After my more depressing last post on the situation in California, on to a lighter note. While all those news must be disturbing for those living in California, others will find plenty of gaming inspiration in this mess. For this reason, I've added quite a lot of material to the California section of the Arcana Wiki.

I am particularly proud of this article and the gaming ideas therein - including a four-way struggle for supremacy between the human survivors of the government collapse and subsequent earthquake, rat kings spreading their filth throughout the state, a super ant hive mind controlling the coastal areas, and mysterious fire creatures emerging from the ground!


I might not quite have reached the level of Ken Hite's Suppressed Transmissions columns, but I'm trying to get there. ;)

From an article from Salon.com:

"Beyond the state's dysfunctional system, the short answer is the rise of the hard-right GOP. Pushed far to the right by ideologues like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and their ilk, California Republican lawmakers have staked out an absolutist line against taxes that makes governance nearly impossible. Lawmakers who believe and act on Reagan's famous line that "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem," are walking oxymorons. Why expect anti-government Republican legislators to resolve a budget crisis when that crisis will result in their goal: the destruction of government? The floundering Governator may not be an extremist, but he remains in thrall to the members of his party who are."


It distresses me extremely to say this, but you know what this reminds me of? The Weimar Republic.

The Weimar Republic might or might not have survived under better conditions - perhaps if the Great Depression hadn't happened, it might have struggled on and reformed somehow.

But there were also several large parties in the Reichstag which wanted to take down the whole system of the government, and which in the end were able to block any legislature to resolve this mess. In the final years, the only way to get anything done was via presidential emergency degrees, but even that was not enough to save the Weimar Republic.

This image of Obama allegedly "checking out" a 16 year old girl at the G8 summit in Italy is currently making the rounds:



I want you all to bookmark this video showing what really happened, as I know, I just know that this image will be used for "swiftboating" attempts against Obama until the end of the next American presidential elections at the very least.

The Legend is already forming...

I've recently discovered Google Insight and am using it for all sorts of pointless trend analysis attempts - to see what's hot, and what isn't.

And apparently, LiveJournal is not so hot any more. Searches for it have declined by more than half since its peak in January 2005. This suggests that the community of LiveJournal users isn't really growing (with the possible exception of Russian Spambots), and that interest is slowly waning.

Blogging itself seems fairly stable at the moment, so there must be other trends filling up the void caused by the reduction of LiveJournal.Twitter, possibly - but what else is out there?

I just found out about Google Insight, which tracks the number of searches for specific terms over time. This might help us track the general state of various RPG lines.

Here are various trends I found for the period on display (starting with 2004):

Call of Cthulhu: About the same, with the exception of a peak in April 2006 (coinciding with the "Dark Corners of the Earth" computer game). The search term is also very popular in Russia, for some reason.
D&D: Down by half
Exalted: Up by 25%
GURPS: Down to a third
RIFTS: Down by half
Savage Worlds: Up by 50%
Shadowrun: Down by half
World of Darkness: Slightly lower than it started, but now about constant

So it does seem that the gaming industry and community is no longer as large as it used to be. But what else can be learned from this tool? Tell me about your favorite armchair analysis using Google Insight!

This is one of numerous examples - it describes how the majority Americans who had to file for bankruptcy because of medical bills actually had health insurance... but the insurance companies found reasons to weasel out of much or most of the payments by burying all sorts of exceptions in the fine print.

Government oversight can reduce such predatory behavior (even if it is unlikely to entirely eliminate it). In a Libertarian society where there is no oversight on such matters and anything is legal as long as two people agree on it by contract, it becomes easy to overwhelm suck^h^h^h^h customers by burying them in legal clauses. The only people who will be able to prosper in such a society will be people who have a legal knowledge equivalent to that of lawyers - and that means that anyone who isn't a lawyer will have to spend so much time on legal concerns that he will be unable to put all his energy into more productive matters.

Does anyone here remember the anti-D&D hysteria of the 1980s?

Well, not me - I got started with gaming in 1990. But over on RPGNet there is a thread with scanned newspaper articles from a Canadian town where this became a hot issue.

My favorite quote is this one:

"Also, the fact that it's mostly boys and men that show greatest interest in the game is an important consideration, for they are the future leaders of our country. Should we not be careful what we feed into their minds?"

Here is an article by Jamais Cascio (of Transhuman Space: Broken Dreams and Transhuman Space: Toxic Memes fame) on Geoengineering. This was published in the Wall Street Journal, which is significant, since past editorials in the Wall Street Journal have been rather, er , skeptic about the very existence of global warming. And the predominant sentiments on the comments section reflect this...

Long interview here.

He is rather gloomy about most parts of the world (except the UK). But I found this part particularly noteworthy:

------------

PK: Well, the US doesn't have the same combination. But in Europe, Germany and Italy look comparable. France is better and Europe as a whole is considerably better.

