He pushed an energy bill that my colleague Jerry Taylor described as "three parts corporate welfare and one part cynical politics . . . a smorgasbord of handouts and subsidies for virtually every energy lobby in Washington."
...His more libertarian-minded voters are taken aback to discover that "compassionate conservatism" turned out to mean social conservatism -- a stepped-up drug war, restrictions on medical research, antigay policies, federal subsidies for marriage and religion -- and big-spending liberalism justified as "compassion."
...Republican strategists are likely to say that libertarians and economic conservatives have nowhere else to go. Many of the disappointed will indeed sigh a deep sigh and vote for Bush as a lesser evil.
But Karl Rove, who is fascinated by the role Mark Hanna played in building the post-1896 Republican majority, should remember one aspect of that era: In the late 19th century, the Democratic Party of Jefferson, Jackson and Cleveland was known as "the party of personal liberty." More so than the Republicans, it was committed to economic and cultural laissez-faire and opposed to Prohibition, protectionism and inflation.
I believe Boaz to be incorrect in his assertions that Americans always vote for "smaller government," which he defines as lower taxes. Although he's right to point out that the anti-tax rhetoric of the Republicans score well in polls, he neglects to mention that a number of government programs are quite popular. Sure, Republicans do well when they promise, as Bush does, Americans can have their cake and eat it too. But Americans desire neither the resulting fiscal mess nor the wholesale dissolution of popular programs that's the none-too-secret goal of the Grover Norquist crowd. That's why Republicans are practically never honest about the costs of their policies. Arnold Schwarzenegger, for example, rode a wave of discontent to the California Governor's mansion by pledging neither to raise taxes nor cut programs in order to solve the state's defecit program. It's unlikely he'll succeed.
But he's spot-on in his recognition -- even if he can't bring himself to say it -- that it's the Democrats, not the GOP, that's the party of personal liberty.
And his column rightly points out that this time around, Bush won't be able to use his fatuous little "My opponent trusts government. I trust you" line...unless he has no shame at all.
Update: Avedon Carol comments: "Well, it's the Democrats if it's anyone, but I'm not sure I would go that far; it's just that the Republicans manifestly are not the party of personal liberty." Fair enough.
Here's some great news for old-school video game aficionados. Reuters reports that Japanese game manufacturer Taito has announced it will re-release its classic arcade game Space Invaders to celebrate its 25th anniversary.
The classic arcade game centers on a fleet of invading aliens looking to take over earth, but they must first deal with a lone gunner -- the player -- holed up behind a fragile set of shields. It has been one of the most popular video games of all time since it was developed in 1978.
"There has been a rebirth of classic video games in America," said Taito spokesman Kengo Naka. "We thought it would coincide nicely with the 25th anniversary of its debut in the U.S."
Taito aims to sell 10,000 of the stand-alone game machines at $2,772 a unit.
This is groovy news indeed. Space Invaders is a classic that should still prove a challenge despite all the advances in video game technology. Its relentless pace and fiendish requirements of hand-eye coordination are sure to test the reflexes of old and new generations of gamers alike. Here's a cool fan site devoted to the game that even offers a Flash-based online version, in case you need to practice up. Here's the Coin-Op Museum's entry devoted to the game.
Namco will manufacture and dstribute the games for the U.S. market via an OEM license. But there's one sign of changing times in this retro gaming story -- a play will now cost 50 cents a pop, not a quarter.
I was in Best Busy the other day making an exchange, and I decided to grab a cheapo DVD I'd had my eye on for a while. It's a two-disc bundle of old Max Fleischer Popeye cartoons courtesy the good people at Goodtimes Entertainment for a mere six bucks. Each disc contains more than an hours' worth of cartoons. I must admit Popeye is something of a guilty pleasure of mine. I hesistated to let The Girls watch them -- in many cases, Popeye solves his problems with his fists, and that isn't an example I want to set, but on the other time he does eat his spinach, and I'd certainly like to encourage that. So I acquiesced, and The Girls seem to love them, despite their venerable age.
Some trivia from the DVD box: Mae Questel, the actress who provided the voice of Olive Oyl, was also the voice of Betty Boop, with more than 300 cartoons to her credit.
The first snowfall of this winter has rolled into Indianapolis! Just as I was heading out to the car, freezing rain changed to snow, and now there's a decent snowfall with mild accumulation. The National Weather Service predicts that we may get up to two inches today. Now, of course, I wish I had worn my truly excellent boots as opposed to loafers.
I'll post pictures later this afternoon, if we get enough snow to be photogenic.
On the agenda for tonight: Fire in the fireplace and some hot cocoa.
Update: On my way out to get lunch, I observed that it's still coming down, but it isn't sticking. So there may be no snowy landscape photos after all.
