perfidy

From the Economist's current issue - an opinion piece that attempts to describe what's wrong with the body politic in America today.

And, bless their pointy little heads - it's outside the subscription firewall so the opiniony goodness is available to all.

I think they've nailed it, but what do I know?

As if it were needed. You reach a point in your life where you're so boring that you get quiz results like those below. Which, by the way, were totally predictable in my case.

You scored as Natural Causes. Your death will be by natural causes, though not by any diseaese, because that is another option on this test. You will probably just silently pass away in the night from old age, and people you love won't realize until the next morning, when you are all purple and cold and icky. So be happy, you won't be murdered.

[wik] Entire contents of table above are [sic]. I'm not one of those whose raison d'etre is to edit other peoples' sloppy spelling. Or my own, for that matter.

Curious, I took the test GeekLethal linked in the previous post. It seems I am fated to just disappear. Hopefully, I will do it with less spelling errors than the author of the test.

You scored as Disappear. Your death will be by disappearing, probably a camping trip gone wrong or an evening hike you never returned from. Always remember that one guy who was hiking alone and got in a rock slide. He could have died, but he cut his own hand off to save himself. Don't end up like him (or worse, dead).

Very interesting. I can think of a dozen people off the top of my head who might agree that I could use a nice tall glass of shut up, but would probably stop short of plotting to kill me. For my part, gentle reader, fret not. The suicide clause in my life insurance policy absolutely precludes auto-darwinating in any form. I'm just gonna have to stick around and suck it like everyone else. Hat tip to Lysander, latest in this chain of quizzery.

You scored as Poison. Your death will be by poison, probably because you are a glutton and are around so many people that it would be easy to get away with it. Several important people in history share your fate.

One in twelve city-dwelling squirrels will be killed by an automobile. Another four are killed by Bob Tyrell of Russell, Indiana.

Based on the latest antics of "Denny Pelosi", one could reasonably get the impression our elected leaders are either gutless or elitist.

Sometimes, reality sucks. Current gas prices are a great example of that.

The French way, it would seem, is to propose a half-solution to the problem (better than none, mind you), and then to climb down from it after street protests by the disaffected presumed-losers from the policy. Examples abound, but the recent tail-between-the-legs by "Black Jack" Chirac on the utterly reasonable attempts by Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin to grease the market for youth employment in France is perhaps most instructive.

That was a case either of the government being too weak-kneed to tell the people what they needed to hear or being certain the people were too stupid, greedy, or both to understand the need for change. Result? Cram-down policies, rejected by the people because they weren't explained fully and correctly.

Same deal today in the US, it seems - the scary correlation between Bush's approval rating and gas prices has awakened the sleeping and impotent populist in each of our Republican leaders. Morons. It's bad enough when the Democrats do it, but flatly embarrassing when the GOP does.

I'm sure that sometimes it's better to be seen to be doing something rather than not, but this isn't one of those times, and will simply feed and nurture the economic illiteracy of those who don't know better. How many times will we go through this charade of pretending that if prices go up, someone's slipping us the high hard one? When prices go down, these same folks, illiterates and impotent populists both, seem not to think it odd at all.

The Ministry is now bound for the vasty deeps of space, riding a beam of light and yodeling like Slim Pickens on the A-Bomb in Dr. Strangelove.

Er, Monopoly. New adventures in Monopoly.

It's America's favorite socially acceptable expression of raw capitalism, made manifest in cardboard and psychedelic currency. No other single gaming product better teaches the lesson that it is good to be a have, and that, by definition, the have-nots are losers.

Everyone has a copy somewhere, and most of you probably know where it is- closet, basement, attic- maybe even still set up from the night before on the big spool table in your living room. Maybe you still have the bits from your old set pressed into new missions: board to cover broken window; plain ol' "dice" turned into 2D6 and working for a Gary Gygax product; desperately gripping the racecar token- your final tangible asset since you sold off your last duplicative organ for real money- and used the last of the game money to kindle your hobo cooking fire and reflect on how you lost at life just as you lost every game of Monopoly you ever played...

Sssooooo.... yeah.

Hasbro is soliciting votes here for new spaces on an updated gameboard. And let's face it, we're due. However boring the gameplay is going to be, having Depression-era landmarks and cultural cues have not helped keep it fresh and interesting. And shit I've never even BEEN to Atlantic City. Matter of fact, the last time I went that far down the Garden State Parkway I wound up at the no-diamond-rated, non-luxury accomodations of the Department of Defense, a guest at Fort Dix' training barracks and the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry. Not in a hurry to get back, thanks.

