Local Coffee Shop Declares Itself A Terrorist Organization; FBI Mulling Response

CINCINNATI, OH - The gentleman who calls himself "John Rouen" is hardly your typical terrorist.

He speaks with a heavy Appalachian accent; his grasp of modern business lingo and American culture belies his frequent reading of Forbes magazine and the FOX network.

His loose-fitting solid black shroud, the traditional garb of the terrorist, exposes only a thin band of pale skin around his blue eyes. During the interview, he continually chafes at his forehead and scratches his shoulders and upper back, apparently finding the full-body garment uncomfortable in Cincinnati's humid summers.

"If I had known this was what was involved in being a terrorist," grumbles the man who calls himself Mr Rouen", "I probably would have thought twice about becoming one."

Yet the man who calls himself Mr Rouen is resolute in his cause - his dedication to terrorism. What drove this ordinary American to turn his back on mainstream American life and become a terrorist?

"Honestly," said the man who calls himself Mr Rouen, "I did it for the tax breaks."

A few months ago, Lakes' Shakes lost its tax-exempt status. The man who became known as Mr Rouen had a heated discussion with his accountant, furious that his firm had to pay more taxes as a percentage of overhead than big banks like Bank of America and HSBC. "We provide a public service," said the man who became known as Mr Rouen to his accountant.

"Well," said the accountant, "terrorist organizations don't pay taxes either, and they also claim to 'provide a public service'."

"It was an epiphany - like JP Morgan, George W Bush and Ayn Rand, I heard God whisper in my ears - 'Follow the path of the terrorist, John'," recounts the man who now calls himself Mr Rouen.

So the man who became known as Mr Rouen walked into Springdales and said, "I want to buy a terrorist uniform." "Everyone looked at me funny," he later recounted. "As if I was talking about having sex with children, or something."

The man who became known as Mr Rouen then took the train to Florida and chartered a small boat to Havana, seeking "terrorism resources".

Under Chapter 18, Sec. 2331 of the United States Code, international terrorism is defined as "...violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State..." and "are to intimidate or coerce a civilian population..."

On May 15, 2013, the man who would become known as Mr Rouen withdrew $17 from the general fund of Lakes' Shakes and used the funds to hire a male prostitute specializing in bondage and sadomasochism. The male prostitute, whose identity has not been disclosed, and the man who thereafter became known as Mr Rouen, spent the night of the 15th whipping and sodomizing each other repeatedly, taking turns tying each other to the bed with hemp cable, gagging the mouth of the "victim" with duct tape, each man being threatened with "punishment" if they did not continue to sodomize the other.

After the twelve-hour ordeal, the man who now calls himself Mr Rouen and the gigolo were rushed to the Havana Medical Centre, where they were treated for severe dehydration and blood loss.

"The patient was nearly dead," said a Havanese doctor who wished not to be identified, saying, "I don't want to be known as the doctor who saved the life of an American terrorist."

"I never saw such vicious wounds. I could hardly believe they were not fatal. And such fearsome language! Just listening to those two men threaten each other with more 'punishment' nearly made me faint.

"I was truly afraid...to this day I still do not feel safe bending over," said the doctor, nervously shifting his bottom.

That night, by endangering his life, and the lives of others, and by violating the laws of the 14 American states in which sodomy is still considered illegal, the man who became known as Mr Rouen had nearly completed his descent into terrorism.

But one heinous act remained. He still had to seek publicity for his deeds. So he posted six hours of grainy, low-res footage on an amateur sex video sharing site, dubbing the footage with pirated music licensed to the estates of Frank Sinatra and Michael Jackson. Through the entire six-hour S&M sex marathon, ran the caption, "DO YOU FEEL YOUR FAMILY VALUES THREATENED YET???"

Within hours, downloads shattered the seven-digit mark. The file was soon taken down by the site, by court order. But it was too late - the cat was out of the bag, and countless mirrors soon sprung up hosting the footage from countries like Venezuela and Sweden.

And with that, the man who now calls himself Mr Rouen realized, he had become a terrorist.

Upon his return to work, he ordered all the servers to dress appropriately - in full-body black shrouds. He commissioned a new awning for the store, emblazoned with the words, "WE SUPPORT TERRORISM!," and offered new customers coupons with each order:"Redeem for one FREE AK-47 - Void Where Prohibited By Law"

The man calling himself Mr Rouen credited the Gettysburg Address as the inspiration for the "AK-47s For Everyone" promotion.

"President Lincoln of the U- I mean, the Great Satan - made the Blacks free, but only where he had no power to enforce his proclamation; and now we're making AK-47s free, but only where we have no power to redeem our coupons."

The moment Lakes' Shakes became a terrorist organization, the FBI froze its assets, in the process instantly clearing several hundred dollars of outstanding debt. Since the man known as Mr Rouen has no income or assets, he now qualifies for public assistance, and since his business has lost its corporate charter, but still retains public recognition as a terrorist entity, Lakes' Shakes is now free from the statutory requirement of corporations to hire professional legal counsel.

The man known as Mr Rouen still lives in fear of the FBI showing up one day to seize his home and business. The FBI, he says, "is no doubt terrified of reprisals by the underground army of male sodomists and male sodomist sypathizers in America," citing statistics that as many as one in ten American men may be a sodomist.

But there is also the fact that the man known as Mr Rouen has actually done nothing wrong under federal law. Terrorism remains a poorly defined legal concept under US law, with neither specific legal mechanisms for its prosecution nor legal remedies for those found guilty.

"I'm in a legal grey area," says the man known as Mr Rouen. "Am I a law-abiding American citizen? Or am I an international terrorist? That depends who you ask."

Meanwhile the persons associated with the Lakes' Shakes terrorist organization are adjusting to the new workplace culture of terrorism.

"We had a 'solidarity' meeting today," said one individual said to be a low-ranking member of the Lakes' Shakes terrorist organization. "We were indoctrinated to blind ourselves to race, religion, gender, political persuasion and national origin - the only thing that matters is fulfilling our goals as a terrorist organization." And what are those goals? The young woman shuddered. "Don't ask me," she pleaded. "I just serve drinks. If you have any questions, ask my manager."

But it's unlikely her manager would have the answer either, for Lakes' Shakes has reorganized itself into self-contained cells of no more than ten individuals. "It's good for morale, and it's good for customer service. If a customer asks, 'Who's the manager?" or, "Who brewed this stool in a cup?" - you can't be forced to name names you don't know.

Since Lakes' Shakes is now a terrorist organization, it cannot legally accept payment for goods and services, instead relying on a shadowy network of collaborators offering payment-in-kind, some possibly motivated by ideological causes, others, perhaps, forced to assist in fear of their family values, or their rectal health.

"It's a daily struggle," says the man known as Mr Rouen. "But somehow, God willing, we will defeat the Great Satan, and serve up some mean coffee."

The Internal Revenue Service is grappling with the issue of tax enforcement of recognized terrorist organizations.

"The United States sponsors terrorism - terrorism does not sponsor the United States. These terrorist organizations are eminently untaxable. It's a tax loophole a million miles wide," said Gary Perkins, a collection officer with the Cincinnati branch of the Internal Revenue Service.

Meanwhile, the Cincinnati office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is mulling its response.

"To be honest, we're worried about copycat crimes. We don't want an epidemic of wannabe sodomists wreaking havoc all over Cincinnati. And, you know, we really need more funding. We take the 'War on Terrorism' seriously, but we also take the budget negotiations back in D.C.  seriously too," said Mr Kevin R Cornelius, director of the Cincinnati FBI office.

"Of course we have to remember that terrorists like the man known as Mr Rouen are American citizens too. So we're considering our options very carefully." Mr Cornelius unequivocally denies rumors that the FBI may have already been infiltrated by sodomist sympathizers.

"The one thing we can't ignore, was the use of hemp in the terrorist act," said Mr Cornelius. "That's a real red flag for us, and it's why we're sitting up and taking notice of terrorists like the man who calls himself Mr Rouen."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

On Feminazism - And Why Feminism Is Doomed

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/rebellious-new-feminism-returns-to-german-social-discourse-a-904100.html

The article broaches two elements of Feminism (in America, where Feminism has been much more successful in changing society for the worse, it is disparagingly referred to as "Feminazism") which betray the true nature of the movement.

First, the observation that Feminists are typically college-educated. This is a half-truth.

Although Feminists tend to be college-educated, they invariably specialize in the softest of soft majors. In America they have even invented the field of "women's studies", then demanded subsidies and salary equalization legislation (the "sue everybody" bill) when the major proved so abtruse and so irrelevant that those who pursued it proved unemployable.

Feminist academics are invariably ignorant individuals with slovenly mental habits. The remarkable resemblance between the debate style of Feminists and the debate style of Adolf Hitler is what has earned them their appellation as "Feminazis" (and no, this is not a "Godwin", because the comparison is relevant).

Like the historical Nazis, the Feminists are apt to rely on the methods of repeating the same lies again and again until even otherwise reasonable people are prepared to accept they are at least partially true; using the mantle of victimhood to justify victimizing others; relying on emotion, shock value and mass mobilization over intellectual sophistication; an intense and unequivocal hostility towards family, business, religion, and anything and everything that exists outside the movement; the creation of an entire pseudoscience of bigotry; and the belief that critical thinking is an ideological contaminant (because only through unadulterated emotion can ideological purity can be achieved).

One of the more ominous patterns that "Feminazis" have in common with the historical Nazis is the efforts of ideologically minded individuals to usurp the mantle of academic prowess in fields they are not qualified of. I remember in college I encountered a Feminist who presumed to claim a doctorate in Classical Studies, lectured to an audience of 200 undergraduates about the Spartans (a supposedly more gender-correct society, which actually isn't true since the apex of Spartan society was military service which was by definition exclusive to men) then left them breathless when she was revealed ignorant of the "helots".

Second, the topic of racism and Feminism.

Race is obviously a much more problematic issue in America than Germany, and I would like to point out to our German friends that (without taking occasion to blame the German nation for the atrocity that was the Holocaust - I personally am Jewish) we Americans haven't taken occasion to conveniently remove the problem for future generations by eradicating our unpopular ethnic minorities. The point is, race is an ongoing issue in American society, which, like every society, is a work in progress; therefore, Germans should be well to consider American experiences instructive and not merely testament to the barbarism that is American society.

