Bailout Thoughts

Okay, everybody is doing it so I’ll chime in.  I’ll try to keep it succinct.

I am ideologically opposed to bailing out these idiot banks staffed by idiot finance majors who weren’t smart enough to be doctors or engineers and were stupid at university and are still stupid.  However, I am also ideologically opposed to my 401k losing all of its value or being unable to take advantage of things like a home equity line of credit because banks are terrified even of responsible borrowers such as myself.

Is a $700bn “bailout” the right answer?  I have no idea.  I am not an economist.  I don’t know what the details of this kind of program are going to be.  Is a fleet of armored trucks going to move gold bullion out of the reserve in Fort Knox into the vaults of banks in New York City?  Are we going to loan them money and expect them to pay us back?  Are we going to buy any debt the banks don’t want anymore?  All of these details are (I hope) detailed in the bill that failed the house recently.  For all I know, the democrats tacked in a bunch of market restriction crap (like caps on CEO pay, or something similiar) that killed the bill.

Am I terrified about a bailout not passing, or super glad?  I honestly don’t know.  I leave it in the hands of our economists and hope to Christ they will do a better job than that dickweed Alan Greenspan who saw this coming yet still continued to lower interest rates.  Why?  We’ll never know!  On a lot of things I overtly presume to know more than our elected officials but not in this case.  The economy is simply too huge and complex a machine for me to diagnose and repair by watching cable news and reading blog commentary on the interwebs.

People seem to bitch and moan about the $700bn price tag, but that doesn’t bother me - think about how many billions it will cost when the feds have to start paying out FDIC insurance.  P.S. – now is a good time to make sure you don’t have more than $100,000 in any one single bank.  If we save the institutions then we are also saving jobs for thousands of dipshits who make their livelihood by giving credit to people who don’t deserve it.

I’m probably more ambivalent about this whole nonsense than a lot of people who are predicting the certain collapse of democracy in the western world immediately followed by inevitable nuclear holocaust because a few banks went bankrupt.  To me, this simply represents a very steep fall following a very rapid climb in the housing market that which we all knew to be unsustainable but were too individually greedy not to exploit.

Of course, the last time something like this happened was in the late 80’s/early 90’s, and apparently the national memory isn’t as long as it should be.  The housing market rose up and up and then came tumbling down.  Ths time the market went much higher much faster – fueled by the same bullshit that is now coming back to haunt these banks (lenient lending practices).  They let it get too high and now they can’t survive the landing.  Shame.

The republicans seem to have taken the position that we should let them twist in the wind.  Again, ideologically, I agree with them.  But practically I think that’s a bad idea.  I’d rather fire some management, get the banks back on their feet, and start drafting some legislation to keep Wall Street from running with the scissors in the future.

I am a registered republican so naturally one might assume that I should steadfastly back deregulation like most republicans have for the last 20 years, and for me to propose Wall Street regulation would somehow be proof that the democrats whom I loathe have the superior policy.  I liken some regulation on Wall Street to the kind of some regulation that we impose on all kinds of industries, for example, sanitation in restaurants and food mills, or safety standards in coal mines, or hazmat dumping by energy companies.  These are all flavors of corporate regulation which are sane in moderation that most conservatives including myself openly back.  A little regulation goes a long way.  A lot of regulation gets us nowhere.

Bleh.  I’m sick of hearing about this bailout.  I’ve said it before: no one will remember this happened ten years from now.  Mark my words.

Gone With the Wind

In Gone With the Wind, there’s a classic scene that says everything we need to say about our foreign policy, specifically about our foreign debt.

Rhett Butler is about to be hanged.  He is playing cards with the guy who is going to hang him.  Rhett Butlet loses an awful lot of money, and he says something along the lines of, “Boy, sheriff, you really got me beat.  I owe you six thousand dollars.  Don’t worry, I’m good for it.”

