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Courts throughout the entire State of California, the United States of America, as well as world courts DO NOT have authority to reverse the Almighty Eternal Creator's Law that bans same-sex marriage...Gay and lesbian marriage and abortion are serious attempts to destroy the Almighty Eternal Creator's ongoing creation of human life on earth! If they do not change their sexual conduct and pay in full for damages caused while they are on earth, they surely must pay after their earthly lives!
I think if they were filing as a friend of my court, I'd get a restraining order :)
The Obama-Biden Transition Project is a nonpartisan entity whose purpose is to facilitate the transition to a new government and prepare for the next administration.
In the past, efforts like these have often been very secretive and funded by the D.C. lobbying and corporate community.
...
For the first time, transition efforts won't be financed with donations from Washington lobbyists and PACs -- which means we'll need to keep asking for your help.
...
Will you help support the urgent mission of our transition team with a donation of $100 or more?
Dude, sorry, but I'm tapped. I gave a lot of money to Obama's campaign and I'm thrilled with the results, but I really can't send anymore. I'm also a little tired of being asked to send money. So seriously, back off.
- While we are electing our first black president, California
looks set to passpassed a repeal of gay marriage in the state. - Ted Stevens, convicted felon
, looks likely to win reelection. If he's removed from the Senate as a felon (likely), Sarah Palin would appoint his successor.LOST!!! - Our economy is still in the crapper and is likely to be there for a while
- We're still at war in two countries and neither of those wars is going particularly well
The battlefield seems to be pretty stagnant right now. I keep having to fight the same battles every time I log in. The Russians are pretty much dominating, but we're stuck at about 24 territories so there's not really anywhere else to go.- I find that I sometimes have to wait a rather long time to get an opponent. It depends on which battlefield I want to fight on. Usually I can get a fight on the US, but not on Europe.
General Strategy:
- The game strongly favors defensive play, therefore, you want to make sure to secure uplinks as quickly as possible. If you get behind it can't be difficult to catch back up. Your best bet is to use infantry and transports to grab the uplinks.
- Engineers are the most powerful unit on the field. A couple engineers can wipe out all kinds of vehicles. The only thing that they're particularly vulnerable to is artillery and that can be offset by making sure to keep enemy scouts (choppers, UAV's) away from your engineers so that artillery can't be called in on them
- Make sure to keep situational awareness. I've noticed a lot of people tend to stack their forces to try to take a fortified position. This usually ends up leaving them wide open for a strike behind them. You can either use a deep strike, or use infantry with transports to sneak behind them.
- If you're losing, avoid the temptation to use the WMD's right away. Once you use the WMD, the enemy gets to use one on you, so generally it doesn't buy you a lot. Wait a bit and you'll get the ability to crash a link which they won't be able to retailiate with.
- Avoid the temptation to use your WMD's on enemy uplinks. Your better bet is to use the WMD's to wipe out enemy troop concentrations. It can take a while to rebuild forces, so this does more to slow an enemy down than just wiping out an uplink.
UPDATE: It appears that the stagnant battlefield was a bug. With the most recent update, I had half a dozen options, so it is much better now.
I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment.
A political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
So let's run through this real quick:
- There is no homosexual nationalist movement to the best of my knowledge
- The movement that exists is supporting individual liberties
- The movement is not centralized or autocratic
- The movement has no backing in government
- The movement has no leader, let alone a dictator
- There is no economic or social regimentation of any kind
As to the rest of his comment, if there's anybody who's using violence and harassment here it is those who are attacking gay people. What we've seen, largely speaking, has been peaceful demonstrations and boycotts of businesses. Has there been any violence? Has there been anybody assaulted, murdered, etc, because they were against homosexuality? Where as there's a long and colorful history of people doing precisely that to gay people.
Nov. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The Bush administration will not seek the $350 billion remaining as part of the $700 billion financial-rescue package, leaving it to the next administration to request the funds, a person familiar with the matter said.
With weeks remaining in the Bush term, the Treasury Department will defer to President-elect Barack Obama to request the funds after he takes office on Jan. 20, the person said.
What I cannot figure out for the life of me is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It's Bush doing it so my instinct is to think it's a bad thing, but I'm honestly not sure.
Futurists are an interesting lot. They try to extrapolate from today's events and trends to tell us what our future holds. Some are better at it than others, but by and large, they aren't much more prescient than the rest of us. Anyhow, today off a Fark link, I saw this article about, OMG PANIC THE END, containing the predictions of Gerald Celente.
What annoyed me a bit was how clearly the predictions were pulled from PR released by Celente himself. Example:
The man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash and the fall of the Soviet Union is now forecasting revolution in America, food riots and tax rebellions - all within four years, while cautioning that putting food on the table will be a more pressing concern than buying Christmas gifts by 2012.