So. Among some of the changes are updated Chance and Community Chest cards to make them more relevant to our place and time. Maybe they replace "won $10 in a beauty contest" with "finalist on American Idol" or something. Gone are the railroads, in favor of airports like O'Hare and Hartsfield-Jackson.

What I don't get though are whether the sites that Hasbro is asking participants to vote on are the ones that will be bought and sold. I mean, you can't very well build a house on Hoover Dam, or sell Beacon Hill. I doubt there's enough raw currency in circulation on the planet to buy Beacon Hill, anyway. So if that's the plan, I don't like it. I respect efforts to modernize the look and feel of the game, but can't get behind the landmarks thing.

I think it would be better for each purchasable property on the board to represent an entire, actual city. So instead of just Atlantic Ave on the classic board, on the new board you'd buy Atlantic City. Keep it going: the purple spaces would be, say, Newark and Detroit; Hartford and DC would fit right about where Connecticut Ave is now, maybe closer to Baltic. Er, Detroit. Updated utilities might include Comcast or other high speed cable/ISP. Boston...hmmm...I'd say somewhere in the high yellow, into green properties. Maybe L.A. for Park Place, NYC for Boardwalk? Jail could still be jail, I guess; maybe zazz it up by making it Pelican Bay. Well, except then you'd probably never get out. Maybe instead of jail, it might be "debt", so that as long as you're "in debt" you pay the bank 27.99999999% interest on all your holdings? Then again, I don't want to work that hard computing interest to play a game.

Come to think of it, I've already worked too hard thinking about this game which I'm never going to play anyway.

If you care, go vote. If you don't care, you're a well-adjusted adult who outgrew Monopoly decades ago and I don't blame you. Or you're a communist, and hate the game anyway on principle.

Ministry Crony EDog has moved his digs from the picturesque but unimproved highlands of ianhealy.com to the congested and crowded suburbs of ianthealy.blogspot.com. We support him in this questionable endeavor, because that's what we do. Support people who undertake questionable endeavors, that is. We would never do anything questionable. Or at least, if we did, we'd make sure there weren't any witnesses. Or insist that we were well compensated for doing something questionable and public.

Good luck to EDog with the permalinks and archives at blogspot, and we wish him all the success in the world. Well all the success that we don't wish for ourselves, anyway.

The Milblogger Conference was a remarkable experience, despite the exigencies of scheduling and over-indulgence which somewhat curtailed my ability to participate. I have rarely been in the presence of so many outstanding people all at once. The people I'd already met - Cat, Blackfive, ArmyWife, were their usual charming and intoxicated selves. And those I met for the first time at the pre conference drinking, the conference, or the after conference pub non-crawl without exception impressed me with their charm, enthusiasm, competence and desire to put themselves around as many alcoholic drinks as humanly possible. But I shouldn't give the impression that the whole thing was about drinking. That was just a useful and enjoyable side effect. The real work of the conference has been discussed elsewhere, but I'd especially like to single out a few of the many people I met.

Uncle Jimbo, from over at Blackfive, is exactly what you'd expect from reading his posts, only more so. An intensely fun and indeed loud individual. And seeing Matt again was every bit as nice as I imagined it would be. Stand up guys, the both of them.

Steve Schippert of ThreatsWatch.org, is a little more serious than Jimbo, but fascinating to talk to, and actually took the time to come up with a stunningly workable scheme to increase this humble website's readership. Even though I hadn't (despite the pleas of many) actually gotten around to reading Threatswatch until this morning, You can be sure that I will be a devotedly regular reader from now on.

Murdoc, of MurdocOnline, whose pages I have filled with drivel about UAVs, made the trek down from the untamed wilderness of Grand Rapids, Michigan. He totally pussed out on the Friday drinking, offering only a lame excuse – something about an eleven hour drive. And I of course had to bail early on the crawl. Hopefully, he can make it down to DC again, and if we are blessed with better weather, I will give him a real tour.

Deborah Scranton and Mike Moriarty, respectively the director and one of the cameramen/stars of the upcoming movie, The War Tapes. Next time I'm up near New Hampshire, I need to hang out with these people. Abandoning my conversation with Mike and Deborah was the most painful bit about bugging out for Easter. Go over and look at the previews.

There's some commentary trickling out, about the aftermath of the pub crawl, available here. And check out OpFor's podcast over here. I know they changed their name because the name "Officer's Club" was exclusionary, offensive and cumbersome. But the new name always reminds me of the eighth grade joke - "Hey man, there's a dikvor on your shoulder." But maybe that's just me.

A great time, and I wish I had been able to spend more time with everyone Saturday night.