Russian authorities to investigate election fraud

About time!

Oh, wait…they’re not investigating the rampant and transparent fraud by Vladimir Putin and his henchmen, but that of an opposition leader running against Putin’s puppet in the upcoming presidential elections.

Apparently the Kremlin thinks Mikhail Kasyanov forged 15,000 signatures that he was required to submit to support his candidacy after Putin banned his party.

It’s amazing at which lengths the Putin Dictatorship goes to secure another .1% of votes. Kinda reminds me of what the communists did. Makes you wonder.

-TPP

Rudy Giuliani – a vindictive schoolyard bully

It’s no wonder why New Yorkers so dislike the mayor with 9/11 tourette’s syndrome. It’s stories like the one New York Times is writing about today that make him look like a more evil version of Dick Cheney.

The New York Times writes about the ruthlessness, pettiness and sometimes even downright illegality in the ways lil Rudy dealt with outspoken critics of him and his mayorality. New York City paid out a record amount of civil penalties during Giuliani’s term as a mayor of the city.

It’s a good thing this mini-Goebbels hasn’t been able to fool the outsiders in the Republican primaries. Maybe there’s hope he will fade away from politics after his failed attempt to become Bush III.

-TPP

No spitting in the elevator

I snapped the photo on the right earlier today while riding the elevator in the building my eye doctor has her office.

I gotta say it never occurred to me that there’d be a need to post a no spitting sign inside an elevator before, but I guess it really is a big problem around where I live.

Yea. It’s real high society in Flushing, NY.

-TPP

Simo Häyhä – Baddest badass of all badasses

The story of a Finnish WW II sniper Simo Häyhä is pretty amazing. A soft-spoken farmer standing at 5 feet tall killed more enemy soldiers than any other sniper in any army in history.

His official kill count stands at 505 confirmed sniper kills. Even more amazing is that those kills were achieved in a 100 day span. By some sources it’s estimated that he killed one Soviet soldier for every hour of daylight during those 100 days. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate though, but not entirely impossible given the short days during wintertime in Finland.

He was an unstoppable killing machine the likes of which the world has never known before or since.

Damn right!

-TPP

Eliot Spitzer – you ignorant slut

What is it with New York politicians?

Eliot Spitzer has been on the warpath against video games before, but this time he’s really outdone himself.

He’s had a video produced educating parents of the dangers of video games. The video is called Video Games and Children: Virtual Playground vs. Danger Zone. Well, the video isn’t as much about the playground part as it is about the Danger Zone (insert dramatic voice effect) part.

The video is great. That is, if you’re intent on making sure your kid never, ever, ever plays video games, because after watching it, I’m pretty sure any reasonable parent who sees it will ban video games from the house effective immediately.

While I wouldn’t expect a video intent on educating parents on the dangers of video games to be a shining beacon of all that is good about video games, there’s a fine line between educating of dangers and being an alarmist. The video goes so far onto the alarmist side it’s not even funny.

Not only that but it goes there with an entirely sensationalistic way. The whole thing reeks of production values more familiar with sweeps week local news segments where the neighborhood restaurant was suddenly found to be feeding patrons with minced meat made out of rat feces.

The video has a number of interesting mistakes in it as well. The tone of the video is well set from the beginning when it goes on to “educate” everyone on how the Virginia Tech shooter played video games. Well, he didn’t. He wrote poetry and there was absolutely no video games present in his dorm room. It’s a well established fact that he did not play video games. Yet here we have the New York State educating New York parents on video game dangers by warning us that video gamers shoot people. When, in fact, the shooter wasn’t playing video games. Good start, Spitzer, good start!

Next the video decides to condemn some Australian dude, who apparently wants his 15 minutes of fame so badly he made a game about Virginia Tech shooting called Virginia Tech Massacre. I really don’t know why this segment is in the video at all. Free speech issues aside, the game is not commercially available anywhere and from what I know it’s also been pulled from the Internet already, so including it in the video serves no other purpose than scaring the hell out of parents whose kids play video games. The segments undertone is “look at what kind of games your kid plays”. Nobody is playing Virginia Tech Massacre. It’s not available to anyone. And it’s definitely not available to any kids whose parents are responsible enough to monitor their kids’ Internet use.

Throughout the video it’s presenting the negative sides of video games (yes, there are some) with no context, no counterpoint and no fact checking ever have had happened. There’s a segment on the history of violent video games, which starts by saying “video games weren’t always violent. In 200,000 B.C. there was this game called Pong.” It then goes on to list and show in graphic detail nearly every violent game ever since. I think the only thing they missed from that was Carmageddon. Strange. I would’ve thought someone so hellbent on looking into everything that’s negative about video games would’ve found out about a game where you actually get points for driving over grannies. Alas, even a hatchet job isn’t flawless. After watching the segment on the “evolution of violent video games” you really get a sense that video games are all violent. That is the message the video is putting out.

That particular segment ends up with a condemnation of Bully, a game by Rockstar Games that’s been at the receiving end of some controversy ever since it was announced. The problem with the video is that they get the game completely wrong. Surprise, surprise. In a segment that “lets the game speak for itself” by showing up an intro video from the game, it is implied the game lets you act out on your aggressions in a school environment beating up fellow students and even teachers. In fact, the game actually puts you in the shoes of a bullying victim, not the bully. That “unimportant” fact was never presented in the video.

