Month: October 2005

Jack Thompson — Sometimes He Feels Like A Nut

Jack’s back (Thompson that is) and this time its the nutcase vs. the video game freaks at Penny-Arcade.

This time around, Thompson made a bizarre offer to pay $10,000 to any game developer who would put out a crude game in which a relative of a victim of video game-inspired violence takes his revenge on game developers. Presumably Thompson was being satirical, though who knows what goes on in this nutcase’s head, and his point was that video game developers wouldn’t create a game where they were the objects of violence. Of course, within short order there were numerous mod projects to fulfill Thompson’s proposal to a T. Thompson responded by saying he was just being satirical and took this $10,000 and went home.

Alas, that was not to be the end of the story. The enterprising folks at Penny-Arcade felt if Thompson wouldn’t keep his word, they would — having been satisfied that Thompson’s challenge had been met, they donated $10,000 in Jack Thompson’s name to The Entertainment Software Association.

That prompted Thompson to fax a letter to Seattle police demanding that they arrest the Penny Arcade folks for harassing and attempting to extort him. Thompson is not just against video game violence, he’s apparently against any speech he disagrees with.

The weird thing is that Thompson still appears on respectable television programs despite a) not knowing what he’s talking about, and b) being an obvious nutcase.

On the first point, Thompson’s Monday night appearance on CNN is an example of his ignorance of the very video game market he wants to destroy. He appeared on Anderson Cooper’s show to talk about the well-reviewed but controversial “Blitz: The League” — the latest installment of what used to be NFL Blitz. According to Penny-Arcade, Thompson offered this judgment of the latest Blitz game,

The NFL wouldn’t allow it’s name to be used, so that tells you something.

This is a demonstrably ignorant statement for someone who passes himself off as an expert on video games. The National Football League recently reached an exclusive agreement with Electronic Arts making EA the only company that can make games with the NFL brand. Midway is not part of EA, so it simply cannot make NFL branded games regardless of how banal or controversial they are. Even if they had loved the game (very doubtful), the NFL could have allowed their name to be associated with the latest Blitz.

More importantly, the ultra violence and some of the more controversial elements of Blitz are clearly veiled shots at the NFL. One feature of Blitz, for example, allows players to juice up their players with any number of steroids to help them perform better or recover more quickly from injury (the player also has to deal with random drug tests and other repercussions for players using steroids).

As for whether or not Thompson is a nutcase, as I’ve maintained, your mileage may vary, but he proved it to my mind in 1988 when running against Janet Reno for the position of Florida Attorney General. Thompson’s campaign premise was quite simple — Reno was a closet lesbian, so she could not be trusted to be attorney general.

At a campaign debate, Thompson actually handed Reno a piece of paper with three checkboxes that read, “I, Janet Reno, am a homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual. If you do not respond then you will be deemed to have checked one of the first two boxes.” Reno wadded up the piece of paper and ignored Thompson, but he kept hitting away at his theme that Reno was a closeted lesbian and was susceptible to being blackmailed if she was elected.

Nut. Case. And CNN guest expert to talk about video games. Go figure.

Cindy Sheehan, We’ll Miss You

The Tri-Valley Herald laments the passing of Cindy Sheehan from the public stage — i.e., her 15 minutes is definitely over. The Herald notes,

But after drawing the international spotlight in Camp Casey in Crawford, her name is fading from headlines.

. . .

She attracted what in essence became a traveling troupe of anti-war activists and p.r. agents and usual suspects, and the story just ceased to be as appealing, [University of Virginia professor Larry] Sabato said. It didn’t seem quite as natural and original, it became more of the same.

Before Cindy Sheehan passes completely out of view, however, lets not forget what she stood for.

Remember fondly the time Sheehan summarized her views at an anti-war gathering at San Francisco State University,

America has been killing people on this continent since it was started. This country is not worth dying for.

Besides which the United States was simply fighting a proxy war. As she said in a letter to Ted Koppel (whom she felt treated her unfairly and did not thank her profusely enough for her appearance on Nightline),

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel.

If it weren’t for the U.S. support of Israel’s policies visa vis the Palestinians, Sheehan reminded us, there would not be any terrorism.

Or remember the time she told CBS News’ Mark Knoller that foreign terrorists entering Iraq were freedom fighters,

But now that we have decimated the country, the borders are open, freedom fighters from other countries are going in, and they [the U.S. government] have created more terrorism by going to an Islamic country, devastating the country and killing innocent people in that country.

And it was not just Iraq, Sheehan reminded us. The Iraq war was just a continuation, after all, of the imperialist war of aggression in Afghanistan,

[CHRIS] MATTHEWS: Can I ask you a tough question? A very tough question.

SHEEHAN: Yes.

MATTHEWS: All right. If your son had been killed in Afghanistan, would you have a different feeling?