Anyway, American Feminists are invariably White, and almost always of Protestant descent. (Many Feminazis pretend to be Jewish, as their modus operandi is to associate themselves with legitimately persecuted groups, seek legitimacy in the social strata they claim to disdain, and to appeal to the Protestant perception of Jews as intellectually superior - the classic behaviors of the chronically insecure). This is so for a very simple reason. No Black American woman would seriously believe that her gender is more of a social handicap than her race. The Feminist movement is a White women's movement, a way for the serially over-privileged to continue to claim privilege over other groups in society.

The Feminazis talk about race. But all it is, is lip service. They have absolutely no interest in correcting racial issues in society, only in allying with other politically minded groups to persecute White males (who are by now an extreme minority in American society and the only group it is legal to discriminate against without legal repercussions). This evil policy has not managed to close the race/gender gap, or even narrow it - it has widened it - because it does not resolve the underlying problems, lack of access to education and life progression.

What Feminazism has instead created is women like those seen in the picture in the article. Confused, angry, hormonal women who are very much cut from the same cloth as the confused, angry young men who felt their masculinity flattered by historical Nazism 80 years ago.

Perhaps the most poignant parallel between historical Nazism and Feminazism is what happens to the loyal-unto-death after "the party is over". They become old, burned-out individuals who spend the remainder of their lives as grifters and pensioners, alone and forgotten amidst a world that has moved on.

Women who were like these individuals back in the 60s (and never learned to hold a job, keep house, or wash their hair) can still be seen at bars, lesbian cafes, flea markets, and drug alleys - the slag heaps of society.

Perhaps that is the greatest evil perpetrated by Feminism. Dooming these young women to that bleak future.

Why Misha Collins and George Takei Are Human Shit

Many people adore Collins and Takei, but do not understand them. They look at the (always popular) causes they support, but they refuse to see what they are really doing and why.

Let's get one thing straight about George Takei. He's not a good actor. He's not even a good actor in the sense that DiCaprio or Reeves were - they could do ennui, the emotional lacuna, staring at the camera with jaw slack and a vacant look on their face.

Absolutely no one would pay to look at Takei, because Takei is a flatly bad actor. So Takei's entire career has been being a minor supporting character on classic Trek, half a century ago, and since then, doing the occasional Troy McClure-style has-been Hollywood bits.

Takei's incompetence at acting is perhaps most noticeable in his appearance in Command & Conquer 3, as the Emperor of the Rising Sun. The antagonists of previous C&C games - Anton Slavik (Frank Zagarino) and Alex Romanov (Nicholas Worth) - were played by actors who had great emotional depth and variety.

As Slavik, Zagarino could appear by turns fierce and determined, surprised and hopeful, fearful and depressed, obsequious and subservient. His actions, from shooting people to delivering speeches to simple dialogue with the other characters, were dealt with just the appropriate inflection and facial movement that imparted pathos and suspense into his every move, made him amazing to just watch. This is the same gift for subtlety that makes Reeves, who is otherwise an unremarkable actor, fun to watch.

Romanov, unlike Slavik, was a comic villain. Yet Worth, again, demonstrated great emotional diversity and spontaneity that made him fun to watch. A good actor is never boring to watch - his every gesture brims with pathos, with suspense, keeps the viewer on seat's edge.

Takei has none of that charm. Takei is a one-trick pony. Takei does the super-stoic overaffected Asian dude thing, which itself is a superficial and tasteless appeal to racist caricatures, and he does it badly. Everything Takei says and does, he does with the same inflection, same word pacing, same over-affected facial immobility that makes him dreadful to watch. When a viewer watches Takei, the first thing he can think is "get the hell off the screen" - and even in his best moments, e.g., Star Trek VI, that is the role he is cast in, a bunch of eight-second intermissions (mostly telling people to go away). This is also why the "You Are A Total Asshole" clip of Takei has its appeal; Takei is good at nothing so much as driving viewers away.

As the Rising Sun Emperor, Takei could only affect facial immobility, pseudopathos, grating false bravado and a very bad impression of a Japanese accent that betrayed only Takei's total reliance on White racism and not any insight he possessed into the Japanese culture for his presentation as a Japanese. Perhaps most importantly, he lacked what the Japanese call "tsundere" - the shadow of the "stoic Asian" archetype, the ability of a stoic and unapproachable character to reveal depth of character. Even in scenes that seemed to call for it, Takei proved incapable of breaking his monotone, making the slight grimaces and eyeblinks that are the magic of a skilled actor.

There is Star Trek: Shattered Universe, an obscure PS2 game featuring Sulu as the main character. The game's cutscenes are poorly scripted but even more dreadfully narrated. The cutscenes seem to drag; through the ups and downs of the plot, Takei never breaks his monotone. Compare the quality of the cutscenes and narration to, say, Starfleet Command I: even the tutorials are interesting because the narrators have good inflection. Even the Romulan tutorial, narrated in the stereotypical super-stoic Romanesque style, entertains the listener.

The latter comparison, though, touches on what is Takei's real weakness. A Hollywood-grade thespian must have not only excellent acting skills, but also a willingness to work with the director and stage manager, to critique plots and casting, and to alter the script to fit his skills. This is a skill that both Shatner and Stewart had in abundance - almost all episodes of OS/TNG deviate substantially from the final script, because the actors would say, "I don't like this, it's awkward", or "I have a better idea". This is perhaps best demonstrated in the dialogue between Picard and Sarek in "Unification", a powerful scene that is substantially different on screen than in the script.

And this is also why Takei has what Shatner (who is, admittedly, both an uxoricide and a self-centered douchebag) described as a "psychosis" regarding his person. Takei is psychotically jealous of not only Shatner's skills and prestige, but also his assertiveness on the stage that is necessary to turn otherwise unremarkable productions into memorable entertainment. Original Trek was tedious and poorly written, and whatever else may be said of it, Shatner was the only reason anyone could stand to watch it.

For half a century, Takei held a pathological grudge against Shatner - snubbing him at reunions, making public statements about perceived slights, complaining that the talents and personhood of the star of the show were a particular affront to one of several dozen supporting actors, that is to say, George Takei.

All of which brought Takei to the GLBT movement. Takei says he's gay, he's been in a relationship for 18 years. Maybe. By that estimate, however, Takei began the relationship in 1995, when he was already 58 years old and the GLBT movement was well "over the hump", the movement had broad support and being gay was not only accepted but even seen as trendy.

Trek's flirtation with the GLBT movement began before Roddenberry died, with the rather unremarkable TNG episode "The Outcast", an allegory about homosexuals' desire for freedom of lifestyle. Through TNG, at least half a dozen TOS stars were given guest appearances at their request, but Takei made no such request to appear in "Outcast", demanding to be the main character for a movie or series of his own -hence "Shattered Universe".

Gay or otherwise, gay advocacy was never Takei's interest - only self-promotion.

The gay rights' movement achieved its legitimate aims in the 90s, but the radical GLBT crowd, which wasn't, hasn't ever been, interested in real equality, began to exert its influence on the franchise via crypto-feminists like Jeri Taylor, who began to ascend in the franchise after she wrote an episode, "Suddenly Human", about the divorce industry. The episode was written before Roddenberry died, and its script is a contrived, bizarre mix of pro-family values and stereotyped misandry. Tellingly, the episode itself is not even considered one of the worst, but most forgotten.

It was Taylor who contrived the character of Ro Laren (Michelle Forbes), whom Taylor conceived as a misandrist lesbian butch, but was softened into a troubled young woman seeking to find her place in the world, and actually turned out to be one of the most well-balanced and compelling characters in the series. Ro was to be a main character in DS9, and with Roddenberry dead and the power struggle at Paramount over, Taylor intended to remake the character closer to her initial notions, but Forbes refused to play the character as Taylor intended it and left the franchise.

So Kira Nerys' (Nana Visitor) character was conceived. Kira was the character Taylor wanted - a misandrist butch whose stock MO was waving a pistol around, shooting at walls, ranting and raving at nonplussed white males, and holding her hands akimbo while doing her best to puff out her torso and shoulders (to which padding was added in some early episodes) in a classic "womyn" pose (best example: DS9, "Shelter"). In classic feminist/GLBT style, Kira was consistently associated with motherhood, while never actually being a mother herself; a histrionic, confused woman who only appeared sexy for the purpose of deceit and never out of actual desire, a schizoid icebox the rest of the time. And of course every woman in her field of vision was a natural victim.

Kira the Butch was such a repulsive character it nearly killed DS9 before the first season was out; so once more pressure came in on Taylor to moderate her misandry. So Kira the Butch became Kira the Tuff Girl - a swooning heterosexual porcupine who beguiled stoic characters to confusion, and her life and career came to mirror Jeri Taylor's own self-image: delusions of violent oppression by arrogant males, finally bested and only by gaining the mantle of some naive higher authority not interested in her personal demons. Taylor went on to miswrite Voyager, which needs no mention here.

Through all this, Takei continued to occupy himself with his own non-career. Never interested in going to any trouble for anyone or anything but himself, the talentless, grasping, disgrunted has-been finally managed to ingratiate himself with a cast of similarly inept and disreputable and seek the attention he craved with the demagogical and piratically minded GLBT movement.

And Misha? Well. I'll get to him later. =)

Memorial Day, And Why I Despise The American Military

People often say we should "respect" Memorial Day, "respect" "those who gave their lives for our country". For this reason, criticism of the evil that is our military is shunned. All days, but this day in particular. Save it for another day, they say. As if there's ever any day that criticism of the military is considered one of those "rights" our mercenaries presume to fight for.

It's also said, that for evil to prevail, good men must do nothing.

All human institutions seek to protect and increase their own power. This is natural and to be expected; it is a natural outgrowth of the Darwinian impulse to survive best; human institutions follow the human character.

The American military is no exception. The fact is, the military has never seen a war it didn't like, no matter how unjust or unnecessary, and has always been willing to lie to the American people and their leaders, to oppress and commit violence against American citizens, in the service of its own self-serving agenda.

Ever seen that poster, "Loose Lips Sink Ships"? To this day, most people still believe that the intent of that poster was to defeat Nazi intelligence efforts. But as a matter of historical fact, the actual rationale for that poster, was the Navy's desire to silence criticism of its profound incompetence at defending the New England coastline against U-boat operations. To the Navy, the lives and property of tens of millions of New Englanders, were less important than their own institutional aggradizement.