WH: Germany matches Japan to an uncanny degree. You talk about the Nipponisation of the world economy: I'm not so sure. But I would talk about the Nipponisation of Europe via a German economy at its centre in the grip of the same problem - and that starts to be a global problem.

PK: Germany has huge inadequacy of domestic demand. Their economic recovery in the first seven years of this decade rested on the emergence of gigantic current account surplus.

How is it possible that Germany, which did not have a house price bubble, is having a steeper GDP fall than anyone else in the major economies?

The answer is that they depended upon exporting to the bubble regions of Europe, so they actually got side-swiped by the loss of those exports worse than the bubble regions themselves got hit.

It's Germany on a global scale that is the concern. We worry about the drag on world demand from the global savings coming out of east Asia and the Middle East, but within Europe there's a European savings glut which is coming out of Germany. And it's much bigger relative to the size of the economy.

WH: And on top there is an unique and unaddressed huge potential banking crisis. The Germans pride themselves on their three-legged banking system, but it is incredibly interlinked. The IMF warns that Germany could have to take at least $500bn of writedowns, which its banks have not begun to recognise. German banks hold a trillion dollars - maybe more - of maturing collateralised debt obligations that can only be refinanced by crystallising the losses. We've had RBS and you've had Citigroup. Germany's GDP will fall 6% this year - before the banking crisis has hit it.

------------

Unfortunately, he is right - the banking system of Germany is a huge mess and rife with corruption. The Hypo Real Estate is just the most blatant case - there have been too many banks - including too many owned by the various states - speculating with derivatives and other financial "tools" they didn't understand. And while the economy of Germany was never as focused on financial products as that of the UK and the USA, this will have a major impact on us all.

And the full impact of all this will likely only become apparent after the federal elections later this year...

From RPGNet (login required to view):

"I truly hope the newspaper industry picks up on that first comment about scientologists trying to buy up all the papers in an effort to quash the story.

I want to see a firestorm of negative scientology stories published as a means of saving the newspaper industry, staving off the collapse of newspapers for a few more years and doing serious financial damage to scientology in the process."



I fully endorse this notion.

Topic: "Finding some kind of context to put your life in."

"What are you doing to about it, oh ye life-contextually challenged Internet Friends?"



"I hope to leave the world a better place than I found it. Trite, but true.

Currently I am building what I hope will be a really big lever."

Story here. With more to come on Monday and Tuesday.


Unless Scientology manages to shut it down before that somehow... which I wouldn't quite put past them.

On another forum (I'm not posting a link to avoid adding to the flames) where the environment and attempts to decrease birth rates were discussed, a poster opined this:

"There are no moral ways to even think of reducing the human population for several reasons.
1) It's racist and classist, it certainly isn't rich white people who are breeding like rabbits.
2) If you think there is already too many people, there really aren't any moral ways to fix that.
3) A static growth rate is completely impossible, so either humanity is growing or dying. Supporting the extinction of humanity is surely immoral, and any level of growth is going to a whole lot of apes.
4) It places the environment as a good unto itself outside it's benefit to humanity, ie your claiming the environment is more important than humanity. Consistently applying that position is clearly immoral.
5) There has been exactly one period in human history where humanity has outgrown it's resource capacity, right before the development of agriculture. After that any resource issues have come solely from poorly distributed resources and not insufficient resources or from unforeseen calamity. Which leads right back into the inherently racist and classist nature of Malthusian argument."


I'll leave counting the number of ways this is wrong as an exercise to the reader.

Aaaand it's off.

Title: "Effcient Phase-field Simulations of Multiple Crystal Orientations"

Now let's see if everything goes according to plan with the upcoming bureaucracy-related deadlines...

Andrew Sullivan has some very interesting blog posts which hint that there was not only massive fraud after the Iranian elections, but clumsy fraud.

The most damning evidence so far is this graph, which tracks the alleged number of votes for each candidate over six different announcements:



Apparently, the people behind all this never had any basic statistics classes...

EDIT: Al-Jazeera is reporting on this, too.

Things are going to be ugly in Iran - but whoever will triumph in the end, at least those in power will loose a lot of credibility over this...

Here is an article on the stance of China when it comes to reducing CO2 emissions.

Excerpt:

"China and the U.S. are jointly responsible for more than 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. China’s emissions are outpacing that of the U.S., but Beijing argues that a large chunk of this is caused by export- driven manufacturing and has suggested that purchasing countries should be responsible for tackling those emissions."

It seems to me that the simplest way for the purchasing countries to "tackle those emissions" is to put a carbon tax on all imports from China. Is this really what the Chinese government wants?

To much of the Muslim world, the American military is Skynet.