I don’t have to say anything else.  Do you get it?  Do you see how it relates to U.S. foreign policy?

As long as we maintain a giant foreign debt, especially to our rivals, it is in their best interests to make sure we do not fail.

Think about it.  If you’re China, and you’ve loaned the U.S. hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars, and the U.S. is paying you big, fat interest checks each year, do you really want anything bad to happen to the U.S., or the U.S. economy?  Do you want to hang Rhett Butler?  If you do, he’s not going to pay you those $6,000, is he?

Let’s talk about foreign oil.  Who is buying up Iran’s oil?  Do you think they really want us to fail?  Do you think they really want our empire to end?  No.  If our empire ends, so does their revenue source.  Why do you think Saudi Arabia left OPEC?

Self interest, and by extension greed, is the simplest motive behind any action.

To all you simpletons who are screaming about the U.S. national debt and foreign oil, I pity how short sighted you are.  I pity how incapable you are of seeing what’s really going on behind the scenes.  We are buying our security with a big national debt.  We are hurting the people who irritate us by letting the dollar slip.  If you think a weak dollar hurts us more than it hurts the countries from whom we buy goods (like oil from the Middle East or Cupie dolls from China), you’re a fool.

This talk about going green and “freeing ourselves from foreign oil” is a shot across the bow.  It’s the obvious response to the sabre rattling going on by Achmedenijad.  Oh, so you want to wipe Israel off the map, do you?  Well, we want to drive wind cars.  Kiss your oil revenue goodbye, jack ass.  We are using this “energy independence” bullshit to counter Iran’s nuclear threat.  They can’t sustain their country without oil revenue, and we are threatening to cut if off.

I swear, sometimes it pains me how stupid most people are.  The foreign debt is not a bad thing.  It is a calculated, strategic move to secure the United States.   We are putting our welfare and continued economic success in the interests of our lenders, which is the rest of the world.  We are now too big to fail.  If we pay off our debt to these lenders, they no longer care if we disappear off the map except that we still buy their shit.  You might ask why a country like China would willingly put themselves into this situation – where they basically have to do everything they can to make sure we continue to thrive so they make their billions on interest – and the answer is simple.  We made them an offer they can’t refuse.  All we have to do is put a tariff on Chinese imports and their entire country goes bankrupt.  Their economic growth is largely dependent on our import consumption – and that is true for a large number of countries, including Europe.

Foreign policy is so easy and so obvious yet so many people struggle with these basic ideas and scream about “trillion dollar deficits!!11!” like it’s bad.  Since most people are stupid, politicians play to their stupidity.  Rather than try to explain complex concepts like I’ve described, they just pretend like national debt is bad, and moronic voters lap it up.  On one hand they’re right – debt is expensive.  It’s really tough to finance sweeping socialist programs like nationalized healthcare when we’re paying $250b annually to keep all of our lenders’ collective nuts in vices.  But since every sweeping socialist program ever instituted in the U.S. has failed miserably and the foreign debt game has and will continue to work, which are you going to bet on?

Boys are Boys and Girls are Girls

“Holly Madison” (whose real name is probably something like Holly Baneszkewskiwitz) is Hugh Heffner’s “number one” girlfriend.  You may have seen her skank ass on The Girls Next Door.

If you’ve even caught a glimmer of that shit show on the E! channel while channel surfing, you’d be aware that Holly has been nagging at Hugh to marry her since she was 22.  No surprise, right?  Who wouldn’t want to be the next Anna Nicole?  On second thought…

In a recent interview Holly expressed some doubts about her future with Hugh Heffner.

I’ll give you three guesses as to how old Holly Madison is.  I don’t have to give you three.  You’ll be right the first time.

Yes, that’s right, Holly is the magic number: 29.  She is about to hit 30 and is unwed and babyless.  On a single birthday, the last decade of her life as a Playboy party slut and her ability to continue that lifestyle is gone in the blink of an eye.  Her biological clock is ticking a lot louder than her desire to party and vainly convince a supercenterian millionaire to give her half of his estate when he dies.