1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were unanimously convinced military action was necessary to solve the problem. (Never mind that the USSR could nuke the continental US from Vladvostok and that the US had missiles equally close to Moscow from Turkey, and it hadn't been casus belli). Kennedy was convinced that the problem could be resolved peacefully, and when the military was thus deprived of an opportunity to justify itself, they instead complained about continental air defense (against ballistic missiles?) being overstretched and that, therefore, the American people didn't understand, or appreciate, the heroism of flying in circles over Florida. Oh, and JFK wound up dead, so, that was the last word on that!

It's true today. The military covered up the suspicious death of Pat Tillman to friendly fire, not because of any legitimate security concern, but because the Army was worried that if the American people knew the truth of whatever actually happened, it would undermine support for the war, and by extension, the Army. These are anecdotes, of course, but they are representations of the general modus operandi of the American military: war allows the American military to justify its own existence, therefore, the military has never seen a war it didn't like.

It isn't a coincidence that veteran associations (whose active membership represents the minority of those who were conscripted) come out banging the war drums whenever there's talk of invading some hapless third world country or that our military is comprised disproportionately of the most ignorant and low-class Americans. There is a very wise Chinese saying, "The worst iron for nails; the worst men for soldiers."

Therein lays the fallacy of those who say things like, "Don't blame the troops for the decisions of their leaders". Of course we should blame the troops - that is the flip side of being a "volunteer" - you don't get to say "I fought because I had to." At best, it boils down to pleading stupidity. It's no coincidence that union workers are fanatically supportive of their unions or that people on welfare always vote against anyone who talks about reforming Social Security. If you're on the take, you're on the take; the military has a good five million people on the take.

When an American soldier presumes to blame politicians for the problems of this nation, what the American soldier is really saying is, "I hate the United States of America, sir. I hate democracy, sir."

Yet every soldier does this and nothing is thought of it. It speaks volumes about what American soldiers REALLY think of America and our freedoms.

Our politicians - their faults the mirror image of the American people - ARE America. They are what those soldiers presume to be fighting for (it couldn't be the paycheck that keeps them from having to work at McDonalds?) and to blame the politicians shows the American soldier's contempt for the American people and American freedom.

Memorial Day, our "respect" for our military, is nothing but the American military's selfish, traitorous use of the American people as 350 million human shields for its own nefarious self-interest. And that is why that "respect" must always be assaulted, at every opportunity, by any means available.

I would like to close with a quote from Alexander Hamilton, the main contributor to the US Constitution:

"In a country [which is often subject to and always apprehensive of foreign invasions, and thus keep standing armies maintained through direct taxation], the contrary of all this happens.

"The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen.

"The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors.

"The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power."

I will leave you with the musings of Hamilton to consider this Memorial Day.

Aestu's Mandatory Boomer Bash

Hi, I'm one of those Millenials. I'm going to tell you Boomers how it is.

First off, let me tell you, not all fools die young, and price does not equal value. Merely because you people earned absurd (and unjustified) salaries in an overheated economy, pumped up by fiat money, real estate bubbles and mortgages out the wazoo, does not mean you ever had the value you may believe yourselves to have, and certainly not now.

If you Boomers drop dead - this applies to any and all of you - you know what will happen to the world? It will keep on trucking. Your vaunted "experience" in whatever field you work in, is that of smooth sailing in easier times, getting along by puffing your chest out back when people cared.

Simply put, we Millennials don't need you, for any other purpose than getting the few Boomer holdouts to take us seriously. We spend considerable time and effort conspiring amongst ourselves to manipulate you Boomers into being stalking horses for our careers and goals, because that's all you are, a bunch of empty suits.

When you Boomers leave the office to go play golf, or pursue any of your other equally inane leisure activities, we're able to REALLY get some work done, without you Boomers getting in the way by imposing your "relevance" on everyone else. Usually this means bypassing or replacing your obsolete organizational processes (e.g., endless meetings, bureaucracy, obsolete technology, etc) and just getting things done.

Now, about you Boomers getting old. Let me tell you, the problem with you Boomers now being old people, is entirely one-sided, and it's on your end. Millennials respect the old. They respect wisdom. Millenials love technological gadgets, but they also love old books, antiques, "retro-gaming"; etc. They've grown up being pushed the latest fad and they're tired of it. You doubt this, go visit your local thrift shop or flea market or used electronics or game store. You know, those stores you think you're too good to shop at. The clientele is mostly Millenials. In their minds, old things are exciting, novel, tested.

Older Millenials remember the Greatest Generation as their grandparents. A surprising number of Millenials love to sit and listen to them talk about the old days. The American cultural notion that the world began in 1953 is really unique to the Boomers - Millenials are fascinated by distant times and places. You can see that in the video games they play - usually set in exotic places (real or otherwise), typically drawing heavily from history and myth. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, or Valkyrie Profile come to mind.

And we don't give a rat's behind about Vietnam or the Civil Rights Movement. Most of you never fought in Vietnam, fewer of you protested it, and those who did one or the other still see the war (for or against) in romantic, unrealistic terms - your "experience" has not guided you to objectivity. And you certainly didn't PAY for it (that's us Millenials, paying down your 50-year-old compound interest).

The Civil Rights Movement was a sideshow. Many Boomers made their lives blockbusting, few married outside their race; Boomers (of all political persuasions) are well known for their intense xenophobia; they invented the Gated Community; they hated busing (again, set up by the Greatest) and strove to destroy it even while their kids shrug at crossing the tracks into the "bad side of town" . The CRA of 1963 was signed into law by LBJ - a Greatest Gen; the Clean Air Act was passed in the same year. Since the Boomers took power (Carter/Reagan/Bush/Clinton), decisive legislation and changes in lifestyle have been replaced by the SUV and "not-me" syndrome. All those progressive ideas the Boomers talk about - their generation represented nothing so much as a lacuna in the process, a generation of historical bystanders.

Perhaps this is an outgrowth of the character of the generation. Boomers, as a culture, are not imaginative. Their parents were largely classically educated and worldly (see: classic Star Trek & Twilight Zone, shows more popular amongst Millennials, or at least better understood by them, than the original youth audience). Boomers love their mass-produced kitsch, their ugly McMansions and cheap Chinese-made furniture. They take this vision to society as well: everything is black-versus-white and the status quo is never wrong.

So our problem with you Boomers is not that you're old (you are). It's that you lack the positive qualities that come with age. Instead of wisdom, you have stubbornness. Instead of dignity, you have pomposity. Instead of temperance, you are grasping. The Boomer inability to handle getting older is not a desire "to keep kicking". It is a desire to hold off growing up until the last possible second.

To say it plain, your "experience" strutting around in your suit and tie is not worth $100k a year or whatever you think it is. That is entitlement speaking, nothing more, nothing less. Most of us Millenials live on tips or near-minimum wage and don't want to hear it.

For your collective benefit, I'll end on a positive note. You want Millenials' respect? Act your age. Drop the pompous "well I have been in this field X years" routine. (That's when we call you "dude"; it frankly baffles us how a generation that doesn't want to get old is offended at being treated like they haven't). Stop trying to talk like young people or affect an interest in our pursuits (you don't understand them and don't want to). Stop trying to tell us how you're not old (you can't stop becoming seniors any more than we can stop being teenagers, the world doesn't stop for you).

Be simple, straightforward, pragmatic, accessible, willing to sacrifice and willing to be proven wrong. You would be surprised how much respect from young people that will garner.

Hell, you might even get another job.

Israel & Palestine: Why The Two-State Solution Is Doomed

The geopolitics wonks of today's NGOs and foreign services have a fetish for two-state solutions. Whenever there are two (or more) ethnic groups that happen to unhappily share a state, the wonks' solution is always to take the same approach as American family courts: split the home, split the assets, give Mommy the house and Daddy the car, send the kids to whomever appears best able to care for them (or has more public support).

The British Raj was split into India and Pakistan. Cyprus into Turkish and Greek halves. Czecho-slovakia, into Slovakia and the Czech Republic. East Timor and Eritea were amputated from Indonesia and Ethiopia. The USSR and Yugoslavia were, well, Balkanized.

Surely, a happy ending awaited the previously unhappily married ethnic groups.
But it never quite works out that way.

There are some pretty solid general trends that can be observed in human history. One is that bigger countries, which benefit from diverse populations, economy of scale, and sheer size and momentum, tend to do better in the long run. (The obvious exception, Switzerland, owes its continued survival and success to impassable terrain, a highly stable and conservative society, and constant influx of foreign capital from its banking industry).

Another is that any viable nation must ultimately forge a national identity strong enough to withstand not only ethnic feuds, but also political quarrels. It is easy to forget that almost every Western nation was forged from disparate tribes, kingdoms, states, localities, etc, through a combination of force and diplomacy. The Magna Carta, the Articles of Confederation, the machinations of Bismarck, watersheds in this process.

Ultimately, the problem with these unhappy marriages is not an surplus of ethnic sentiment, but a deficit of political loyalty. The wonks' fetish for splitting countries is equivalent to an incompetent cook carving the turkey before he cooks it.

The basic political and economic problems - and the inability of extremists to reconcile their religious or ethnic sentiments with the secular needs of a modern state - are in no way corrected by partition. In fact the problems are now compounded by the guaranteed presence of an incorrigibly hostile neighbor who believes itself to have rightful claim to at least some of the other's land and resources. And so goes the same sad story, every time...military dictatorship, petty wars, economic weakness, foreign dependence, "the road to nowhere".

The Israeli and Palestinians peoples need not be natural enemies, it is said. Very true. Yet this begs the question: if the two peoples need not be natural enemies, then why has the peace process met with such difficulty? After all, surely it is only the extremists on both sides who desire to continue of the long conflict? Yes, it is so; but rather than fight the good fight against those extremists, the partition promises to give them free reign, and guarantee unremitting hostility between the two new nations.
So - is there a better alternative? Yes, there is - from Jewish history, no less.

The ancient Hebrews called themselves, "The Twelve Tribes", after the sons of Joseph. The historical truth is, those tribes represented serious political challenges to the survival of the Jewish people - divisions that, over time, became less relevant than questions of sectarianism and national origin.
The system of collective representation settled by Moses directly parallels the Roman comitia tributa (Tribal Assembly), which, too, provided structure to Roman society in its early years, before being superseded by considerations of class, the British House of Lords, and the American bicameral legislature.

