No, he was paralyzed. In all likelihood, he needed that surgery. So why are they trying to stick him with a $70,000 bill? That's half the value of the mortgage on my home.

The home that is my biggest expense, the home that's going to take me 30 years to pay off.

My question: How can any reasonable person expect a paralyzed guy to pay $70,000 for surgery?

No, let me rephrase that:

How can any reasonable person expect anyone to pay $70,000 for surgery? Jesus Christ.

You know what this country needs more of? Working-class doctors. You know what we don't need more of? Republicans bitching about healthcare reform.

Now I Have a Machine Gun

Okay, so maybe not a machine gun.

But I do have an iPod now! Oh glorious purple iPod. With your little screen and easy to use controls. You can play music and tell me what it is! You've got video too! Albeit on a little screen, but if you do a lot of standing around at bus stops and rolling around on public transit, it's pretty convenient. Oh and podcasts and audiobooks and games and all this other stuff! All neatly organized, too.

I love you, iPod. If only you weren't so damn proprietary...

Is it just me, or does my head look too small for my body in this picture? The stylish pull over was a gift from my brother.

That's my niece holding on for dear life.

Here's my nephew holding up his prized Xbox and new games. Look, his eyes are already glazed.

Angel got a "new" bike. (It's new in the sense that it's never been put together, but it's been sitting in my shed since she was born... Long term planning. It's a gift.)

Oh, and you know what else I got? A puke-free, Players of the Century tagged LT jersey. The LT.

Merry Christmas everybody. Hope you're watching Die Hard.

The Garden

Missing from Bob Cesca's best political documentary list, The Garden. I finally saw this movie yesterday, and it brought me to tears.

It was --by far-- the best political documentary I've ever seen, better than anything Michael Moore could come up with. It tells the heartbreaking story of the South Central Community Garden, the largest garden of its kind, an experiment in community revitalization and urban farming that lost out to greed and mean-spiritedness.

Do I recommend it? Highly. It's not just a great documentary; it's a great film.

Viral Video of the Day

I saw this video posted somewhere while I was at work and made a mental note to watch it later. Never happened...

Until now.

And after hearing the first line, especially the droll way it's delivered, I'm glad I finally watched it.

"Star Wars the Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son..."

Updated: Part 2 is hilarious! I love this dude.

Don't Bring a Gun to a Snowball Fight

This video fills me with Chrismas cheer. The scenario:

A snowball fight in the street. An off-duty cop gets involved, pulls out his gun and calls for back-up.

The best part?

People intentionally throw snowballs at this dickhead. They start chanting "Don't bring a gun to a snowball fight." As backup arrives and the on-duty cop tries to handle the situation, some guy starts asking the cop, "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

What the fuck is wrong with you indeed?

Te-Nehisi Coates, commenting on the video, says:

The fact that "there are only a handful of bad cops" cuts no ice with me. If only a "handful of McDonald's are spitting in your food" your not going to McDonalds. Likewise, I don't even ask the cops for directions. Better to take my chance with a dude on the street. At least if he decides to shoot me, he stands a chance of being prosecuted.

Bad Writing

So I'm reading this really bad horror novel and no, that's not redundant. There are, on occasion, really good horror novels but this is not one of them. I will spare the author embarassment and not name him/her or the book, but I will include some of the blurbs on the cover.

"One of my must-read authors!"
"------ is a writer to watch!"
"It won't be long before ----- is taking big bites out of the field of horror fiction!"
"------ gives his/her audience what they crave in spades!"

The book is about a werewolf and includes this passage:

"His fingers and toes were white-hot lances of agony as the skin split to allow for razor-sharp claws to erupt; likewise his gums split open, blood staining his mouth as his teeth became razor-sharp fangs in a drooling maw of sharp, canine teeth."

No shit. I typed that straight out of the book.

"White-hot lances of agony" is good, but then something happens to this sentence. "To allow for razor-sharp claws to erupt." For? We don't need that "for."

"To allow razor-sharp claws to erupt" is much smoother.

Then, we've got this horrible sentence fragment: "blood staining his mouth as his teeth became razor-sharp fangs in a drooling maw of sharp, canine teeth."

Man, where to start? If you strip out most of the adjectives, this sentence tells us one thing:

His teeth became fangs in a mouth full of teeth.

What's another word for mouth? Maw. What's another word for "razor-sharp fangs?" That's right. "Sharp, canine teeth."

Now here's the thing. As a writer, I could totally write that sentence. But I would rewrite the hell out of it. I'd cut it way down, to nothing, but that's my style.

"His mouth became a drooling maw of razor-sharp fangs." And even then, I'd hate it.