Heffner is in his 80’s and he’s been doing the same thing for the last 60 years.

This simple story should be enough to show you that if women didn’t have a subconscious voice in the back of their heads screaming about having babies that gets louder and louder every year until she has those babies, every man would be Hugh Heffner and every woman would be Holly Madison at 28.  I think the end result is that we’d all still be living in caves.

This simple story should also show you that women are all the same.  Even a Playboy party slut like Holly Madison can’t resist the urge to settle down and spawn.  She will give up the lifestyle of living in an iconic mansion with a millionaire with whom she probably barely ever has to sleep with because of his age.  No job, no cares, maybe once in a while she takes her top off and lets guys photograph her generic unimpressive dime-a-dozen breasts.  It’s as close to Eden as it can get, but she’ll move out and move into the suburbs with some beta provider type who will probably make her do anal.  All so she can get impregnated and execute her female agenda.

No matter how fun a girl seems to be at 22, 25, or 27, once she hits 29, she’ll want a baby.  And everything that comes with it.  How much more proof do you need?

Phil Harris Nails it On the Head

If you don’t mind a ridiculous analogy of the American economy to that of a pie, you might find this editorial interesting.  It’s not the kind of thing I expected to read on TownHall.com, but read it:

http://townhall.com/Columnists/PhilHarris/2008/09/20/the_credit_industry_-_death_of_the_pie

Throughout this editorial, I couldn’t help but shake my head over and over.  It almost sounds like he’s auditioning to write speeches for John Edwards.  Didn’t Phil get the memo?  Cheating on your cancer stricken wife is not in fashion this season.

Let’s read:

This begs the question, who is to blame for the rusted out pie pan? A standard retort from the “all is well” crowd is that irresponsible borrowers are the culprits. Unfortunately, this snappy (condescending) attitude fails to recognize that the “all is well” crowd could not even begin to form the pie pan on which their own stable economy depends.

Actually, I would argue that the “(condescending) all-is-well crowd” are exactly the ones who form the pie pan on which our own stable economy depends.  To be clear, here, I get the sentiment tnat Harris is projecting that anyone who makes more than the median income (who he describes as upper middle class) would potentially fit into this “all is well” crowd.  Ipso facto, let’s use that definition from this point forward.  The upper middle class are the ones who form the “pie pan.”  We are the ones who own businesses and give jobs to the lower middle class people.  We are the ones who pay taxes to finance everything.  We are the ones who have disposable income to inject into the consumer economy.  The fact that the top 10% of Americans cover over 50% of the American national budget is telling.  Does pointing out these facts make me condescending?  According to Harris, yes.  There must obviously be some judgment, associated with some character flaw, any time someone like me reports a statistic or states irrefutable fact, right?  Please.  Cry more, Phil.

It does not take much of a disruption, such as a period of unemployment or unexpected and unavoidable expenses to knock hard working families on their tailbones. This is where the phenomenon of institutional greed meets the pie pan, when corrosion begins to eat at the very foundation of the economic pie.

I have written about this topic before.  If there is anything that annoys me about this frame of mind it’s the “one paycheck away” rhetoric.  Hillary Clinton was obsessed with this one.  Every time I saw a clip of her speaking she fell back on this tired old crap about how so many American families are living “paycheck to paycheck.”

Let me spell this one out nice and easy.  If you are living paycheck to paycheck, you are not living within your means.  Rein yourself in and save some money.

Any responsible adult will not put themselves in a situation where they cannot carry their own expenses for at least six months.  If you are one missed paycheck from financial ruin, it means you are spending more than you can afford.

I am 25 years old and I can carry my own expenses for at least one year.  I’d probably have to pillage some of my retirement funds to do it, but blowing some retirement money at 25 is a small price to pay for avoiding financial ruin.