The lesson is clear. Representative political systems, that provide a balance between headcount and ethnos, can, over time, provide a scaffolding on which to build a strong and stable national identity.

Israel's Arab policies in the last 60 years has had two main objectives:

1. Ensure the physical security of the State of Israel through military superiority and control of buffer zones
2. Ensure the political security of the State of Israel through undermining Palestinian political unity from without and effective representation from within

Now, the goal of these policies - the security of the State of Israel - is only right and reasonable. The problem is, like all ethnic squabbles, the approach leads Israel down the Road To Nowhere.

If nothing else, it ensures that Israelis will continue to "earn Greek salaries, and pay Swiss prices".

Israel continues to expend US$15B on its military annually. In a nation of eight million individuals, this represents a per capita expenditure of almost US$2,000 annually, or an eighth of the per capita GDP. The expenditure is so great, that the cost of feeding, clothing, housing and defending each and every Palestinian between Gaza and Amman, would amount to only a fraction of these expenditures.

Israel's arguments against political integration of the Palestinians are twofold:

1. Israeli Jews are outnumbered by Palestinians by about a 2:1 ratio
2. Enfranchising the Palestinians will empower a Palestinian "Fifth Column"

These concerns are valid. Yet they ignore three important facts.

First, Israel is guaranteed a demographic nightmare if the Palestinians are excluded. Ultra-orthodox Jews - the Haredi - average about ten children per couple, managing a 6% annual growth rate, while birth rates for mainstream Israeli Jews are in line with those of Europeans and Americans, with a 1.5% annual growth rate.

Today, the ultra-Orthodox - who do not pay taxes, who do not serve in the IDF, who are supported by state benefits their whole lives and who are typically the most hawkish - today make up about 8% of Israel's population. In twenty years, the Haredi will make up 20%; in fifty years, they will make up over half, and in a century - well, no one dares think that far ahead.

It would be incorrect to say that mainstream Israeli Jews and Palestinians share "a common enemy". It would be correct to say that mainstream Israeli Jews, Israeli Haredi Jews, and Palestinians, share a common interest. The three groups have different visions for Judaea: a modern Israel, a pious Israel, and a just Israel. Interests that ultimately complement each other. A Knesset balanced between liberal Jews, Haredi and Palestinian Arabs is a much more palatable thought for any sensible person, than a Knesset starkly divided between Haredi and secularist, forever glancing over the border towards an all-Arab Palestine.

Second, Demonsthenes' admonishment to "keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer", although a bit harsh, applies. Removing the Palestinians from the Israeli political system will ultimately empower extreme nationalists on both sides. Losing a vote in a half-Palestinian Knesset is ultimately less fearful than Hamas getting a supermajority in a Palestinian legislature.

A partition of Judaea will allow powerful outsiders - both economic competitors, Europe, Russia and the US, as well as regional rivals - to mercilessly pit the two Balkanized states against each other. Why give an Israeli a job when an impoverished Palestinian across the border will work for food? How big a TV do Palestinians think their dinars will buy against Israeli shekels?

Third, the integration of the Palestinians is essential to Israel maintaining its identity as a Jewish state. Without ethnic contrast, Israeli Jews will inevitably fall into ennui and apostacy, just like every other religiously homogenous nation. Religious extremists will become the face of religion in an increasingly secularized society, and will ultimately destroy public confidence in Judaism, just as has happened in most modern secular nations.

The Haredi are completely correct in their belief that an unchallenged secular society is a mortal threat to Jewish piety. The Jewish faith owes its survival and success to constant challenge from outsiders - as Bernard Malamud observed, "If you ever forget that you're a Jew, a goy will remind you." The successful integration of the Palestinians into Israel will ultimately not only head off Jewish religious extremism, but ensure the long-term survival and success of mainstream secular Judaism.

So, how could this be accomplished?

Ethnic squabbles are very rarely about ethnic issues. Most often, ethnic issues are strawmen for the machinations of the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous - land developers, terrorist leaders, military contractors, religious bigots, demagogues of all sorts.

The Palestinians and the Jews must commit to an equitable sharing of the limited resources of the area - as well as long-term plans to cultivate and increase those resources. The sharing must take into account both the numerical superiority of the Palestinians, as well as the need to preserve overall balance between the two sides.

Moses, not Marx, is instructive here.

I would propose extending IDF conscription to Palestinians, and distributing the Palestinians alongside secular Jews in conscript companies. Company captains, however, should be equally divided between Arabs and Jews, and a central military committee comprised of equal numbers of Arab and Jewish captains should have a preponderance of authority over military concerns.

These captains should be well-paid, serve 20-year terms, appoint their successors (subject to ratification by a majority of the council), be responsible for the security of a district on land, and the cultivation of a portion of Israel's territorial waters - the laying of kelp fields, oyster and shrimp farms (which, forbidden by kosher and halal laws alike, would have to be traded for foreign currency, giving the captains money, power, and a stake in the survival and success of the government).

In this way, a military aristocracy would be formed, similar to that previously existing in Prussia or Japan, that would have a strong personal and financial incentive to ensure the security and stability of the Israeli state, and the quashing of any ethnic feuds. Like most such aristocracies, the Council of Captains would likely evolve into a reactionary body that would provide an better balance to Israel's notoriously unstable democracy than its shady relationship with IDF/Mossad insiders.

Like the Iron Curtain, the walls dividing Judaea must come down. Jew and Arab must learn to live alongside each other. To that end, in addition to conscription, every year, the IDF should move one out of every hundred Jewish families from their neighborhood, and transplant them into a majority Arab district, and do the same to an Arab family. The matches should be defined by percentile rating of household wealth compared to members of the same ethnic group - a Jewish family at the 55th percentile for Israeli Jews would be uprooted and replaced by an Arab family at the 55th percentile for Arabs.

Haredi would be exempt from this arrangement. In this way, wealth would gradually be equalized, and a Israeli Palestinian majority would coexist with a Israeli Jewish "center of gravity".
Finally, and perhaps most controversially, minarets should be built all over Israel, and all non-Haredi Jews should be required to answer the salah, the call to prayer, five times a day, just as Muslims do, but in their own synagogues, with Jewish prayer, and in Hebrew. (Or, if they prefer, they can just watch Jewish movies or plays). Again, in this way, the Haredi would keep the Jewish faith stable, while contrast with the Palestinians reminds every Israeli Jew that he is a Jew.

Some might see this as a bastardization of the Jewish faith with Muslim traditions. But we must remember that the Jewish faith as it exists today is itself the product of many influences from other cultures. Extreme monotheism (the belief in one God, rather than the belief in the one true God) only came about via cultural cross-pollination with Zoroastrianism during the Babylonian Exile. The tale of Samson was conceived by way of contact with the Selucid Greeks and their tale of Heracles. Most Ashkenazi Jews identify the jelly donut as an ethnic food to their liking, but (as President Kennedy learned, to his bemusement), it was originally known as the berliner, a German delicacy. All these influences peacefully coalesced with Jewish traditions, because although they were novel, none were forbidden.


Finally, Jerusalem should become a free city, directly administrated by the Council of Captains, while being (on paper) the capital of the State of Israel. The State should have a monopoly on the sale of food and lodging within its walls, with all citizens of the City receiving free food and lodging, and tourists being made to pay extortionate rates in dollars or euro only. The Council of Captains should receive a large share of these receipts as their privy purse, while the rest ought to subsidize aggressive building programs to increase Israel's supply of land and water, by building Chinese junks, tree farms, and artificial lakes.

All this could be possible with the sponsorship of American Jews. If you like these ideas - please - talk about them with your friends.

"Opinions are like glaciers. You stand on them, they seem solid enough. But if they didn't move, the whole Western would would still be covered in ice."

The Guild Wars 2 Fallacy: Microtransactions as a Free Lunch

I was looking to buy GW1 gold and came across this [b][url=http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-obrien-on-microtransactions-in-guild-wars-2]interesting but completely overlooked blog post[/url][/b]...

It says in big letters
[quote]… it’s never OK for players who spend money to have an unfair advantage over players who spend time.[/quote]

But then in the text of the article it says completely the opposite:

[quote]...microtransactions were an afterthought in Guild Wars, whereas with Guild Wars 2, we had an opportunity to integrate the microtransaction system from the ground up...

...If you want something, whether it’s an in-game item or a microtransaction, you ultimately have two ways to get it: you can play to earn gold or you can use money to buy gems...

.... Because gems can be traded for gold and vice versa, we don’t need two different trading systems, one for gold and one for gems. In Guild Wars 2, everything on the Trading Post is traded for gold, but of course, somebody who wants to earn gems can just sell items for gold, and then convert the gold to gems...

...If a player buys gold from another player, he gets the gold he wants, the selling player gets gems she can use for microtransactions, and ArenaNet generates revenue from the sale of gems that we can use to keep supporting and updating the game...[/quote]

Supporting and updating the game? WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns-IIn-DG-c[/youtube]

Anyone remember that video? Anyone?

[quote]...the argument runs, "a MMO needs a subscription to support the game"...if this were the late 90s I'd agree...but today this simply isn't true...[/quote]

Yet the GW2 dev team that some people fete trots out that [i][b]exact same argument[/b][/i] (cost of support) when it serves their purposes.

The "content" argument is also malarkey, and here is why:

The GW2 blog draws a comparison with one game, EvE, which is faulty given that EvE is a small and very niche game that appeals to the ground up to relatively well-to-do overgrown nerds in the finance and programming fields. EvE is also an older game and as such does not reflect the driving forces of modern MMO administration. GW2 diverges from this comparison in that:

1. GW2 will not be a super-hardcore elitist niche game like EvE; it is aimed at the broadest belly of the market. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that the design and administration of the game, which are the defining characteristics of a MMO, will reflect this.

2. GW2 is a brand new game, conceived, designed - and funded - in today's MMO business environment.

This one very flawed example deliberately disregards much more relevant examples such as WoW and Star Trek Online. Both are much more modern games designed for a much broader audience. In both cases, switching from a subscription model to microtransactions disincentivized the running of the game as a going concern and coincided with sharp drops in content production and quality of customer service.

My point here is this: the would-be groupies of the GW2 dev team, who think they're the white knights, the "good guys" of the MMO industry, are willfully delusional. They're in it for the money, just like everyone else.