So we have presented evidence of his prognostication prowess and then his inevitable proposition that we're all deeply screwed. Of course there's no context for when his predictions were made and any details of what exactly he predicted. I can tell you right now we're going to have another stock market crash in this century. So when that happens, I will totally take credit for predicting it.
Anyhow, my annoyance lead to research. I decided to go do some Googling to find his other predictions. Unfortunately I couldn't find anything going back to his actual 1987 prediction. It says something to me that this guy doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry about him. However I did find this nugget in a March 31, 2003 article in the Hartford Courant:
"The revolution has begun," said Gerald Celente, director and founder of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and author of "Trends 2000." He said that the anti-war protests in the United States and around the world are part of a broad, anti- corporate, anti-greed movement that predates the threat of war in Iraq. However, the war and protests against it are accelerating these linked movements.
...
He said the result could be social and political change more dramatic than the turmoil of the 1960s. Globally, he said, there is already a backlash against American products and culture.
Actually, the number of these protests world wide have diminished since that time. This isn't surprising given that the article is from roughly two weeks after the Iraq war started. The protests ultimately lead to little in the way of real change. The country in turmoil ended up releecting the same failed president and didn't finally get its act together to change direction until 2006. Continuing that trend, they then went on to elect Obama in 2008. Wow, people voting. The revolution really has begun hasn't it?
Oh and I found that book on Amazon, Trends 2000. I literally LOL'd when I saw this prediction:
The next dramatic shift in the momentum of the digital revolution will take place with the perfection of ... the videophone!
I figured if I read far enough into the book I'd find out when I'm finally getting my flying car!
There is value in trying to figure out what will happen in the future, but people who make their livings off the concept seem like nothing but the worst kind hucksters. They make hundreds of predictions, get a few right, and then use the fact that they got those few right to claim how brilliant they are. All of it is based on extrapolation of existing trends. Sometimes they are right because the trend continues and sometimes they are wrong because the trend changes. I will be the first to tell you that we have a lot imbalances that need to be corrected and the next couple of years are going to suck, but food riots and tax rebellions in the United States? Not bloody likely.
US Citizen, Steve Stearns, said he has applied to become a bank holding company, looking to access part of the Federal Reserve's $700 billion in funds being pumped into financial companies and to participate in the Treasury Department's $250 billion capital-infusion program.
I googled this phrase in quotations and it's nowhere to be found :).
I had a completely unique thought. How cool is that? :)
My biggest concern with this is that, broadly speaking, the trends that have pushed our news media to become more opinion oriented and partisan seem to be accelerating. This has happened because simple reporting of fact has become a commodity with rapidly declining value. To illustrate the point, go to Google news and look at the headlines and see that there are hundreds of newspapers all reporting the exact same thing. Much of the "reporting" is just rehashing of the same wire service article.
The problem, of course is that as these news outlets struggle to survive, the resources dedicated to news gathering and objective analysis are dwindling. They can't survive on rehashing the same wire article and so they cannot maintain a staff of reporters to cover local events that would ultimately make them the source of other wire articles. Yes, amateurs have stepped up to an extent, reporting on what's going on around them, but they have limited resources, and you end up with a serious signal to noise problem.
In the long run I feel like this will lead to people being less informed and less aware of the world around them. People will seek out their information sources and be informed in limited ways, but there will be less common basis of understanding between people. This has already happened to an extent and if you saw the folks who genuinely believed Obama was a Muslim, you got a glimpse of the kind of idiocy that can happen when people are lost in their own little media bubbles.
I was reading your post about some people pushing for keeping allowances within the CIA for torture under an Obama administration. What these people seem to have forgotten in our years under Bush is that we had a very functional and effective intelligence apparatus for decades without permitting torture. You'd be naive to think that we hadn't tortured in all those years, but yet it was still illegal. So why must we change this now?
The reason that it must be illegal is so that it forces those engaging in torture to weigh the value of the information against the personal consequences they may face.
It puts the burden on the interrogator to make these calls and will discourage them from torturing arbitrarily or even casually. If it's officially permitted, then torture is no longer seen as a last resort for a rare circumstance, but just another tool in the arsenal. It practically guarantees that innocent people will be tortured.
Furthermore, as a practical matter, if you permit torture officially and more innocents are tortured, it means you actually get more bad information. Innocent people can't tell you what you need to know. So you end up having to spend that much more time and resources just trying to weed out the extra bad information from what you really wanted to know.
Our laws about interrogation, torture, evidence, burden of proof, etc, are all there for a good reason. We tend to think of these issues in terms of civil rights but it is also about the very real practical value of the results. Those rules force our criminal and intelligence agencies to work harder to get the information the right way, and getting it the right way yields better results.