I'd want a better verb. I'd want to lose the "mouth/maw" redundancy. I'd rip it up and put it back together again. "Razor-sharp fangs emerged from his drooling maw."

Yeah, I'd keep that. It plays hell with the word count, but then again, I don't write for a living, so I'm not exactly getting paid by the word. Instead, I'd rather craft a coherent sentence.

Side Benefits of Medical Marijuana

When someone tries to rob your marijuana dispensary, you can call the cops.

Look at this dude.

I don't know if he was roughed up by the cops or the dispensary owners, but he got fucked up.

I love that the cops were called, that they came to the pot dispensary, and instead of busting down doors, confiscating cash and plants, and carting people off to jail, they had to take statements.

Oh, there will be a prosecution. But not for growing, possessing, or selling pot.

That's progress.

PS. Also notice how this is filed in the "attempted robbery" category and not, as it normally would be, in the "drug deal gone bad" category.

Say It Ain't So

You know, I've posted about my disappointment in Dan Simmons but I was ready to get over it. The guy is just too good a writer. But then I read this in his latest semi-monthly "Message From Dan:"

Don’t worry, I won’t get into politics. There’s enough of that on the “Hot Button Issues” section of my forum here. But I will say that this one-year-later November of 2010 was disturbing. Anger and division and suspicion and breakdown of traditional political dialogue runs deeper in the country than any time I can remember since the end of the 1960’s during the depths of the Vietnam War days. Recent choices, decisions, and directions by the president and party we voted into power last year have polarized me in ways I haven’t felt since the late-1960’s . . . demanding some action. It’s just harder now to find the proper venue for constructive political action, but I shall. I suspect many other people – on both sides of many of these issues of war, peace, and the economy – will as well in the coming months and years.

It makes me sad.

Now, contrary to what some may believe, I try not to be a knee-jerk guy. I try to put myself in other people's shoes, try to understand before being understood.

But I read that bolded sentence, and went "Huh?"

"Recent choices, decisions, and directions by the president and party we voted into power last year have polarized me in ways I haven’t felt since the late-1960’s..."

So I take it Dan doesn't like the Lily Ledbetter Act...

Or S-Chip.

Or stem cell research.

Or Sonia Sotomayor.

Or the Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

I'm assuming that he doesn't like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but then again, who does? I would have preferred to do without that one, but then again, I would have preferred to do without the whole economic meltdown thing, too.

Maybe Dan's disappointed that Obama hasn't closed Gitmo. Maybe he's worried about trying terrorists as criminals like we did all those years before George W. Bush "decided" we didn't need laws and courts and all that other pansy liberal stuff.

Maybe he really really wants Obama to get rid of Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

But something tells me that's not what Dan's talking about. I wouldn't advise it, but take a look at the "Hot Button Issues" section of his forum.

Some of the headlines of recent Simmons posts:

Paul Krugman IS "A Dangerous Dysfunction"
VDH (As in Victor Davis Hanson): Obama versus History
Cap and Steal
Schumer Calls Flight Attendant "Bitch"
A Little Learning is a Bidenesque Thing
Holder and Race-Based Politics
Gitmo by the Lake
Ayn Rand
Obama in Oslo
Islam U
The Most Boring Man in the World?
Brooks: Bearded Mideastern Religious Fanatics
Their Shackles Are Their Own Problem
Ahmadinejad: US Blocking Return of Savior
Obama's Approval Rating Lowest of any President
Peggy Noonan on THE SPEECH
George Will: This Will Not End Well
Alinsky Does Afghanistan
Krauthammer: Uncertain Trumpet

Oh God. It's like Pajamas Media all over again.

$Wankster$

Last night, my cousin sent me a text gloating over the hated Raiders beating my beloved Broncos. His text included his signature: "$gangster$"

I found that funny because 1) he ain't no gangster and 2) he ain't got no money.

The Worst "10 Best" List Ever

Courtesy of Bob Cesca, who puts together a list of the ten best political movies of the last decade.

Michael Moore gets three nods, for Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and SICKO.

Now, just speaking for me personally, if I were putting together a list of "10 best" list on anything, and one guy got three nods, I'd think...okay, I need to diversify.

Not my list, but my tastes.

Around the Web

The Washington Post compiled "The Worst Ideas of the Decade," and surprise-surprise, many of them are cherished Republican/Right-wing ideas, like torture, letting Osama Bin Laden go at Tora Bora, the prosperity gospel. (Ugh, how I hate that prosperity gospel shit.)