Phil Harris’s entire tone throughout his editorial is that anyone who suggests that families who are living paycheck to paycheck are in some way irresponsible children who deserved to be spanked is a condescending asshole who is obviously to blame for this financial crisis.  I do believe that families who are living paycheck to paycheck are irresponsible children who deserve to be spanked.  How is it possible to see it any other way?  If you can’t manage your finances responsibly, what do you possibly expect?

And here comes the standard bullshit liberal retort courtesy of Phil Harris:

Common sense, as opposed to some hollow mantra about making responsible financial decisions, will suggest that people are going to do their level best to provide as much “normal” as possible for their families. This means that millions of below-median-income folks are going to reasonably expect to buy homes and reliable transportation that allows them to maintain (at least) their below-median incomes.

Woah, woah, woah.  Slow it down, there, Phil.  Expectations?!  You just hit the nail on the head, Phil.  This is the problem.  I wouldn’t consider the expectation to finance reliable transportation and own a home reasonable for people making less than the median income.  Of course, we’ve already established the fact that I’m part of the condescending “all is well” crowd who lacks common sense.  After all, I believe that people should only reasonably expect to buy things they can reasonably afford.  I must be retarded.

If the “normal” or “average” American experience is to own and maintain a car and to own and maintain a house, then basic statistics would suggest that you need to be making at least the median income to “reasonably expect” a median existence.

Christ, how do people function?

This common sense reality also means that millions of regular folks are going to be at the edge of sustainability. They will be on the proverbial one-paycheck from disaster boat, and they will be there without making foolish, extravagant, frivolous credit decisions. They will simply be living up to the basic American expectation.

So in other words, if the average American can afford an average existence, a below-average American should leverage themselves to the eyeballs with debt and risky credit in order to finance the average lifestyle he couldn’t otherwise afford.  He should put himself into an irresponsible position to keep up with the Joneses.  Great idea, Phil!

Many well-intentioned families purchased homes using adjustable rates, because such loans made it possible for them to do so. After three years, they expected to refinance more favorably, and such did not seem so unreasonable. In the interim, if there has been a disruption and credit scores suffered, refinance options become limited or worse, impossible.

I didn’t think it was possible for so many of the flaws in the standard Democrat worldview to be apparent in one editorial, especially one posted on a Republican rag.  In the worldview of the typical Democrat, your intent is more important than the results.  Even if we let Phil have the fact that these families were “well-intentioned” – as I would instead use the term “greedy” or at best “fool-hardy” – he is trying to cover for their obvious lack of planning.  “They expected to refinance more favorably, and such did not seem so unreasonable.”

What if I suggest, instead, that rather than take the ARM today, you wait those three years – saving all the while – building good credit all the while – so you have a 20% down payment and can take out a 30 year fixed at an affordable rate?  But you want it NOW!  Right.  After all, it’s only reasonable to expect that you, too, own a house even if you can’t afford one without taking out an incredibly risky loan that could balloon at any time.  Sounds like a great plan, doesn’t it?  Idiot.

Certainly, this will sound like so much class-envy to many, but such could not be further from the truth. The upper-middle class seems to have no comprehension that the lower-middle class makes life good for all. An expectation that those on the mid to lower end of the spectrum must be satisfied to live in noisy, crowded apartment complexes, and drive smoke-blowing, on-the-brink heaps to jobs, is incredibly moronic.

Actually, I don’t expect the mid- to lower- class to live any other way than what they can afford.  If that includes a car and a house, great.  If not, make more money or shut up.  I don’t expect to live like a millionaire; why should someone who makes one half of my income expect to live like me?  What is hard about this to understand?  Life isn’t fair and America doesn’t owe you anything.  We give you the opportunity to be as successful and as rich as you are capable and willing to be.  If that falls short of home ownership, so be it. 