The top comment on the Youtube video that was previously linked to me and I linked here again is:

[quote]Complaining about subscription fees not being present is like saying your taxes aren't high enough. [/quote]

However, that complaint is, under certain conditions, a perfectly valid one.

Higher taxes and what they buy is preferable to the absence of the stability and equalization of opportunity provided by a strong public sector. Everyone must pay for healthcare, transit, food and water, housing, education, security, etc, in one manner or another, but paying for all those things via taxes is all-around a better deal than paying for all those things piecemeal according to an arbitrary system predicated on the willful self-delusion of the participants.

And by that I mean those people who think they're keeping more of their paycheck when they get a tax cut, then turn around and spend vast sums on personal security, gasoline, auto maintenance, student loans, insurance, emergency rooms, rent, and bottled water.

Paying a subscription fee is exactly the same as paying taxes. It is an economic contract with a society, predicated on the realities of human nature: that individual human beings need the patronage of a higher power to defend themselves from the vicissitudes of fortune and the intentions of other men, and that nothing is free.

A MT system is exactly the same as a so-called "free market". It is predicated on the abject fallacy that those who control the board will honor their word when they have no reason to and be restrained from human evil by the transcendent, Buddha-esque enlightenment to understand the futile and self-defeating destiny of all human greed.

The subscription fee, like the voting booth, is the lever of control.
Remove that lever - through faithlessness by way of folly - and the system will run amok.

The analogy between contemporary politics and gaming is not coincidental nor contrived. Apples and oranges are mutually comparable as kinds of fruit, and both politics and gaming are products of contemporary folly. Contemporary folly is a foible that West Coast liberals and Midwestern rednecks share in common.

Both groups of little people think that they can win in a game with no rules.

[quote][b][i]"So what about you, Aestu? You're still here..."[/i][/b][/quote]

My answer is: like everyone else I play the game of life...and e-life. Merely because I understand the faults of the system does not mean I am willing or able to fully divorce myself from it; I merely approach it from a position of knowledge rather than willful ignorance. The choices I make reflect that.

P.S. I am tripping on bean curd, bean sprouts, rice vermicelli, aspartame and MSG right now. Bear with me.

The Art of Challenge (And Why Bashiok Doesn't Get It)

Making WoW Easier
I understand and respect gaming masochism. But, I think that changing mechanics to be more reasonable and less punishing is an improvement, not a detriment, to games in general. Many of us Original Gamers pine for the days of D&D-based yore when games were seemingly intended to break us down into sobbing masses created by an uncaring necromancer of pain and suffering, or at least didn't try to avoid it. Overcoming all of the obstacles (I CHOOSE NOT TO SHOOT HER WITH THE SILVER ARROW... NOOOOO) was a big part of what gaming (I HAVE 1 LIFE!?), and especially PC gaming (HOW DO I LOAD MOUSE DRIVERS?), were about. But, I feel we're lucky to now be in an age where those ideals (intended or not) are giving way to actual fun, actual challenge, and not fabricating it through high-reach requirements (I NEED A FAIRY MONK WITH A MAGIC LOCKPICK?).

What we've always been trying to do, what WoW has always been about (and to which much of its success is due) is to make an accessible MMO. Anyone that looks back at the game at launch and wishes it was as challenging now as it was then is not aware of the painstaking effort put into making this game accessible as compared to its predecessors. Since release we've refined that intent, eventually evolving the very few masochistic designs WoW actually ever started with, but ideally still offering those same prestige goals that give that feeling of achieving something great if you're able to pull it off. We've made a lot of progress toward striking that balance and continuing to evolve the game, but it's not something we're ever likely to perfect, and we'll be constantly working to hit that elusive goal. Hopefully it's to the benefit of everyone playing and enjoying the game, and they'll continue to enjoy the journey that a living, breathing, persistent universe will take us on.

The person who first got me into gaming was my 75-year-old arthritic, Yiddish-speaking, half-blind grandmother (who has since passed away) when she gave me a classic NES as a Hanukkah present when I was eight years old. She had previously purchased a Master Set for herself as well. Of course, because of her age and weakness, she couldn't play the game very well; getting past World 1-2 was impossible for her. When she watched me play through it after a few hours' practice, I still remember her saying, "My god, he's so smooth..."

Even I wasn't very good at Super Mario Bros. I wasn't able to consistently make that big jump in World 8-1 and didn't get past World 8-2 for many years. Still, the fact that we both middled along at certain levels of mediocrity didn't prevent either of us from enjoying the game for what it was: an entertaining novelty with mass appeal.

What is important to understand here - and Bashiok does not - is that winning, progression, is not the point. The best video game is that which very, very few people can "beat" - but everyone enjoys just playing.

At the far other end of the spectrum are games like Tomb Raider. I remember reading an interview with the developer when the game first came out in which he remarked, "The key to making a good game is to make it easy." Even at the time, I remember thinking, "This guy just doesn't get it." And it's true - games that are designed to appeal to those who have something to prove in the game itself (that they can beat it) will always have a narrower appeal than games that are made to be great and rewarding in their own right. People who aren't hardcore play games for enjoyment - not because they need a sort of virtual punching bag.

Moving forward a few years, I took up Magic: The Gathering in elementary school. I started playing during the Fallen Empires expansion. Early Magic: The Gathering paralleled vanilla WoW in many ways. Profound immersion. Emphasis on "feel" or "adventure" over balance and game dynamics. Early Magic, like early WoW, had terrible balance, a host of cards with TLR game text and lore; some were insanely OP, even more were almost useless except for flavor. A lot of early Magic cards had complex mechanics that lent themselves to creative application outside an overall game strategy. And so The Duelist featured bridge-like puzzle scenarios in each month's issue. There were also a lot of really weird, wonky mechanics that almost no one really understand ("Banding") and cool cards that were almost totally unplayable (Legends).

Early Magic, like early WoW, had a fairly broad appeal. The emphasis on flavor and experience meant that being the best wasn't necessarily the point. You could have fun messing around with "joke" or "theme" decks, or decks that would needle your opponent to death. Kids played it, teens played it, young adults played it, a lot of girls played it too.

This wasn't good enough for Wizards of the qCoast, so what they ultimately did, was reconceive the game to be more competitive, while also oversimplifying it and watering down the immersiveness of the game to suit munchkins without imagination. They implemented the "Block" system, which started out as a means of ensuring game balance and evolved into a shameless effort to bilk hardcore players at the expense of those who might prefer to play the game casually, without going out and buying a booster box every three months. They replaced the "Vintage" look with the more streamlined, anime-style "Modern" look, and lore became more stereotyped; most lore on Magic cards (like WoW: TCG) consists entirely of witless, stereotyped superlatives.

Magic: The Gathering is still around today. I'm pretty sure the franchise is still lucrative. But the appeal of the game is very narrow. A couple of years back I considered taking up the game again, and visited a tournament. It was hosted in this non-alcoholic bar with blaring, 110-decibel music, so no one could hear others talk. And no wonder; the crowd was divided pretty evenly between these young teenage munchkins and some creepy yuppies in their mid-20s who obviously had something to prove. I didn't even stay to collect the reward at the end.

You see the same sort of thing in WoW. Efforts to broaden the appeal of the game, at the expense of the game itself, inevitably have the opposite effect; all you have are the clueless munchkins (the GS-bro crowd) and hardcore players (cagey oldschoolers too rigid to go do something else). Eliminating the "flavor" or "intrinsic challenge" of the game - contrary to what Bashiok claims - narrows the appeal not to hardcores, but to the general population.

I remember my MC guild in vanilla - like most - had on its roster, of course, the gamer types, but it also had a diversity of housewives, busy professionals, and other individuals outside the typical 16-35 male gamer profile. Many of these were not stellar players and could never be. In better-progressed guilds, these people would often simply not raid. And that was fine, because WoW had more to it than progression - this is where immersive world environments and shared efforts came in.

"People? People were always lousy. But there was a world, once..."
-Solomon Roth, Soylent Green

Today, I study classical culture. A remarkable, recurring theme in that field is how human stupidity rears its head time and again and people continue to make the same mistakes. Invariably, the reason behind those mistakes is, as Hippocrates said, "people who think they've discovered something truly new, in reality, know nothing at all." Reading Cicero's remarks about society in the late Republic or Thucydides' incisive observations about the motivations for the Sicilian Expedition beg comparisons to dilemmas we face today.

Growing up, my parents taught me to write, and the first lesson I was taught, is that the best way to learn to write well, is to read abundantly. People who are great - especially creative artists - do not have difficulty acknowledging or respecting others' accomplishments. People who are ignorant of past greatness - or don't appreciate its value - are invariably the most petty, untalented, insipid writers and artists - those people who think Paradise Lost should be taken off reading lists because it's "just another old book written by some white guy".

Now that doesn't mean that everything that could be said or done already has, and everyone here today on God's green earth has to commit himself to slavishly emulating the past. Going forward to WoW today: Was DnD or Final Fantasy IV or EQ the pinnacle of video game development? Of course not. Was vanilla WoW (or TBC) in all respects the apex of this game? No. But a vain effort to make one's own wanting creations look better, by saying that nothing that previously existed had any value - or something to teach, or did something right - shows a profound ignorance and incompetence at one's own craft.

"Genius and crime are incompatible."
Mozart, to Salieri

If you need to resort to PR stunts, endless gyrations in theme and intent to pander to the lowest common denominator, silencing anyone who doesn't agree with the assumption that "Cataclysm will fix it" or what have you, every variant of doublespeak and euphemism in the service of the mythos of Blizzard infallibility, or mistaking cronyism with loyalty (e.g., the change in management at Wowhead, or losing CMs to Sega), then you are, quite simply, doing it wrong.

Things that are great or work well truly do sell themselves. This doesn't mean a certain level of salesmanship or flexibility isn't necessary, or that at least some "h8rs" won't always be hatin'. But if you have to go so far as to say that everything that isn't yours was inherently flawed and that therefore you are right in the here and now...you are doing it wrong.

4.1: Call to Arms, Tanks: A Balanced Viewpoint

Having tanked nearly three thousand heroics since 2.2 - here's my opinion on CtA:

The difference will be very marginal.

Most skilled tanks will continue to shun LFD for the reasons they already do, and no rewards short of the truly exorbitant - certainly not the CtA goodie bag - could convince them to brave the horrors of LFD. Some incompetent players will try their hand at tanking, and as now, they will get chewed up and spat out in short order, and go back to being carried as DPS, just as they do now. A relatively small number of individuals will commit to the sword and board. Not enough to make a substantial difference.