SHEEHAN: I don’t think so, Chris, because I believe that Afghanistan is almost the same thing. We’re fighting terrorism. Or terrorists, we’re saying. But they’re not contained in a country. This is an ideology and not an enemy. And we know that Iraq, Iraq had no terrorism. They were no threat to the United States of America.

MATTHEWS: But Afghanistan was harboring, the Taliban was harboring al-Qaida which is the group that attacked us on 9/11.

SHEEHAN: Well then we should have gone after al-Qaida and maybe not after the country of Afghanistan.

MATTHEWS: But that’s where they were being harbored. That’s where they were headquartered. Shouldn’t we go after their headquarters? Doesn’t that make sense?

SHEEHAN: Well, but there were a lot of innocent people killed in that invasion, too. … But I’m seeing that we’re sending our ground troops in to invade countries where the entire country wasn’t the problem. Especially Iraq. Iraq was no problem. And why do we send in invading armies to march into Afghanistan when we’re looking for a select group of people in that country?

So I believe that our troops should be brought home out of both places where we’re obviously not having any success in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is still on the loose and that’s who they told us was responsible for 9/11.

And, of course, Sheehan was the first to note the evil hands of the neo-cons on American soil when the National Guard was sent in to New Orleans to maintain order following Hurricane Katrina. Sheehan urged the Bush administration to, “Pull our troops out of occupied New Orleans and Iraq.”

Presumably if it had not been for U.S. support of Israel, Hurricane Katrina never would have had to hit Louisiana at all.

Its too bad Sheehan is so quickly leaving the public consciousness and that we will no longer be treated to such eloquent pearls of wisdom.

Sources:

Peace mom slips from public stage. Josh Richman, Tri-Valley Herald, October 18, 2005.

Cindy: Terrorists ‘freedom fighters’. Joe Kovacs, World Net Daily, August 23, 2005.

Selling Organs to Saudis

Imagine you need a liver transplant, but there’s a problem. There is, of course, a shortage of organs and unfortunately you are the 52nd person on the list in your region. What do you do?

Well, if you’re a Saudi national, you pull some strings, and you get the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia to agree to pay the hospital about 25 percent more than a typical liver transplantation would cost. Mysteriously, you then go to the top of the list and get your liver.

At least that’s what happened at St. Vincent Medical Center in California. Staff at the hospital allegedly falsified numerous documents in order to cover up the blatant sale of the liver to the Saudi national.

In fact, St. Vincent’s appears to have been the place to get a liver if you happened to be a wealthy foreigner. Nationally, the United Organ Sharing Network decrees that no more than 5 percent of organs should go to foreigners. Nationwide the rate is much lower, according to the Los Angeles Times, but at St. Vincent’s 8 percent of all liver transplants at the hospital went to foreigners(and St. Vincent’s is a very large transplantation center).

St. Vincent’s organ transplantation program has been suspended and UNOS is still investigating. What they should do in response to this create an open market in organs and allow the rest of us to get in on the money. Organ selling — its not just for corrupt California hospitals anymore.

Source:

Hospital Halts Organ Program. Los Angeles Times, September 27, 2005.

In Which I Stop Playing World of Warcraft to Play Auction House Extravaganza

Last year I mentioned my obsession with E-Bay I cut short and haven’t been back to E-Bay for a real auction in more than a year (I do occasionally buy some office stuff from a vendor who uses E-Bay to offer goods at a discount, but I’m strictly a “Buy It Now” guy).

Unfortunately, now my life has become dominated by virtual auctions within World of Warcraft. There’s been quite a bit of press about virtual economies in these MMORPGs, especially when they spill over into the real world such as the people selling their uber WoW characters on Ebay for hundreds of dollars. And, of course, there are a number of services where I could go to buy gold or items for use in the game. Of course, if you get caught buying or selling items, Blizzard will ban your account, plus I prefer to find ways to tweak the game within the in-game parameters. Going outside to E-Bay or some other service is akin to using a trainer program — not something I’ve ever found interesting.

No, it is the in-game trade in items that is my current obsession. World of Warcraft has a fairly interesting economic model which attempts to balance things by setting a time limit on how quickly one can acquire money and items. So, as with most action-style RPGs, the better an item is the less likely it is to drop from a beast or monster, beasts and monsters don’t drop very much money relative to how much time and additional resources it takes to kill them (you won’t get rich farming monsters), and other methods of making money, such as mining for various metals, only respawn at given intervals, so you might find a vein of gold and mine it, but it disappears and then respawns later with the time it takes to respawn based on how valuable the resource is.