It's nearly 2,000 years old and was used by the Romans to play a game, the details of which are lost to antiquity. It's expected to fetch a cool four grand at auction. c00L!
Writing in the Atlantic, Jack Beatty sums up the potential impact of a Bush victory in 2004:
Can a "miserable failure" of a president win re-election? Bush's victory would testify to a civic failure more dangerous to the American future than any policies implemented or continued during a second Bush term. A majority would have demonstrated that democratic accountability is finished. That you can fail in everything and still be re-elected president.
I would, of course, quibble with the re-elected, but still...
Pundits kicking around the RNC-inspired "[insert Democratic dandidate here] is unelectable" meme are missing the point. Bush -- that miserable failure -- is unelectable. That doesn't mean that the Democrats should be expected to coast to an easy victory; far from it. We know Bush and crew are going to fight dirty and try to lie their way to victory. But the Democrats absolutely must force Bush to defend his lousy policies, and not let (again, RNC-inspired) claims of "political hate speech" or whatever sway them.
R. U. Sirius, co-founder and editor-in-chief of MONDO 2000 and former contributing editor at Wired magazine, is posting a series of interviews at this site. Here's a quote from his opening post:
Funkmaster George Clinton once said, “Think. It ain’t illegal yet.” And while Clinton’s intent was probably to encourage a greater diversity of political opinions and cultural lifestyle choices, it seems that today we also need to remind people (and ourselves) that it’s not a crime to think expansively about the enhancement and extension of human potentialities through science, technology and technique. While the 1990s saw a great flowering of popular interest in technological and scientific innovation; a combination of the tech market bust and some 14th Century religious ideologues armed with box cutters pushed most citizens (of the globe as well as the US) into a reactive mode. Now that we’ve had enough time to absorb these complexities, and to prepare for possible further difficulties, it is time again that some of us focus energy and attention on more promising possibilities.
...Here at The NeoFiles we will be exploring scientific and technological advances towards these and other objectives over the coming months in interviews and articles. However, the seriousness and immediacy of these potentially life-altering developments is perhaps best indicated by evolutions in business and culture. On the one hand, hopes are symbolized by the long-term existence of Wall Street-ready businesses dedicated to marvels like the expansion of maximum life span. On the other hand, our fears are expressed by the increasingly vocal anguish of those who see potential for disaster in these developments.
...This newsletter will explore the latest information, news, and views of those who are redefining the outer limits of human potential. It is dedicated to all novelty seekers — to those who know they are and those that suspect they might be.
Here's some downright spiffy news: The ubiquitous Photoshop application has its origins as a special effects tool for the original Star Wars movie, according to MacWorld's UK edition!
The Financial Times today is carrying an interview with Adobe employee 38 and Photoshop evangelist Russell Preston Brown.
The report looks at the history of Photoshop – which was developed by Thomas and John Knoll. Thomas was a programmer, while John was in charge of special effects for the first Star Wars film. Brown confirms: "Photoshop is here today because of that movie." Thomas developed software to add effects and painting tools to images at John's request.
... it is too soon to know whether the image of Bush in his Army jacket yesterday will become a symbol of strong leadership or a symbol of unwarranted bravado.
Iraqis may be reassured that the United States will put down the insurgency and restore order in their country. Or they may take the image of Bush landing unannounced at night without lights and not venturing from a heavily fortified military installation as confirmation that the security situation in Iraq is dire indeed.
But one thing is certain. Bush's Thanksgiving Day surprise ties him, for better or worse, ever more tightly to the outcome of the Iraq struggle.
Tying Bush's political future "tightly to the outcome of the Iraq struggle" has been precisely the goal of critics of the Bush administration's policy in post-invasion Iraq. (Or, more precisely, critics of Bush's lack of any discernible consistent policy.)
His visit to Iraq yesterday accepted the terms, if not the substance, of those critics. For better or worse, as Milbank says, George W. Bush's presidency, his political future and his place in history are inextricably bound up with the long-term outcome of the invasion of Iraq.
Indeed; if nothing else, the tacit admission by the Bush campaign that it needed new footage of the President in military garb -- since his opponents are using the carrier landing against him -- represents an acknowledgement that Bush's claim to be effective on defense rests largely with American success in Iraq.
Writing in the Washington Monthly, Nicholas Thompson describes the disturbing hostility between the Bush Administration and the scientific community, and his unabashed attempts to politicize the scientific process.
George W. Bush embodies the modern GOP's attitude toward science. He hails from a segment of the energy industry that, when it comes to global warming, considers science an obstacle to growth. He is strongly partisan, deeply religious, and also tied to evangelical supporters. And, like Reagan, he has refused to endorse the scientific principle of evolution. During the 2000 campaign, a New York Times reporter asked whether he believed in evolution. Bush equivocated, leading the Times to write that he "believes the jury is still out."