People »Organization »Organized Crime »Drug Cartel »Los Zetas

Basic Information

Los Zetas is a criminal mercenary army for Mexico'sGulf Cartel. The group is comprised of ex-soldiers, including many members of the Mexican Army's elite Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE). GAFE is an elite unit trained to locate, hunt, and apprehend members of Drug Cartels, and the Gulf Cartel has actively recruited from it's ranks to form Los Zetas. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) advises that the Los Zetas paramilitaries may be the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and violent of all paramilitary enforcement groups. It is believed that they were originally trained at the military School of the Americas. Also, they were trained by foreign specialists, including Americans, French, and Israelis, in rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, small-group tactics, intelligence collection, counter-surveillance techniques, prisoner rescues and sophisticated communications.[1]

They serve the Cartel as bodyguards, enforcers, debt collectors, executioners and assassins.

See Also

• News: Police - U.S. teens were hit men for Mexican Cartel

Sources

Bibliography
1. Wikipedia entry

Game and Story Use

• Pretty much the most threatening paramilitary cadre the GM can throw against PCs in the Modern Day. They have extensive military training, and strong financial backing.
  • Considering their complicated backgrounds and training, they could make for a very sinister Quirky Miniboss Squad.
  • Los Zetas might be running El Rey, or just be hired on as security for such a place.
• Source of inspiration for Parallel organizations in other settings.
  • A group of Knights or Adventurers who got hit with an alignment-reversing curse? Killed by a Vampire? Bribed by the Dragon they couldn't defeat?
  • The most badass Time Travelers in all of history, from half a dozen scattered eras and cultures? Per Godwins Law of Time Travel, they're working for the Nazis now.
• Founded and organized by well-trained commandos. Now, according to the news (see link above) they are recruiting US teenagers. Los Zetas like a real-world embodiment of the Authority Equals Ass-Kicking trope, with Mooks at the bottom and a Big Bad Evil Guy at the top.

This entire post is under a Creative Commons License. If you want to add your own ideas to the original article, go here.

Today are the elections for the European Parliament, so I did my civic duty and went to cast my vote early in the morning.

You can find the ballot for Germany here. Among the 31 parties on it:

#6 Die Tierschutzpartei (Animal Protection Party)
#8 FAMILIE (Family Party of Germany)
#10 DIE FRAUEN (Feminist Party)
#11 PBC - Partei Bibeltreuer Christen (Party of Bible-Faithful Christians) - this is the only one of the "minor parties" which I've actually seen posters for.
#13 CM Christliche Mitte - Für ein Deutschland nach GOTTES Geboten (Christian Middle - for a Germany [built after] GOD'S Commandments)
#16 PSG Partei für Soziale Gerechtigkeit, Sektion der Vierten Internationale (Party for Social Justice, Section of the Fourth International)
#18 50Plus - Das Generationen-Bündnis (The Alliance of Generations)
#19 AUF - Partei für Arbeit, Umwelt, und Familie, Christen für Deutschland (Party for Work, Environment and Family, Christians for Germany)
#22 DIE GRAUEN - Generationspartei (Party of the Generation)
#23 DIE VIOLETTEN - für spirituelle Politik (The Violet Ones - for spiritual politics)
#24 EDE - Europa - Demokratie - Esperanto (Europe - Democracy - Esperanto)
#28 Newropeans
#29 PIRATEN - Piratenpartei Deutschlands (Pirate Party of Germany)
#30 RRP - Rentnerinnen und Rentner Partei (Female and Male Pensioners' Party)
#31 RENTNER - Rentner-Partei Deutschland (Pensioners' Party of Germany)

So there are three different "Christian" parties on the ballot (PBC, CM, AUF - not including the mainstream Christian Democrats), and four different parties for old people (50Plus, DIE GRAUEN, RRP, RENTNER).


Oh, and I recently received a letter according to which I have been drafted to help with the communal elections in late August...

I've always been somewhat skeptical of the idea of the Technological Singularity. It always sounded a bit too grandiose and overblown - too much like the "Rapture of the Nerds" it is often derided as.

However, recently I have become less sure. I've started following all sorts of technological news recently - not just advancements in computers and computer science, but also robotics, logistics, and all sorts of other fields. And my current reading of Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer only drives home that technological advancement is incredibly fast now. In many fields, capabilities of certain types of technology double on a regular basis - from 18 months to as quickly as every nine months. And exponential growth is something incredibly powerful.

Perhaps we really will develop artificial superintelligences far surpassing humanity (not just individual humans - the whole of humanity) in a few decades. Perhaps the technological singularity will come. But even if it doesn't, it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that we are at the very beginning of a major paradigm shift in our civilization - perhaps even the biggest our species has ever seen.

It is both an exiting and a terrifying time to be alive.