 ”Easy for you to say, Evan!”  Yes, it is easy for me to say.  When I bought my house (and my car, which occurred within 2 weeks of each other), I was 23 years old and was making less than the median income.  I still was not living strictly paycheck to paycheck since I had at least 6 months of safety net to pay my mortgage if I lost my job and was unable to find another one, but I still managed.  I pulled it off; why can’t you?  I had exactly the same outlook then as I do now.

People willing to work, should have an opportunity in this country for an American lifestyle. Not a guarantee of luxury, and certainly not a sense of entitlement, but a reasonable expectation that a stable home can be obtained and maintained on the basis of hard work and realistic expectations. If our economy is incapable of sustaining this for the regular folks, then it is not structured in a way that is sustainable.

This is exactly the bullshit attitude that got us into this in the first place.  Bill Clinton pushed for legislation that made it easier for lower income people to get mortgages – essentially requiring by law that mortgage companies be more lenient with their lending than they otherwise would be.  Our economy is capable of sustaining this for the regular folks.  It’s the sub-regular – below the median income – that it isn’t sustainable for, because they were the ones taking out the risky loans and are the ones living paycheck to paycheck so they can live in a house.  Fools.

Finally, Harris closes with a fantastic strawman analogy:

When “Bob” suffers a heart attack, I don’t think that a prudent EMT would decide that the best way to keep “Bob” going is to make him do a hundred pushups. A family that is experiencing a financial crisis and temporarily cannot honor their credit obligations is no different. Just as the cardiac patient would likely die if subjected to some kind of punishment for becoming ill, why would one expect anything different when a family’s finances become sick?

To the pedestrian analyst, this analogy may make perfect sense.  To the person with a functioning brain, he’ll see this for what it is: a pathetic strawman.  Comparing “Bob” and his heart attack to “Bob”’s financial situation is apples and oranges, because “Bob”s choices did not cause his heart attack.  Everybody dies and the choice of “heart attack” is arbitrary – it could have easily been cancer or getting hit by a train.  “Heart attack” is actually a bad choice here since it’s pretty well known that many choices greatly increase the likelihood of a heart attack such as eating McDonald’s daily – so forget the fact that the heart attack is Bob’s fault by substituting heart attack with some medical affliction that could legitimately strike anyone at any time. 

Harris is trying to insinuate that a financial crisis can strike anyone at any time, and while that is true, that kind of crisis will only kill you (financially) if you haven’t planned sufficiently in advance, as I claim should be a prerequisite to taking huge risks like buying a house.  Harris seems to think that it’s okay to live paycheck to paycheck and then not get totally screwed when your expenses creep higher than your budget one single time.  If you are that close to your margins, you shouldn’t expect anything other than financial ruin.  Period.

According to Phil Harris, this assertion makes me an elitist, myopic, arrogant bastard devoid of common sense.  According to thinking people with a solid grasp on the real world and an accurate understanding of what “fair” means, this makes me correct.

Gloom and Doom

Every couple of months the media hypes up the latest disaster that will surely end the country.  Right now it’s Bear Stearns/Lehman Brothers/AIG.  And like babies latched to tits, you morons suck it up.  You buy it hook line and sinker.

“OMFG the dollar!111  It’s weak!!  OMFG the economy!!!1″

Of course, not a single one of you can name a single reason how any of this directly affects your life in a tangible way unless you happen to be doing business with these companies, and even though they are large companies, they aren’t that large.  Fannie and Freddie are more of a concern, but even that is kind of silly.

I never quite understood what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are.  They were created by the government but privately owned?  What?  I knew they issued mortgages backed by the US government, so I wonder how a US government “takeover” really means anything except that the “companies” are no longer headed by their incompetent boards.  The CEOs get to walk away with huge severance packages of course, which I never quite understood.  Hey, you guys drove national lenders into the dirt by taking risky loans.  We won’t be needing your services anymore.  Here’s $50m so you can go away.  Great idea!