Ailing mall owner General Growth Properties Inc. warned Monday in a government filing that its failure to refinance or extend $1 billion in debt due this month could trigger default on billions of dollars in debt and its ability to continue operations would be in "substantial doubt."
GM recently announced that they would have trouble maintaining sufficient liquidity to keep operations running through the end of the year. What strikes me is that these are companies who have value and have assets but because of the tight credit markets and their already weakened state, they are being pushed over the brink because they lack the liquidity to maintain their basic operations. Those that are able to find financing are having to pay more for it, making it harder to stay afloat.
What isn't entirely clear to me at this point is whether the credit crunch is merely accelerating the demise of companies that would have gone under anyhow, or if some companies that might have survived are dying off because they just can't maintain enough liquidity.
Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn't raise his standards, he will exceed Bush's total before he is inaugurated.
Wow they have some REALLY good drugs over there don't they?
- No "god" view - rather than doing the fog of war concept, you see the battle from the perspective of your units on the field. Granted, you can get a command vehicle that gives you more of that god perspective with the ability to launch UAV's, etc, but overall the concept gives you the kind of perspective a real commander in the field would have
- Voice commands - the entire system can be driven using the controller, but you can also issue commands by speaking them. So if you want unit 2 to attack hostile 4, you just say, "unit 2 attack hostile 4".
- Massive elements - while you're never playing more than a couple people in any one battle, all of the battles are part of a larger war. So the battlefield changes as the overall war shifts back and forth,
The massive elements of the game are... okay. I mean the only flaw with it is that your actions doing have any immediate tangible impact on the game. So, I can go to a battle, win a lot, and after the round is over, we'll gain that territory if we had more victories. But at any given time there's only three territories to fight in. The problem with this is that if I log in and I'm not particularly enamored with the battlefields available at the time, I can't do anything about it.
The mechanics of combat are pretty simple, and this leads to a pretty fast pace of battle. It's mostly a rock/paper/scissors style where, for example, helicopters beat tanks but get beat by transports. Then transports get beat by tanks. You get the idea. You also have artillery, infantry, engineers, and command vehicles.
The only thing I find to be a glaring flaw in the game is that it's way too easy to destroy uplinks. The way the game plays in conquest mode is that you can either wipe out the enemy or take the majority of control points. But the problem is, you have to keep the majority. As soon as you take the majority, the enemy is given the ability to call in a WMD strike, which permits them to destroy an uplink. But you can also destroy the uplinks with direct fire by your units and artillery as well. So invariably all the uplinks end up getting wiped out in short order.
I do wonder how this will play out in the long run though. See, as you fight battles you get money to spend on abilities for your units. My concern is that eventually you end up with an imbalance between dedicated players and more casual players. For example, I recently got the deep strike upgrade for my infantry. This allows me to deploy infantry literally anywhere on the battlefield. It's expensive, costing me 4CP for the unit itself, then another 6CP to initiate the deep strike. So I can be a total dick and steal an uplink from the other team by dropping my infantry into their back line. That's a huge advantage over somebody who doesn't have those abilities.
I think overall it's not all I'd hoped it'd be but it is a fun game and it definitely breaks a lot of new ground. It will be very interesting to see what they do with it going forward. They are talking about having downloadable add ons for it and that it's all part of a networked game with a larger battle concept, there's all kinds of variables that might be thrown into the game as it goes on.
Also, a reminder, that you can find all my photos over on visual-meme.com and there's a
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visualmeme LJ feed as well.Say, is this Lollapalooza?
Anyhow, I got downtown, and after getting dinner and an aborted attempt to meet up with a friend, I headed over to the park to get into the rally. It was a total mob scene. Having said that, the police did a really good job of keeping things orderly. Basically what they'd do is block a group of people for like 10 minutes, then let them go to the next waiting point where the next group of cops were blocking. So there was a lot of standing and waiting, but you always got a sense of progress and things moved pretty well.
The whole time we were waiting in line people were giving updates. You'd hear random cheers from the crowd as various states were announced. The big early one was Pennsylvania, and when I heard that I knew the night would end well. Ohio was announced about 12 times while waiting in line, but I'm pretty sure it didn't get called til I was almost through security.
The Main Event
Finally I got in past security. I was in the last group to get into the main crowd area so I timed it well. I went and got something to drink and a slice of pizza and then found a good spot to stand and watch the big screen. In the distance I could see where the stage was but I was pretty far back. Then I waited.
CNN was on the big screen and they'd show what was happening there, occasionally playing music instead of making us sit through CNN's commercials. As we waited, the states started to roll in. A few would get announced for McCain and we'd boo, and then Obama would win one an we'd cheer. Then there was the moment. THE moment.
Wolf was talking about how the votes from the west coast would be coming in shortly. Then about a minute before California's polls closed, Virginia was announced. That meant that California's votes would end it. Then the countdown timer came up on CNN's screen, counting down to when California's votes rolled in.