The video continues with a segment on research about violence in video games. It starts, promisingly, with a mention that the research is inconclusive, but doesn’t explain how it is inconclusive. It then goes on to quote several studies that state negative effects of playing violent video games. There are studies that state playing video games will have short term affects in children. These are the same effects kids have had ever since there have been kids when they’ve been exposed to violence of any kind. Any parent knows if you let your kids horseplay before dinner, they will act up at dinner table. None of the studies on violence in video games have ever linked violent video games to CAUSING children to become violent in general. The video fails to pinpoint that leaving the impression that video games do in fact make children more violent. The producer of the video basically cherry picked the research presented in the video to show video games in as negative light as humanly possible.

The best part about the research segment is on how the video uses an analogy between cigarette smoking and it causing lung cancer and violent video game playing. It’s so subliminal it’s genius. The video goes on to allow video games a rare reprieve. It says that just like not all cigarette smokers develop lung cancer, not all video games are bad and cause kids to become mass murderers. Well, gee whiz, I didn’t know that! The problem with this analogy, of course, is that there are studies that link cigarette smoking to causing lung cancer. Violent video games have not been proven to cause long term violent behavior, never mind a life threatening illness that kills 80% of all of its victims.

The video’s educational part ends up with an egg-in-the-face moment when it lists a number of resources as further information about video game violence. It lists Mothers Against Videogame Addiction and Violence as one of the websites to read up on. Excellent idea. Except that the site is a parody of the anti-video game campaigns such as Eliot Spitzer’s. Well played, MAMAV, well played!

The video concludes with an unnarrated segment of an overweight boy playing some shooter game alone in his parents living room. The sound on the segment is dramatic slow heartbeat pounding as if something really, really awful is just about to happen. I was expecting some Internet stalker kicking in the door and brutally murdering the boy, especially since the preceding segment was just talking about how you should never ever let your children play with strangers online. But that’s not what happened. Instead some video game gremlin climbed out of the boy’s stomach. WTF.

Eliot, my pandering, ignorant, poliwhore friend, you rock!

-TPP

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agrees, the American Dream is dead

Just the other day I wrote about how the majority of people in the United States are doing worse than their parents and how the American Dream is effectively not attainable any more.

That conclusion received some more proof in the form of a Congressional Budget Office data series on income equality in the United States between 2003 – 2005. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer.

The after-tax income of the bottom 20% grew by 6%, hardly to cover increased costs of living, healthcare and transportation, while the income of the top 1% grew by 228%. Even worse the after-tax income inequality is growing faster than the pre-tax income inequality meaning the rich are paying less taxes than the poor.

The trickle-up economy is treating Bushies well. Too bad about the folks hit by hurricanes. The income inequality is worse than at any other time in US history for at least a century. We’re at a point where we’re approaching the robber baron era type of economy in the United States, if we didn’t already make it there.

The Economic Public Institute (EPI) concludes:

Such concentration of income is unsustainable in a democratic society. The distribution mechanisms that have historically worked to ensure much more equitable outcomes appear to be wholly inoperative. Fixing them must be at the heart of any serious economic policy discussion.

EPI’s analysis of the situation is on their website. EPI also posted a shorter blog article about the numbers.

It’d be interesting to hear what the presidential candidates think about this. I think I know what the Republicans would say, and I also know what John Edwards thinks about it.

-TPP

Soviet Russia interns dissidents in mental institutions

The Soviet era tactics in dealing with opposition leaders continue unabated in Russia.

The International Secretariat of the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) is reporting that Russian authorities are holding Mr. Artyom Basyrov against his will in a mental institute and are medicating him heavily with drugs. His relatives were not informed of his imprisonment and they have been unable to visit Mr. Basyrov in the hospital.

Mr. Basyrov was kidnapped in Yoshkar-Ola, the capital of Mari-El, on November 23rd 2007 late at night by two men in civilian clothes. He’s been imprisoned ever since.

If the “softening” of this man continues according to age old Soviet formula, he’ll be mysteriously beaten up in the hospital or soon after his release (if he is ever released) by assailants nobody will see or hear, he will then be charged with some bogus crime and sentenced to home arrest while all his belongings relating to his political activities will quite coincidentally be confiscated.

Let’s see how it goes.

-TPP

The American Dream is dead

Alter.net has an article basically saying the American Dream these days is a complete myth to the majority of people living in the United States and especially to those born in poverty.

As a whole the US residents are doing better, but the accumulation of wealth is concentrating more and more to the few that are already wealthy, so the stats are getting skewed by the well-to-dos doing even better while the average Joe is doing worse.

Upward mobility (moving up in the socio-economic ladder) is just as likely as downward mobility (getting poorer), and the number of people who are earning more than their parents but still moving down is increasing. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t look ok to me.

Living costs (education, healthcare, housing) are skyrocketing while earnings are staying flat or declining depending on how you factor in things like inflation. Things are not looking good for the middle class in America, and it’s downright scary for poor people.

Meanwhile European countries, especially in Scandinavia are doing extremely well. The mobility (one’s ability to climb up on the socio-economic ladder) is up to three times as likely in countries like Denmark and Finland than in the United States. Scandinavian countries are high tax, free education/healthcare type of countries, pretty much complete opposites of the United States.

While it’s easy to dismiss the article by merely claiming it’s done by those liberal rabblerousers, you can’t argue with the facts. The research is solid and it’s showing undeniably that the “trickle-down” economy bullshit is bad for America. It’s making rich people even richer, and poor people even poorer. That’s why I personally call it the trickle-up economy.

The data is showing the Big Government approach is actually better for your citizens than the Small Government approach. Imagine that. Let’s see if they learn that in the US before it’s too late. I’m not too optimistic myself.

-TPP