Naturally this is the worst thing to ever happen ever since 1930 ever.  That is, if you listen to the gloom-and-doom bloggers.  These are the same people whol also uniformly believe we’ll all be dead from global warming and feel warm inside when they see that shitty We commercial about how “we” demand clean renewable energy in 10 years.  How laughable.  I could write a whole post on how much I hate that commercial.  Maybe I will.

The gloom-and-doom bloggers are insisting that the dollar will collapse into nothing and our economy will collapse into shambles any minute now.

Of course, when I look through their blog history, I don’t see a single mention of major investment bank collapses.  Where was your crystal ball 6 months ago?  1 year ago?  If you couldn’t see this coming, then you’re clueless and you should stop blogging about things that, according to you, will surely happen.  A retarded flamingo could have predicted more bank bankruptcies 6 months ago.  It started with American Home Mortgage and will surely continue.

Hmm, let’s think about this for a moment.  Mortgage companies are selling mortgages to people who shouldn’t be taking out mortgages.  Said people start becoming unable to make monthly payments.  Said properties are now in foreclosure.  Who owns these properties?  If you answered anything other than said mortgage companies, you’re a bozo.  Or some shmuck renter who is only tangentially aware of how this shit works having never been in the mortgager-mortgagee relationship before.

If people stop paying back mortgages, the bank takes the loss.  Sure, we slap the moron who took out the loan on the wrist.  We make them liquidate some assets and file for bankruptcy, but it is highly unlikely that their financial losses are anywhere near what the bank’s are – in fact, it’s guaranteed that they aren’t since any liquifying of assets during the bankruptcy process goes to paying back the debt owners.  When you’ve got environment teeming with easy to get, cheap mortgages, it becomes easier to buy and sell property at higher prices.  People buy and buy and buy and borrow and borrow and borrow until you’ve got people making less than $100k living in $500, $600k houses on ARM’s or interest-only’s.  The minute they lose their jobs, or incur new major expenses like daycare or need a new car, or their ARM adjusts, they can’t pay the mortgage anymore.  They could always sell their way out of it, but when this starts happening to enough people, there are too many sellers and not enough buyers.  Couple this with the fact that as these buyers start defaulting, banks start getting stricter, so new morons who are about to make the same mistake that the defaulter is making by buying a property that the owners can’t afford can’t get the same kind of ARM the original buyers got, so they can’t buy at the same price.

It was totally obvious who was going to get hit here.  It was totally obvious that at least one major mortgage company, and several banks, were going to go under as a result of this.  The chickens have come home to roost and you dipshits are acting surprised.  Oh, I see.  Now is the end of the world, not 2 years ago when the shit started hitting the fan?  It was only a matter of time then but you had more important things to worry about like the Iraq war.

Banks fail all the time.  They’ve failed before, they’ll fail again.  They’re just businesses like anything else.  If you invested with these bozos I feel bad for you, but I hope you’ve learned your lesson and do a better job picking your bank in the future.  If anything, this crisis is a good thing because it is illustrating how plainly true it is that all banks are not created equal.  You can’t throw your money in any arbitrary random bank and expect the same security as you could with any other.  Why do you think there are so many banks?  They are competing with each other.  Anyone adversely affected here just picked wrong.  Shame on you!

I don’t think this is going to have any major lasting effect on anything, and I bet 2 years from now you’ll barely even remember this happened.  You’ll get the answer wrong when you are asked which major investment bank went under in September 2008 after taking heavy, unsustainable losses from the subprime mortgage market.

You don’t care now and you won’t care then.  You just enjoy imagining horrible scenarios.  I call this worrying for the sake of worrying.  Get over it, you just sound like a bunch of whiney douches to me.

Where’s the judgment?

I was watching some dopey reality TV show the other day, and I noticed something that is obvious but thanks to the mind-numbing effects of shows like these, I had never really thought much deeper about it until now.