But WoW has an additional way of making money and procuring items — Auction Houses. There are three Auction Houses, one each in a Horde and Alliance town and one in a neutral town that both factions can use. The Auction House works like an Internet auction house. You take your item and set a minimum bid, a buyout price if you like, and the length of the auction (the minimum is 30 minutes, the longest is 24 hours). Players find items by searching for what they’re looking for, and the search is pretty granular so I can look for swords that are only of a specific level range and only with a certain set of magical enhancements. I’m not sure how many individual items there are in WoW, but it is clearly in the thousands.

Because it is a simulated economy and not a real one, many (most?) players do not have a good idea of how much a given item is actually worth. If I someone says how much would you sell a brand new SUV for, I may not be a car salesman but I could give someone a decent range. How much should a Level 25 Sword of the Monkey go for? I have no idea, since there are so many items I have no intuitions or experiences with how much most items should go for. My knowledge about pricing is limited to an extremely small subset of items. As a result, the pricing of items is all over the place. You might look at the listings of people selling the same item, and the minimum price might range from 9 silver (very low price) to 2 gold (very high). There are clearly lots of opportunities for arbitrage in that situation, if a player can get a handle on what the market value of the item really is.

Enter Auctioneer. Auctioneer is an add-on to WoW produced by some enthusiasts. What Auctioneer does is add a “Scan” button to the Auction House interface that methodically goes through each auction posted and writes information about the item, the minimum bid, buyout, and current bid price to a database. Perform such scans frequently, and the result is a much higher level of information about the market for goods in WoW than most players have.

This is viewable in game through an enhanced tool tip. I can arrow over any item in my inventory and see, say, that in all of the scans I’ve performed there have been 300 auctions, the average minimum bid was 50 silver, the average buyout was 2 gold, the average bid was 60 silver, and the best estimate of the market value of the item is 1 gold, 80 silver. When I’m ready to sell an item, Auctioneer will suggest a price based on both historical data and the most recent scan that just undercuts the competition. The result is that I’ve gone from selling about 95 percent of my auctions compared to maybe 35-40 percent before using the add on.

If that’s all Auctioneer did it would be indispensable, but it also has a feature that is almost unfair to those who do not install it. It has a number of command line parameters that make it trivial to identify arbitrate opportunities. Run a scan and then run Auctioneer’s bidbroker command. It will then display all auctions in the most recent scan where the minimum bid of the item is 50 silver less than the market price for the item. Buy those items, sell them at market price and count the money.

I was doing pretty good at the auction house before using Auctioneer — after a day of questing and farming I’d make maybe 5-6 gold a day. This Saturday, I made 25 gold just in buying and reselling items at the auction house. As I joked to my wife, I decided to stop playing WoW and start playing Auctioneer. Auctioneer essentially turned the game from an RPG to a trade sim for me.

Why the West Is Doomed

Okay, maybe the West is not doomed, but it is still a bit shocking to see how quickly Western institutions bow to religious extremism at the same time that individuals in countries dominated by religious extremism fight that trend.

In late September, two stories appeared in the British press about separate art exhibits and very different attitudes toward freedom of expression.

On September 26, the Associated Press reported that in response to the July terrorist bombings in London, the Tate Museum had pulled works from an art exhibit in order to avoid offending Muslims. The work by John Latham, “God Is Great,” featured, according to the AP,

. . . a large sheet of glass and copies of the Quran, the Bible and Judaism’s Talmud that have been cut apart, with the pieces mounted on either side of the glass to make it appear that they are embedded in it.

Latham, 84, derided the Tate’s cowardice noting that such outrageous reactions simply empower religious extremism. Latham was quoted by the Associated Press as saying,

Tate Britain have shown cowardice over this. I think it’s a daft thing to do because, if they want to help militants, this is the way to do it.

“God Is Great” is part of the museum’s permanent collection, and Latham asked the museum to return the artwork given its decision to remove it.

While Tate Britain was cowering trying to avoid offending anyone, activists in Tehran were putting on art show of their own. On September 26 the Sunday Times reported that a group of Iranians put on an art show in Tehran showing off 190 paintings that had been banned as “anti-Islamic” after the Islamist revolution there.

While Tate Britain removed “God Is Great,” Iranians were viewing works by Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Andy Warhol that was intended to offend the sensibilities of Muslim extremists. Incoming Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently announced the firing of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s director, Ali-Reza Samiazar, and the show featuring the banned artwork was essentially a parting shot by Samiazar against the hardline conservative Ahmadinejad.

The Western intelligentsia cowers in the corner at the fear of religious extremism, while those who have to live under the brunt of it daily openly rebel against it. Maybe the West is not doomed, but it is certainly troubling how much it is willing to bend over backwards to accommodate its enemies.

Sources:

Banned art in a show of revolt against mullahs. Peter Conradi, The Sunday times, September 25, 2005.

Tate Britain Museum Pulls Artwork. Associated Press, September 26, 2005.