10...
9...
And the crowd starts shouting along.
8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... 1...
Then the graphic comes up and it says Barack Obama is going to be our next president and the crowd goes ballistic. Dancing and cheering and crying and it was completely amazing to be there. Yes, I cried a bit, but I'm a softy, I won't pretend otherwise. Seeing Jesse Jackson on the screen was particularly touching. This has been a loooooong time coming.
McCain did his concession speech. Crowd booed a bit here and there, but mostly we were letting it go. Then Obama gave his acceptance speech. Honestly I don't remember much about it. I was just over the moon that this moment was even happening.
Anyhow, I'll post more later, but that's the gist of it. Glad I was there to see it :)
My day on November 4th began at 4:45 AM. Obama, apparently having things wrapped up, didn't really seem to need my time to go along with the money I sent to him. So I decided to instead commit some time to a local congressional candidate, Dan Seals. I'd met Dan Seals at a DailyKos meetup a few years back, as he was launching his first campaign to unseat Republican incumbent, Mark Kirk. It looked like he had a chance to push it over the top this time, so hoped I could help with that a little bit.
The Making of Sausage
I've come to realize in the last few years what a poor job we do in this country of teaching people civics. We teach about bills, and laws, and the high level view of how our government operates, but we barely touch the surface of what's involved in electing a candidate. I'm really glad I went and helped out with the campaign because it helped give me an insight into what really happens.
The real core of electoral politics is the grind of getting out to voters, meeting them, and talking to them about the candidate. Initially, it's an effort to convince voters to come out for your candidate. Towards the end though, when I got involved, it's about making sure who is voting for your candidate so that you can make sure they get to the poll and actually vote like they said they would.
The Saturday before the election, me and a retired school teacher I met, John, went to a precinct and then went door to door to check names on our list. These were people who had been missed in previous efforts to canvas the neighborhood. So we didn't know who they intended to vote for, and just did our best to ascertain that so we could put them on our list or cross them off. It's like going door to door to sell people something, but you aren't asking for money, which is a plus, but a good chunk of the people you meet hate your product.
Anybody want the plague? Plague here! Get your plague!
On election day however, I got a different even more thankless job. On election day, I would stand outside a polling place and hand out slate cards. The intent of these cards is to get Obama voters who hadn't thought about the congressional race to vote for our guy. It does in fact work as I got a few people who came out afterwards saying they didn't know about the race and thanked me. However, it is annoying as hell to do this job.
First of all, I was in a heavily Republican district. So if I said, "Dan Seals, Democrat for Congress," in many cases I could actually see the bile back up in people's throats. Second of all, a lot of people, for some reason, think this is some kind of crooked evil thing. Like I'm taking a knife to them and saying they need to vote for my guy or they're gonna get it. The usual comment I'd get from these folks is for them to tell me I'm not supposed to be that close to the precinct.
Under Cook County election law, I could not go within 100ft of the precinct. There's all kinds of little subtle secondary rules related to this, but basically the way it works is that the election judges mark a line or put up cones to tell us where we cannot go. In my case there was a big blue chalk line that I could not go past. If you go past that line, it's considered electioneering and it's a no no.
So inevitably I had this exchange multiple times:
Me: Sir, I'm a volunteer with the Dan Seals Campa...
Voter: You're not supposed to be this close
Me: Sir, I can't cross over that blue line right there
Voter: Harumph
The real hilight of my day was when a Park District worker came out to tell me I had to be off the property. This was because she did not understand how the rules work. I won't get into the details of it, but basically she told me to leave, I moved as requested, called the campaign office, then they told me to go back and that the district person was wrong. Lovely. The last thing I wanted to do was get in the middle of a fight. I sat for a bit, calmed myself down, and then got back to work, nervous that somebody'd call the cops and this would go down hill.
Cops showed up. Lovely. Office said, "how's it going," I said it was going great, and he said something to the effect of, "let's keep it that way," and he drove on. I felt MUUUUUCH better.
So that's pretty much how my day went. Later on, a guy from the Mark Kirk campaign showed up and we started competing for voters. This, incidentally, was when I found out how heavily Republican this district was. He apparently had canvassed most of it, and many people showed up clearly knowing him personally. Looooovely. But I had fun with it, and we chatted about how mostly pointless this venture was, etc. I had fun with it.
I Love Democracy
At some point during this whole thing, I came to realize how much I love Democracy. I talked to many people who didn't want to vote for my candidate, but I didn't care. I respected the fact that they were out voting and was glad they did it. As much as it sucked to have to bother people with this stuff, I'm really glad I did it. I had some really good conversations with a few people, and it was worth putting up with the few bitter pills who saw me as representing the communist muslim guy.
Anyhow, that's the way my day began. Next post will be about what happened after I got done with the Dan Seals campaign work.