Ever since Survivor, the standard pattern of reality shows is: group of young beautiful people show up at some mansion, frequently in Mexico where insurance is cheaper, perform dopey challenges, and are slowly whittled down until only one one person is left.

The first observation I have about this pattern is the overuse of democracy.  Most of these shows, including Survivor, and nearly every crappy competition show on MTV/VH1, involve the group voting one of their own off the show.  While there’s usually an angle, like if you actually win the competition you can’t get voted off, it still boils down to the group making its own decision.

I thought about this because when I actually saw for the first time a situation where instead of the winner being rewarded, the loser was sent home by the host without a cutesy little pow-wow where his teammates get to condemn him.

This event was refreshing to me.

It’s disappointing to me how these fallacious microcosms called reality TV shows suggest to the public that decisions about who wins and loses are made by a group, and the authorities above (e.g., the show’s host and crew) are charged only with enforcing the rules.

At face value you might think to yourself, but hey, that’s how America works!  That’s what a democracy is!  The people choose, and the government only makes sure all the rules are followed!

The deficiency here – and the part that saddens me – is the manner in which these decisions are made.  If reality TV is a reflection of the democratic process, it’s no wonder that Barack Obama can base entire campaign on five letters.

The method that is used to determine who goes home is based chiefly on “alliances”.  The translation of “alliance” is some bitches whisper in dark alleys and bloc vote whoever they don’t like.  Very rarely do the players’ performances in challenges actually reflect their likelihood of winning or losing.

You aren’t judged on skill, intelligence, or even luck.  You don’t need these things on a reality show.  All you need to do is kiss the right ass and stay on the right side of the majority.   You don’t need to be objectively better than any of the other competition, you just need more than half of the other players to vote your competition off.

This is a very shallow interpretation of how to survive in the world.  I feel sorry for kids who grew up watching TV shows like this.  Boy will they be in for a surprise when they get fired for the first time.  They’ll never get their chance to convene the tribal council of their coworkers and democratically elect which one of them gets fired, oh no.  Their boss makes that decision, informs them, and then they are escorted off of the premises by security.  Oh, and also, their paychecks stop coming.

It’s no wonder people can’t connect with religion.  One of the chief concepts of virtually all religions is that you are being judged from above by a being who makes independent decisions without democratic input from anyone.  This concept fits well in the natural world.  When the hungry sabretooth stalks your hunter gatherer camp, it chooses which one of you to eat.  You don’t get to vote which one of you gets dysentery.  You don’t sacrifice one of your own.  You have no control over your fate, or the fate of the rest of your camp.  Something else is choosing your destiny for you – or maybe not, maybe it’s all random chance – but the last thing it could be called is a group decision.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – all of these fancy aspects of life we enjoy so much, such as civilization and democracy, are luxuries.  Try to imagine how the world would be if all of our modern trappings were taken away.  We’re still human beings and we’ll still get hungry.  How do you suppose things would play out?

Unfortunately, we can’t show reality on TV, mostly because the resulting scenario would be too horrifying for all of the idealogues to stomach.  If Survivor were actually about surviving, it doesn’t take a great amount of creativity to imagine how the islanders would have behaved.  The last thing they would have done is assemble a democratic tribal council and voted on who gets to eat and who doesn’t.  The strongest males would instantly band together and control all of the resources, giving only to themselves and any attractive women with whom sex is traded for food.  The starving betas with no resources would attack out of desperation and they’d kill each other.  That’s how life actually is.

But actual life is too hard for a lot of people – especially those who know they’d be in the starving beta group if such a scenario were to play out – so they erect the kind of facade that the Survivor we all saw neatly depicts.  There’s no starving, no fighting, no non-consensual fucking (although on more than one occasion the girls on Survivor were more than willing to take off their clothes for Oreo cookies).  That’s exactly when Survivor’s ratings started going down hill because all of the people who live in the fairytale world of pretend and political correctness (100% of liberals) didn’t want to see the wicked truth of the real world.  When the air conditioning is shut off, when there are no flush toilets, when the only thing to eat – god forbid – is plain white rice – women instantly forget ideas like self dignity, self control, values, and words like “objectification.”  They’re willing to whore themselves out for food.  So much for feminism, right?