(And don't give me that "But they're a liberal paper!" bullshit. Some of these were written by conservatives. You're going to tell me that Reihan Salam is a liberal? Um...no. And yet, there he is, writing critically of the "compassionate conservativism" of George W. Bush. He must have Bush Derangement Syndrome or something, I guess, huh?)

This column from Will Wilkinson, perhaps the world's most reasonable libertarian, is worth reading in its entirety. He describes riding on a plane with an Iraq War vet returning from combat. The crew mentioned the soldier and asked for applause "to thank one of the real heroes who keeps America safe."

Wilkinson continues:

I hesitated to join the applause.

Hadn’t we known for years that the war was predicated on misinformation? Were we all so ready to agree that it was keeping Americans safe? It was, in fact, killing and wounding thousands upon thousands of Americans--many more than were killed on 9/11. Our troops, in turn, have killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who did nothing to any of us. Maybe the soldier on the airplane signed up to keep me safe and to protect our freedom. But why should we all have to agree that his choice was free of false assumptions? Why should we be expected to display our gratitude, to put our hands together, for what may in the end be a senseless waste of life and a squandering of national power?

Yet all of this is expected of us. By a flight attendant in an American flag tie. So I hesitated. But sooner or later we all feel the ugly nudge of conformism and make some small surrender to keep up appearances. On that juddering plane descending through the clouds, it seemed worth communicating that I was not, after all, on the side of the terrorists.

I, too, am not on the side of the terrorists, but if you try to tell me that we're fighting in Iraq to keep me safe or to preserve my freedoms, I'll blow a big raspberry in your face.

I don't live in Iraq, can't be touched by the WMD they don't have, won't be voting in their elections, won't be going to their schools...

You want to fight for my freedom? Let me smoke pot without a prescription. Hell, let me smoke a cigarette at a bar. Let me drive my truck again. Let my Mom get married officially. Don't kick my girlfriend out when her visa expires.

The biggest threat to my freedom isn't Saddam Hussein or Iraqi insurgents. The biggest threat to my freedom is right here at home and comes from my fellow citizens.

On another subject, this exchange from this interview made me laugh and cry all at the same time:

Q: What role did loose lending practices play in masking declining wages during the last period of economic expansion?

A: Easy credit has been America's substitute for decent wages.

Oh snap!

I used to know this dude that urged me to vote against a minimum wage increase a few years ago. I ignored his pleas and voted yes, but he argued that it would make it harder for companies to hire people. Makes sense on a certain level but correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't making a shit wage make it harder to participate in the economy?

So let's see...a company paying more for labor...or a person --a living, breathing, thinking, feeling person-- having more buying power? Um, I think I'll side with the person.

The Process

Not to make my blog all Vukovar, all the time, but this is the same passage as before, only with some edits.

You interested in a peak at the writing process? Okay, you're weird, but here you go!

Vukovar, Croatia - November 18, 1991


The constant air strikes and artillery bombardments had turned Vukovar into a city of ruins. The streets were paved with rubble and broken glass. Most of the buildings had been blasted to bits of crumbled concrete, tangles of twisted rebar, and heaps of scattered bricks. The ones that were still standing were pocked with shrapnel divots, their windows and doors blown out, roofs caved in.

“It’s beautiful, no?” Dmitri said, heaving for breath. His face was dripping with sweat and grime. He wiped his brow with his sleeve but it just smeared his forehead with streaks of dirt.

Monte stared out at the scarred landscape from atop the hill. The town’s water tower, still standing even though chunks had been blown out of it, caught his eye in the distance. It was such an obvious target, it must have been a point of honor among the JNA to destroy it. And yet it remained upright.

Monte found that beautiful. The willful destruction of a city was something else, certainly not beautiful.

“Stunning,” Monte said, though even that word failed to describe it. Heart-breaking, depressing, ugly, enraging. They would have qualified too, but stunning would do.

He detached the wide-angle lens from his camera and fitted it with a long lens from his satchel. From this viewpoint the town spread out before him, its winding streets and battered buildings appearing like miniatures in a diorama. War smoke filtered the light and cast everything with a desolate gloom.

Monte tried to make it beautiful through his viewfinder, marking each attempt with a click of his shutter. He finished the roll and popped it out, letting the camera dangle from a strap around his neck as he labeled the expended roll with a permanent marker. He had his own system, known only to himself and his agent in New York, Spencer. It made no sense to anyone else, but after over a decade in the hot zones of the world, he and Spencer somehow made it work.

He loaded another roll and considered shooting some more shots from the hill top –the climb was worth it—but he figured he had gotten enough. The only thing to see from up here was a dead city.

Just as he was turning around to start the climb back down the hill, an artillery battery started walking another bombardment down one of Vukovar’s streets, kicking up plumes of dust and smoke. The explosions echoed in the valley –boom, boom, boom.