I think what we will see is tank and healer supply becoming more similar. Some players who are currently healers (and thus do not disdain responsibility) will feel compelled to answer the call, and in effect get a bonus to do a bit more than they currently are. Some healers may get disgruntled and stop healing randoms with the influx of inexperienced or incompetent tanks we will see in the first few weeks post-4.1. This, together with DPS-gone-tanks, will increase the tank supply while marginally reducing the healer supply.

This change represents a grey-area compromise. On the plus side, Blizzard is making a perhaps desperate effort to correct the tank gap in LFD. Some such system of incentives - however crude or unfair it may seem - is clearly necessary to increase tank supply. The alternative "solutions", most of which involve fundamentally reconceiving PvE as we know it, are completely impractical.

There are, however, several serious downsides to this change that must be considered.

First off, this change, like the similar (and oft-ridiculed) Oculus bag, is ultimately a shill for bad content. There's a word for developers trying to get players to repeatedly do content that isn't fun in its own right by offering in-game rewards. It's called a grind. Do we want WoW to be more grindy? How ought the developers make WoW less grindy? Simple: don't buff the internal rewards, improve the content itself, so that it becomes more fun.

Second off, this change makes the game even less immersive and more disjointed. How does it make any kind of sense that sitting in Stormwind/Orgimmar, pressing a UI button, AoEing down waves of dragonkin or lion-men or cultists, gives you a skeletal horse or a sporebat or a hawkstrider? What is the point of this activity? What is the setting for the activity? It makes the game less like a drama and more like prime-time commercials - a rapid-fire juxtaposition of shallow images. Ultimately the audience becomes desensitized; the images no longer shock or awe, they are merely a brilliant and tedious annoyance.

Third - and perhaps most perniciously - this change ultimately represents Blizzard going further down the wrong road. Growing up, did anyone read that Bernstein Bears' story where Gramps shows the kid a wagon he abandoned in a swamp? He couldn't take it upon himself to correct his mistake, so he kept plodding down the wrong path, until he couldn't get his wagon out of the mud.

Understand this - this change to LFD will remain into the foreseeable future and we will in all likelihood have to live with it for at least a few years to come, until the end of the expansion. I say this, because Blizzard is typically very reluctant to admit error by removing incentive mechanics that don't work out. They may retune failed mechanics, but they seldom remove them prior to the end of an expansion.

Something had to give, and in that sense, this change was appropriate and necessary. But this falls short of correcting the underlying problems. At best it is an interim measure. At worst, another ineffectual step down the wrong path.

Personally, I believe Blizzard developers currently feel much more desperate than is generally known, and this change reflects that sense of desperation.
What needs to be done is the entire anonymous and incentive-driven nature of LFD and dungeon dailies to be fundamentally reworked. Responsibility needs to be offloaded from tanks and healers onto DPS. Instances need to be made more fun, not through adding rewards or nerfing them into the ground, but making them more random and interactive. If this meant retroactively re-doing the Cata heroics - taking the unpalatable dishes back to the kitchen - then that was what ought to have happened.

I think this change would have been much more positive if Blizzard created new and unique items for this bag, rather than a random selection of "last season's leftover merchandise".

Unfortunately, Blizzard's overly cautious pursuit of half-measures will prove self-defeating.

Why There Will Never Be A WoW Killer: GERYON

As is the case with most traditional stories, there are many tellings of the tale of the Geryon. There was a particular way I have heard it told which I am very fond of.

Once upon a time, there was a monster called the Geryon. The Geryon was a giant, muscled humanoid warrior with three torsos with a total of six arms and three heads joined onto a single pair of great legs. Each of its pair of arms carried a spear and a shield; each torso was a capable fighter in its own right. Perhaps some great warrior might be a stronger combatant than each individual torso, but in combination, the Geryon's trio was peerless.

The legendary hero Hercules was tasked with killing the monster, as it had been ravaging fields and stealing farm animals. Seeking advice in this endeavor, he consulted the Fates, the mistresses who say what shall be and what shall not, and they proclaimed, "Geryon shall be slain by none else."

With this said, even the gods concluded that the Geryon could not be slain by Hercules. The hero was not dissuaded in his task by god or man or even the Fates themselves. Tracking the Geryon, observing it, the hero noted that one head preferred beef, another pork, and the third, venison. So he cunningly laid out wagons of beef, pork, and venison at equal distance from the Geryon's cave. Geryon took notice of them, and the three heads each had different ideas as to where to go. The Geryon's three heads argued, and finally its six arms raised spear and shield against each other. The Geryon lay dead, a bloody mess. Geryon was slain by none else.

And so there was never another Geryon.

....

My point here is not to merely to repeat what has become the cliche that World of Warcraft can be killed only by itself, or by the greed of the producers, or attempts to pander to this or that audience. To be sure, I agree with all that, but that's not the point. My argument isn't that WoW will die - all things come to an end - my argument is that there will never be another WoW killer, or another WoW.

World of Warcraft, like the Geryon, is not one monoclastic entity. There are many other MMOs and other games that will no doubt prove superior to WoW to most who now play it. But there will be no one game that alone seizes most of WoW's audience. And I do not believe there will be any such game in the coming decade that managed to do what WoW did, which was appeal to many different kinds of people. World of Warcraft was a great game because, as with the Geryon, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

Does anyone really believe that kiddies, housewives, and the middle-aged will take up Guild Wars 2 or the Star Wars MMO or Titan the way they came to WoW? I'm sure those games will be far superior to WoW in terms of their appeal to young males and maybe their girlfriends, and maybe some younger nerds or social misfits who play the game even though they are not considered cool or interesting by their peers. As for those other people - outside the typical gamer demographic - WoW may be what got them into games, but what they will be playing won't be what other people are playing after WoW's inevitable demise. Inevitable as in, we're all going to die - eventually.

It's widely forgotten by the community, the world at large, and even Blizzard themselves that WoW's success was an accident. Vanilla WoW was in many ways Everquest 3, and it wasn't really intended to transcend EQ's scope and success beyond merely getting bigger sub numbers. Yet it did, and it did precisely because it was an accident, and not something contrived like a politician's persona.

People don't grasp that WoW really is much more than the sum of its parts. WoW players identify with a certain playstyle - PvE, PvP, RP, casual, hardcore, whatever - but there is a shared experience, a certain wealth to that experience, and each of the individual demographics in the playerbase owe each other a debt even though they do not realize it (and often vehemently contest that such a bond exists), or see it in narrowly financial terms - who pays for and who uses what content and whatnot.

The WoW community was vibrant and interesting because there were all sorts of people playing the game, and that gave it a certain allure. No game now on the market can replicate that allure. It is most definitely interesting when people who are very unlike each other can mutually relate to a shared fantasy world. Whether you're a pensioner or a college student or a housewife or some kid, the Stormwind theme sounds the same, and you have to find Mankrik's wife, and you zerg down Karazhan with nine other people who may not be young or male or middle-class. There's something to that.

My prediction is this: There will be no single WoW killer, nor will WoW "die". In the same way there will be no one superpower that succeeds America, but an unstable world of many different countries of different shapes, sizes and ways jostling for power and status, and in the same way that the decline in American power will not end with the destruction of our country but merely a gradual descent into stagnation and mediocrity, what will displace WoW will be a multitude of contrived games that are relatively narrow in scope.

I believe there will ultimately be another WoW, but it will not be released by EA or Activison or any other name we've yet heard of. The next WoW, that takes the MMO genre, the entire paradigm of MMOs to the next level, will be a low-budget indie production that will play like an SNES game. It will be talky, execution-based, and have a lot of activities with no intrinsic rewards. The underlying technology may be advanced, but the UI and mechanics will be extremely simplistic and intuitive. The game will grow slowly at first then catch fire. What will guarantee its success is that the game will start small but grow organically and prove highly scalable. The game will live a very long life, probably in the centuries (yes, centuries), and change very, very slowly. The subscription fee will be low, the content will be horizontal, and there will be no expansions, only endless morsels of new content, often released by surprise.

If you want a real world example of what I'm talking about, look at things that aren't MMOs - like eBay, or the Roman empire, or electricity, or the American constitution - things that started out small and slowly grew to immense proportions to be something they were never intended to. Things where a simple and rational framework proved viable for purposes and a scope far transcending the original purpose. eBay started out as a doll store. The Roman empire started out as an obscure village of belligerent young males. Electricity started out as a curiosity used for some narrow purposes like telegraphy. The US govt started out as a bunch of disgruntled colonials agreeing on some basic principles. The big Super Mario Bros. of MMOs will be the same thing, something that wasn't intended to be a WoW killer or even a successful MMO. We'll probably start hearing about it in a little over a decade.

Of course I could be wrong and it will add up to the same thing =) but consider this merely food for thought.

Japan Disaster: The Long-Term Impact

The "low levels of radiation" were measured 100 miles off the coast by an American carrier. That means that the radiation levels are much greater closer-in. 15 patients were received in the hospitals with radiation poisoning, probably workers in the plant. Still, it's likely that radiation levels near the plant - outside the containment housing - are significantly in excess of what is healthy.

Japan is a small enough place that 100 miles is within the radius between the reactors and Tokyo itself. And there's the longer-term problem that radiation uptake is cumulative. The very fact that the plant managers are simply pumping seawater into the reactors to cool them show just how desperate they are for options.

There have been reactor incidents in the past in Japan, and with the Japanese national character what it is, they have always sought to play down the extent of the problem. There is every reason to believe they are doing the same now - the problem is likely far worse than is generally known. It's clear that the three reactors have already gone into meltdown. The question is, whether what is being detected is an actual containment breach or merely radioactive steam and seawater.

It only became clear after a few weeks just how serious a problem the Chernobyl disaster was, because the Soviets tried to cover it up, which, then as now, was a futile and unsustainable gesture. Many people (hundreds of thousands) who did not die instantly were "affected" and may well still be.

Short of a massive release of core material as happened at Chernobyl (which will not occur due to the containment dome that the Japanese reactors have), there obviously has been a significant release of radioactive material. Even after the reactor is stabilized, that mess will have to be cleaned up. Since they are using raw seawater to try to cool the reactor, and it is obvious that radioactive materials are being emitted from the plant, the surrounding area will become contaminated. Even low-level contamination is dangerous for long-term exposure, as in living within a few miles of it for the entire lifespan of tens of millions of people.