...When required to seek input from scientists, the administration tends to actively recruit those few who will bolster the positions it already knows it wants to support, even if that means defying scientific consensus. As with Bush's inquiry into stem-cell research, when preparing important policy decisions, the White House wants scientists to give them validation, not grief. The administration has stacked hitherto apolitical scientific advisory committees, and even an ergonomics study section, which is just a research group and has no policy making role.
Bush's seeming contempt for science may be behind his disquieting tendency to pretend there's scientific dispute over issues from global warning to stem cells, when in fact a scientific consensus exists that's typically in opposition to Bush's preferred policy. Then again, it may be simply a rancid combination of bull-headedness, intellectual dishonesty and his preference to subordinate good policy to personal power politics.
You know those omnipresent backdrops at Bush photo ops -- the ones with labels like "Building America's Economy," that make sure the TV audience gets the message du jour? Well, FreshLaundry lets you roll your own.
Wired has an interesting and lengthy article on sci-fi author Philip K. Dick, noting the author's posthumous success with movie adaptations of his works, from Blade Runner to Total Recall to Minority Report to the new John Woo film Paycheck.
Dick's anxious surrealism all but defines contemporary Hollywood science fiction and spills over into other kinds of movies as well. His influence is pervasive in The Matrix and its sequels, which present the world we know as nothing more than an information grid; Dick articulated the concept in a 1977 speech in which he posited the existence of multiple realities overlapping the "matrix world" that most of us experience. Vanilla Sky, with its dizzying shifts between fantasy and fact, likewise ventures into a Dickian warp zone, as does Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. Memento reprises Dick's memory obsession by focusing on a man whose attempts to avenge his wife's murder are complicated by his inability to remember anything. In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey discovers the life he's living is an illusion, an idea Dick developed in his 1959 novel Time Out of Joint. Next year, Carrey and Kate Winslet will play a couple who have their memories of each other erased in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memory, paranoia, alternate realities: Dick's themes are everywhere.
At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time. He didn't really care about robots or space travel, though they sometimes turn up in his stories. He wrote about ordinary Joes caught in a web of corporate domination and ubiquitous electronic media, of memory implants and mood dispensers and counterfeit worlds. This strikes a nerve. "People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."
Like the babbling psychics who predict future crimes in Minority Report, Dick was a precog. Lurking within his amphetamine-fueled fictions are truths that have only to be found and decoded. In a 1978 essay he wrote: "We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives. I distrust their power. It is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing."
Wired's article paints Dick as one of the first cyberpunk authors, long before the movement coalesced around such luminaries as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan and Greg Bear. In turn, the film Blade Runner profoundly influenced this later generation of authors with its dark vision of corporate dystopia.
Fortunately for PKD fans, probate questions with his estate -- the author died in near-obscurity and without a will -- have apparently been settled, and more of his work is in development for the silver screen. Of course, as the article discusses, Dick's work is often, ah, adapted for the screen -- often muddying themes in the original story. Witness, for example, the famous differences between the theatrical release and director's cut of Blade Runner -- the two films, although only slightly different, tell vastly different stories with entirely different implications for the protagonist.
Musashi and I have already expressed reservations about John Woo's upcoming adaptation of Paycheck. As much as we're fans of both PKD and John Woo, it'll be interesting to see how the two artists' visions manage to gel.
Here's some safe-for-work cheesecake: a brief slideshow from a recent idol competition held Nov. 26 in Tokyo. A Japanese agency has placed photos of the five girls, who range in age from 14 to 21, on an Internet site, and asked investors to pay for the cost of promoting the winner as a new modeling sensation.
Italy is hosting a new beauty pageant, but there's a catch: The competitors are simply collections of pixels.
"Miss Digital World" is the first beauty contest reserved for the likes of videogame heroine Lara Croft, computer-cloned actresses from the "Matrix" films and new beauties tweaked to perfection with 3D graphics.
Digital artists, advertising agencies and videogame programmers from around the world have been asked to send a computer design of their perfect woman to www.missdigitalworld.com, complete with date of birth and body measurements.
"Every age has its ideal of beauty, and every age produces its visual incarnation of that ideal from the Venus de Milo in ancient Greece to Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s," Franz Cerami, the creator of the competition, said.
"Miss Digital World is the search for a contemporary ideal of beauty, seen through virtual reality," he told Reuters.
Designers will program their contestants to parade along a virtual catwalk, and there'll be a virtual presenter and virtual guests who will help create the atmosphere of a beauty contest.
Like many of their real-world counterparts, digital contestants will be disqualified if they've participated in any pornographic activity...sorry, Virtual Valerie.