Monte quickly snapped off a few shots with the camera, trying to capture the moment of detonation. He was always off a few seconds, but no doubt, Spencer would say the shots were beautiful when they got back from the lab. That one’s a magazine cover, and that one goes into your book. But Monte knew it wasn’t his best work.

A few blocks away from the explosions, Monte watched a few squads of lightly armed paramilitaries fan out amidst the rubble, following the artillery but trying to avoid getting directly under it. Most of them were in store-bought uniforms that indicated they were definitely not JNA, but even through the telephoto lens, Monte couldn’t read the patches on their sleeves. There were a few wearing the square shubara caps and double bandoliers typical of the Chetnik movement, so Monte guessed they were Serbs.

He pointed them out to Dmitri. “White Eagles?”

Dmitri squinted. “Nah, just hoodlums from Banja Luka.”

“Look at how they’re following those shells. You think they’re coordinating with the JNA? ”

“Would you follow shells if you were coordinating with the JNA? No. They’re hoodlums from Banja Luka, out for a weekend of fun and games. They’re following those shells because they think that’s where the action is. But as you can see from here, there is no action. Only shells. Come on, we’re too visible up here.”

He scrambled down from the crest of the hill and took refuge under a tree, leaving Monte alone at the top. Monte hadn’t felt exposed until that moment, but he saw Dmitri cowering under the tree and the hoodlums from Banja Luka, who were half-drunk on slivovitz and nationalist anthems and wouldn’t think twice about taking a shot at some man-shaped figures on the hillside.

“Come on, you fool,” Dmitri said. “You want to die for those pictures?” It was becoming a common question - you want to die for those pictures? - but the answer never changed.

No, Monte did not want to die out here in Croatia, not for pictures, not for anything. Want had nothing to do with it. Whether you live or die in a war zone relies on the vagaries of time and space. Some places will be, at different times, more deadly than others. One minute, a crowd of people are standing on a street corner. The next they are obliterated by flying metal as a mortar shell explodes at their feet. Fifteen minutes later, Monte is stooping over their bloody remains, taking snapshots. The same space, different times, different levels of danger.

So far he had been lucky. He had never been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was often, through the nature of his work, often in the right place at the right time. And when he went home, back to the states and the half-empty apartment he rented mostly for storage space for the few possessions he could not carry, he returned with nothing but bad memories, nightmares, and mild alcoholic tendencies.

Monte met Dmitri at the tree and grabbed one of the branches overhead. “So when can we get down there?” he asked. “I want to go into the city.”

“So do I,” Dmitri said.

Another round of artillery shells rained down on Vukovar in the distance. Monte felt the explosions in his bones.

Dmitri did too, but he quickly replaced the momentary dread that was on his face with a grin. “After they’re done bombing.”

“When do you think that will be?”

“Let me consult the Colonel,” Dmitri said. He held his thumb and pinky to the side of his head like he was talking on the phone. “Hallo, Colonel? Yes, Dmitri here. I was just wondering, uh, when will the assault take place? Yes, thank you.” He tilted his head and smirked. “He put me on hold.”

“Cut the shit, man,” Monte said. “I just don’t want to be up here when the city falls.”

“Then let’s get off this fucking hill.” He shouldered his M70 and started leading the way down the path.

What a Dummy

I will never forgive the GOP for trying to foist Sarah Palin on the rest of us. Hey, I get why they like her.

She's a living breathing personification of their wildest hopes and dreams. The GOP establishment likes her because she's a reliable line-tower. The base likes her because she tells them what they want to hear.

But at some point, even they must realize that the woman is just not cut out for the position they carved out for her.

I speak mostly of Visorgate. The gist: Sarah Palin, vacationing with her family in Hawaii, was spotted by the paparazzi. To "hide," she marked out the "McCain For President" on her visor.

Some people thought this might be a dig at her running mate. I happen to believe Palin's explanation:

"In an attempt to 'go incognito,' I Sharpied the logo out on my sun visor so photographers would be less likely to recognize me and bother my kids or other vacationers.

It doesn't impress me, of course, but I believe it.

Palin has shown she can be as petty and immature as any politician, but when did she start this passive-aggressive stuff? Hasn't she been mostly just aggressive with none of this passivity crap?

Aside from that, Palin strikes me as the type of idiot who would think conspicuously blacking out the logo on her visor would make her more "incognito" than just leaving it alone.

I mean, don't just take off the visor or anything. Just black it out with a Sharpie, you know, so the paps can get their before and after shots and start making uneducated guesses about your motives...

That Palin, she's quite a thinker!