Radiation cleanup, like earthquake proofing, is one of those public-works tasks in which any feat, however great, can be accomplished - for the right price. The Japanese will probably wind up doing what they did after the atom bombs, removing the entire mass of the reactor and several meters of topsoil and contaminated buildings, then re-establishing the terrain with landfill and new buildings at a cost of many hundreds of billions of dollars.

It's important to understand what this means. We're talking about moving huge, unfathomable amounts of earth and building materials, many millions of tons of dirt, then importing millions of tons more of steel, concrete, and other materials. It's a massive undertaking, like rebuilding the Pyramids many times over. It's low-tech, but the fuel and labor costs and sheer scale are mind-numbing.

Obviously, all that will have to be paid for with loans. From whom? China and the US. The long-term legacy of this incident will be how it affects their relationship with China and the US - they will have a far weaker hand to play in international relations with us holding loans against them.

Ironically, this incident may prove very good for the environment, because it will likely put a nail between the eyes of the whaling profession - Japan will no longer be in a position to subsidize it nor to make diplomatic entreaties on the behalf of whalers.

Another long-term impact this incident will have is to significantly raise interest rates, with Japan needing to hire so much money. This will cause the yen to go down in value. The real question, then, is whether this event will cause the dollar or the yuan to gain more value relative to other currencies. If the dollar wins more, that's bad, because it will perpetuate our unsustainable economic situation and make the inevitable adjustment more severe. If the yuan wins more, which is unlikely, that is a good thing, because it will make the American economy more competitive and increase the probability that our long-term correction will be a soft one and not end in civil strife.

The Experts Are Idiots

I was guided to, and read, this very interesting article about a workshop to develop a means of discouraging future civilizations from digging up radioactive waste.

I agree with a little of it. For the most part, however, I think it's dumb, and, to me, it's an excellent study in the so-called "experts" not understanding the liberal sciences they study.

Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system...This is the report of the A Team; a multidisciplinary group with an anthropologist (who is at home with different, but contemporary, cultures), an astronomer (who searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence), an archaeologist (who is at home with cultures that differ in both time and space from our own), an environmental designer (who studies how people perceive and react to a landscape and the buildings within them), a linguist (who studies how languages change with time), and a materials scientist (who knows the options available to us for implementing our marking system concepts).

Our efforts focused on making it understandable while providing minimal incentive to disturb it. We also consider a public information effort a necessary part of the marking system design. A system that is not understood today has no chance of being understood in the far future.

This is very wrong. One of the interesting things about ancient history is that it is often the facts and ideas best known to ancient civilizations which are the the most irrecoverably lost to future civilizations, because ancient civilizations never bothered to write the information down because it was presumed to be obvious and was well-understood by contemporaries.

By contrast, we know ancient civilizations in many ways far better than they knew themselves. We often understand their strengths and weaknesses, and the values and causes driving their approaches, better than they did, and because we have a wider perspective on cultures, we often formalize and document approaches to problems that, to them, were obvious and without alternative.

Modern people can read many ancient languages fairly well. However, simple epigrams are often very difficult for us to understand - for example, we understand complex books by Caesar and Cicero much better than we do Roman street signs and graffiti - even though the ancients meant for even foreigners who did not understand their language to understand them clearly.

I don't see any reason to be sanguine about our ability to make a sign that future people who do not think as we do, will understand any better than we do that of ancients who tried to do the same. A communication-based approach is doomed to failure.

"These standing stones mark an area used to bury radioactive wastes. The area is ... by ... kilometers (or ... miles or about ... times the height of an average full-grown male person) and the buried waste is ... kilometers down. This place was chosen to put this dangerous material far away from people. The rock and water in this area may not look, feel, or smell unusual but may be poisoned by radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter decays, it gives off invisible energy that can destroy or damage people, animals, and plants.

Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do anything that will change the rocks or water in the area.

Do not destroy this marker. This marking system has been designed to last 10,000 years. If the marker is difficult to read, add new markers in longer-lasting materials in languages that you speak. For more information go to the building further inside. The site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site when it was closed in ..."

People have been doing this sort of thing since the beginning of time: inscribing curses and warnings and such on tombs and sarcophagi and temples, in the hopes of discouraging looters: "if you break this seal, bad things will happen to you."

The problem is...it never works. Humans are by nature curious and audacious creatures. They want what they cannot have. Putting a sign like that on something just says, "There's something here that was important to the ancients. Dig here if you want to find out what it was."

A big problem - and it says a great deal about how stupid these "experts" are regarding the material they're supposed to understand - is the particular wording they chose. The wording emphasizes that the danger cannot be seen or smelled or heard; it is supposed to be taken on faith. Problem is, it is human nature to reject a claim based on faith framed in terms outside their own culture.

Modern people have great reverence for places of worship in their own world and regard the desecration of churches and temples as despicable even if they are not religious (also see: Sim City 2000), but they totally disregard similar warnings in ancient tombs. And even those ancients had no regard for the curses uttered by contemporaneous cultures that were serious business to those who uttered them - for example, the Pharaoh cursing the Israelites on pieces of commemorative pottery.

The wording is also bad because it lends itself to a superstitious interpretation and consequent dismissal as external to any future belief system: emphasizing natural elements such as water and earth, and naming a specific time period in which a curse is supposed to endure.

Humans are pragmatic, and the best way to dissuade future civilizations from opening a dangerous seal would be to give them a taste of what lies in store - I think it would be best to make the door to the facility, and much of the entry area, have intense, localized radiation that gets even more intense further in. If intruders realize the danger is real - and not just provided in the form of warnings and booby traps, but a constant that scales in a predictable way - they will avoid the area for fear of their lives and the greater dangers that no doubt dwell deeper within.

Booby traps would not work towards this end because future civilizations would approach them just as we do today: as a challenge to be overcome, protecting something powerless but important deep within.

Everything on the site is conceived of as part of the message communication...from the very size of the whole site-marking down to the design of protected inscribed reading walls and the shapes of materials and their joints. In this report, the various levels of message content are described, as is the content of each level, the various modes of message delivery, and the most appropriate physical form of each.

Ancient civilizations did this all the time - almost invariably, in fact - and those messages, although desperately intended to be pervasive and obvious, are almost always lost on us. (Also see: Pyramids and UFOs) The purpose of cardinal facing on many monuments, for example, is still a mystery, as is the actual intent of Stone Age cave art.

We decided against a large radiation symbol prominently displayed on a marker lest the potential intruders take a quick reading, find nothing more than background radiation, and ignore the rest of the message. We did decide that the incorporation of a radiation symbol was approriate within the larger context of the message. As a symbol, it could provide a link between textual and pictorial information.

This is very wrong. A symbol combined with words creates one of the most cryptic messages possible.

Example: an ancient tablet featuring a picture of a cow with a block of text, it's impossible to know if the text is about the sale of cattle or the worship of a cow god. It might be neither; it could be some sort of satire or narrative. This sort of thing happens often - for example, we have many tablets written in poorly understood languages like Linear A/B, where the topic is clear, but the meaning is not.

Symbols, by contrast, are very easy to understand, as is writing, provided the language is well-understood (and it is highly probable that future civilizations will learn English as readily as we learn Koine Greek or Classical Latin or Aramaic or Hebrew). If the Eye of Horus is seen on a door, it is a clear sign that whatever is beyond that door is meant to be protected by its power. If a mezuzah is seen on a door, it is clear the door leads into a dwelling. If a weapon is planted atop a grave, it's clear the grave contains the remains of the wielder.

We decided against simple "Keep Out" messages with scary faces. Museums and private collections abound with such guardian figures removed from burial sites. These earlier warning messages did not work because the intruder knew that the burial goods were valuable. We did decide to include faces portraying horror and sickness (see Sections 3.3 and 4.5.1). Such faces would relate to the potential intruder wishing to protect himself or herself, rather than to protect a valued resource from thievery.

Missing the forest for the trees. This is the ultimate fallacy perpetuated by the morons who call themselves anthropologists: that all human behavior is dictated by economic advantage or the desire for gain. If humans see an image of something macabre that they do not relate to or empathize with, they will be curious, and try to investigate further.

...this system of markings should represent an enormous effort and investment of resources on our part...

....this panel member recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines. To put their size into perspective, a simple berm, say 35-m wide and 15-m high, surrounding the proposed land-withdrawal boundary, would involve excavation, transport, and placement of around 12 million cubic meters of earth. What is proposed, of course, is on a much greater scale than that. By contrast, in the construction of the Panama Canal, 72.6 million cubic meters were excavated, and the Great Pyramid occupies 2.4 million cubic meters. In short, to ensure the probability of success, the WIPP marker undertaking will have to be one of the greatest public works ventures in history.

This is the dumbest part of the whole proposal. Basically, the designers are approaching the project as if they're building a child's toy - that the ultimate audience does not share their level of intellectual and emotional capacity but will stand in dumb stupefaction of whatever they create.

History consistently shows that, when confronted by massive or inscrutable monuments, natural or artificial, humans are invariably fascinated, doubly so if the monument represents potential danger. It's as true of the Great Pyramids as it is of Mount Everest. And certainly both were designed to keep people away with threats, implied or real.

Such efforts to discourage human exploration by way of intimidation have never succeeded. Look at space travel, which serves no economic purpose other than to satiate the human desire to confront danger and to do the impossible, just as it was true when Westerners forced open the doors to China and Japan. Agricola invaded England just as Alexander invaded Afghanistan before him, despite those regions being some of the most hostile and resource-poor on earth.

This panel member therefore recommends that the markers and the structures associated with them be conceived along truly gargantuan lines...

5.3 Personal thoughts (WS)
Working on this panel, always fascinating and usually enlightening too, has led to the following personal thoughts:

We have all become very marker-prone, but shouldn't we nevertheless admit that, in the end, despite all we try to do, the most effective "marker" for any intruders will be a relatively limited amount of sickness and death caused by the radioactive waste?

In other words, it is largely a self-correcting process if anyone intrudes without appropriate precautions, and it seems unlikely that intrusion on such buried waste would lead to large-scale disasters. An analysis of the likely number of deaths over 10,000 years due to inadvertent intrusion should be conducted. This cost should be weighted against that of the marker system.

...So-called "experts" can of course make important contributions, but they must listen carefully to all other people who represent those who might encounter the markers. In the course of working on this project, I received excellent ideas from a wide range of undergraduates, colleagues, friends, and relatives...

This is why committees of experts are dumb. Everything gets watered down to the level of the most overstuffed, pretentious Ph.D on the panel even if some people have the common sense to know it's all a load of shit. Then, of course, mistakes are made, and the world is irreparably damaged.

------
The best approach is that which has historically proven to work best at hiding things of enormous value...whether that value is economic, like deep sea squid, or cultural, like the lost tombs of Imhotep and Scipio. The approach consistently proven most successful at keeping intruders out is simply to place the tomb in an obscure, isolated, unmarked area, situate it far below ground level, keep few records of its location, and remove all nearby human settlements and roads leading up to the monument.

But of course...that would be too logical.

Charity And The Status Quo

Three weeks ago or so, I sent an app in to volunteer at the Boston Food Bank. I didn't hear back from them, but I did hear back from a 12-step program for druggies. So I went and have been volunteering in the kitchen at this program for some time now. The kitchen crew are mostly either recovered addicts or students doing volunteer work; I haven't met any people doing penal community service yet.

Helping people is not my primary motivation. Rather, I enjoy the activity - doing things, making things happen, even the very menial - and of course talking to the other people, extracting their human knowledge and experience and adding it to my own, listening to their life stories and what wisdom they can provide about life. The manager of the kitchen, for example, is this hardscrabble guy who lost his family and his life to drugs, then with much hard work won it back. He has long experience in the hospitality industry and managing food prep - a career benevolent despot of the kitchen - and learning his methodology is interesting. There's another frequent volunteer, also a recovered drug addict, one of those highly itinerant but hardworking black people; it's interesting listening both to his ideological/metaphysical rantings about haves/havenots, and also about his travels. There are other people I also enjoy the benefits of taking their knowledge and experience, in the sense of getting to know and understand them and how they think and relate to the world. I care very little about "making friends", only developing a better understanding of others.

The kitchen gets a huge volume of food donations, in the form of canned goods and day-old bread. Most effort is spent prepping it for storage - only for it to be wasted a few days later. Most of what is prepared is fed to staff. This is distasteful to me, but like I said my aim is not necessarily to help people, only to keep myself busy and take what I want from the other volunteers. In any event, this corroborates my understanding of the field from what I have read in the past: getting donations is easy, the problem is most of these food banks and such do not have the means to store and distribute the donations.

The other day, I received a belated email from the Greater Food Bank thanking me for my application and asking me to register on the site. The site did not make any connection with my prior application when I registered - I re-entered my personal info from scratch, signed up for a work period, and showed up.

The food bank facility was situated in a light industrial area near Andrew station. I had to walk over an unpaved road running parallel to a cement factory to get there.

My initial impression of the interior was quite disheartening. It was a very large, very modern, very clean and well-maintained place, with promotional banners, posters, and iconographs, and a large LCD screen running a promo track along one wall. The latter was particularly a red flag. It's consistently my experience that organizations, especially non-profits, that focus their efforts on being "receptive" or welcoming are invariably ineffectual and merely fiefs for overpaid non-profit executives who prance around engaging in circlejerks and hobnobbing, aggrandizing themselves as do-gooders, when the truth is they just want money, status, and the security and ease of non-profit administration, and care nothing about actually helping people. They typically do not possess real administrative skills, and go to great lengths to isolate themselves from the organizations they manage. I have seen this a great deal in the many non-profit settings I've seen over the years.

A jaded secretary - overweight young black female, of course - told me to go up to the second floor, and so I did. The second floor consisted of a catwalk running along a wall featuring detailed promotional posters printed on pastel-colored PVC plates about the Boston Food Bank; amongst them was one touting their nutritional standards. On the other side was a vast warehouse area that reminded me of nothing more than the final scene of [i]Raiders of the Lost Ark[/i]. In the warehouse area, there was no movement, and most of the pallets were either empty or filled with pallets of visibly empty boxes. The catwalk branched off into massive offices - mostly empty - and conference rooms, all very modern and sparkling clean, with expensive upholstery and such.

I arrived at the work area. An individual whom I at first guessed was retarded - white, with thick, heavy, unmoving facial features, never looking at his surroundings, dimly messing with his task in an aimless, redundant manner - was putting oranges in bags in a vast and otherwise motionless room. The supervisor, a gregarious Haitian, walked up and asked me to help, so I did, throwing away bad oranges and bagging good ones. Except, they were all pretty much bad; all had crackling or dry rot, most were at least partly blackened, almost none had any edible flesh inside, it was clear all these cheap reject oranges had inside was a bit of fluid and pulp.

I initially did not attempt to address this person. Eventually, another volunteer arrived, and I struck up a conversation. I do not remember his name. He said he was from Seattle, a student at Boston University, majoring in advertising. He said he intended to get a degree in business. Interestingly, he said, advertising is part of the school of communications and not marketing, business or psychology. He had no ambitions, and after initial banter he, too, silently fiddled with the inedible oranges.

Eventually I spoke to the other guy, whom I had believed was retarded. I opened the conversation in a matter-of-fact way, to make this person not feel a stigma: "Are you here doing community service for parole, or as an educational requirement?" "Uh, I'm in high school, I'm doing this for an...internship kinda deal thing..." he said, seemingly distastefully. I saw where this guy was coming from. "High school, huh...I had a rough time of it, I was actually asked to leave and never come back. And I didn't, I took the GED and never looked back." 75% true - I was asked to leave, and did take the GED, but I implied I didn't graduate which is not true.

"So you intend to go to college?" "Yeah, gotta pay for it..." "Community college is really good." "Yeah, it's cheap, is the thing." "Yeah, it's actually a better education than a university - more practical, more hands-on, more employment oriented...typically, university is basically a waste of time." I had managed to pry this person open a bit. Lower-class youth like this kid are very interesting because my initial perception that he was a retard, although mistaken, nonetheless, I feel, hints at a deeper truth - the problem with these people is that they are not sufficiently engaged by their environments as children and have low self-esteem and self-actualization. I believe the solution is to make society more accessible and engaging - create parks and institute daycare and posthumous deification.

I had arrived at 8:55, but apparently the shift that was to start at 9:00 actually started at 9:30. The room quickly flooded with high school kids, who started picking aimlessly at objects on a conveyor belt. As if by cue, two portly guys in suits carrying fancy water bottles they did not sip from came through and one of them gave the other a spiel about the place. A young black man with a heavy nickel-steel alloy ring studded with zircons - clearly doing community service - showed up. A dolley on a manual forklift got stuck on a cargo elevator. The Haitian showed us how to correct the issue - apply more pneumatic pressure to the dolley's suspension. The dolley was loaded down with about a ton of milk, and I couldn't move it alone. With the help of the paroler, we managed to move the dolley. I turned to him. "Thanks a lot, I didn't do much at all." He smiled. Although I am very racist, unlike most white people, I am not bigoted, and I find that black people are often jaded about how white people do not treat them as people; they are often surprised and receptive when I do so. I have a huge ego, and it has to an enormous extent displaced my superego and id, making me less susceptible to bigotry than most people.

We spent the next three hours putting the inedible oranges in bags then putting the bags in used banana boxes. The Haitian showed me a rather interesting technique for separating lid from box - insert foot and pull. We finished, rather inefficiently; most of the time, the black guy just sat there, fiddling. I didn't particularly blame him; he didn't see himself as a stakeholder in what was going on, and I believe this is why black people in general often have work ethic / honesty issues - because they are not stakeholders in society, they see themselves on the fringe, or outside the system, they do not mentally buy into the social contract, a perception which is not unreasonable.

The Haitian told us to take our break in the "training room", which was labelled "Training Room 01" on a plastic bezel on the wall. He jokingly said something about there being snacks "if you can find any of them that can be eaten." I opened all the cabinets and drawers. There were cheap corn-based jelly snacks, peanut butter crackers, a beat-up but sealed can of Pringles, honey-mustard flavor, and a large quantity of individually packaged candies of all sorts. In the fridge there was a collection of sealed water bottles of diverse brands and a 2L bottle of ginger ale. I poured myself some ginger ale, took some chips and candy, napkins, and a sealed pack of disposable utensils and napkin and sat down. It was pretty gross. A few minutes later, all the kids flooded into the room and I excused myself. I wandered in the hall for a moment before this woman with an expensive haircut and clothes walked up to me rather imperiously.

"Are you with the morning group?" "Hmm?" "Are you with the morning group?" "I do not understand." "Are you a volunteer?" "Yes. The training room is overrun with the kids, though." "Oh...well...you seemed kind of lost. If you want...you can hang out over there, by the gantry..." "Ok. And you are...?" "The director of this place." She wore no nametag; she then walked back into the office, which of course has its own break facilities. I stood by the gantry, where there was actually no sitting area.

I didn't even bother staying for the afternoon; no point in wasting time sorting goods in silence. I arrived home to find an automated email thanking me for my contribution that morning. At 4PM I received a second automated email thanking me for my efforts during session I actually didn't attend.

Boarding the bus home, this young druggie jumped onto the bus. "Can I have your attention please I need help I'm going to detox tomorrow but I need some change to take the train there help me please my bodys about to give out I need detox." No one said anything. Some girls behind him giggled. "Fuckers...no one helps..." He walked along the aisle, addressing individual passengers, including me. "Help me please..." I looked at him. "What's your story?" "I need detox I'm going tomorrow but I need some change can you help me-" I cut him off. "I mean, what's your story...How old are you?" "28" "What was your parents' trade?" "Trade?" "What did they do?" "Uh, my mom's an alcoholic, and my dad's...dead...that's why I need help me please so I can take the train to get detox-" He started the spiel again and I gave him a basilisk gaze. He stopped talking. "Fucker..." He pointed to a well-dressed woman to my left. "She was gonna help..." He got off the train.

I got off at my stop and headed home. My train runs along BU, so there's always a ton of these shallow, over-ambitious, useless girls who try to get noticed by constantly fidgeting and tapping their heels loudly. I despise and ignore them.

I got home and began to read an article about nuclear waste storage iconography....

Generally speaking, I don't believe in the power of charity to help people. I believe that charity and non-profits inevitably act as agents of the status quo.