If you have children, you are doing them a disservice to let them watch reality TV with its nonsense rules where consensus is the only factor in winning and losing without explaining to them in no uncertain terms that in no way does reality TV depict reality.  In the real world, judgment comes from above, not from within.  Then again, if your family is religious, your kids already know that.

Is Palin Hypocritical?

I read some anonymous armchair’s opinion in the form of an overexerted comment to a post about Biden’s worthlessness, and he said something like this:

“NOW and other thinking people hate Palin because she contradicts the entire Republican ‘morality’ line of argument they’ve been using ever since Rush Limbaugh made it fashionable in the 1980’s.  If Palin were Obama’s democratic pick, Hannity, Limbaugh, and the rest of Faux News would be all over her like flies to shit about her unwed daughter’s pregnancy.  That’s not family values!  We’re not talking about some swing-shift worker at Arby’s or an impoverished inner city dweller – we’re talking about the daughter of one of the governors of the United States.”

At first read, I thought he might have a point.  But then I read it a second time, and two things became apparent.

First, if Bristol Palin were a democrat, her fetus would have been long dead and no one would have been the wiser.  Did you know that Chelsea Clinton was knocked up twice before Bill Clinton even left the White House?  Unfortunately, we’ll never know because Hillary chartered Marine 1 to fly Chelsea to Camp David for abortions both times and the national media never found out.  Actually, CNN and MSNBC were notified but their press director sent out a memo instructing all of their journalists not to cover it.  Had they, we could have expected a press release from Hillary in which she proclaimed that Chelsea did not have “prenatal relations” with any aborted fetuses.

The fact that Sarah and Bristol Palin are not attempting to cover up what most of America classifies as a mistake with the easy way out (i.e., abortion) speaks to their character.  Democrats are in favor of a don’t-ask-don’t-tell-(your parents) policy for abortions performed on 14 year old girls without parental consent.  A great number of barely teen-aged girls whose pregnancies would be exposed to small groups comprised of their family, friends, and communities probably not totalling more than 100 people in each case.  Bristol Palin, whose condition reflects poorly on her mother, is exposing her unwed teen pregnancy to billions of people.  That takes guts.  Like mother, like daughter.  What do you think Hillary would have done with Chelsea?

Second, if anyone is hypocritical, it’s the anonymous arm-chair liberal commentor.  Notice the abject racism and classism expressed when he tries to strengthen his argument by suggesting that Bristol Palin’s pregnancy is more scandalous because Bristol Palin is an upper-middle-class white girl whose mother is a governor.  If it were some poor black girl from the hood, or an illegal chicana, you’d pretty much expect them to get knocked up, right?  That’s what those people do.  And those poor, uneducated minimum wage workers at Arby’s?  They don’t have a liberal arts degree, how can they possibly be expected to control their reproduction?  Funny.  I was forced to take 40 wasted credits of liberal arts to get my engineering degree and I don’t remember any classes listed about how not to get knocked up.

The fact of the matter is that a busted rubber or a missed birth control pill can happen to anyone.  I’d say that fewer than 10% of likely voters over the age of 25 have never had a pregnancy scare (or an unplanned pregnancy for that matter).  Hell, even though my parents were married at the time, I was a mistake.  My mom miscounted.  Good thing she did because my dad was diagnosed with testicular cancer a month after I was conceived.

Comparing Bristol Palin to those underclass simpletons described by the real hypocrit in this story is like apples and oranges.  When Rush Limbaugh harps about family values, he’s not talking about the poor girls whose birth control fails.  He’s talking about the ones who don’t even bother to take birth control, or who actively seek pregnancy during their teenage years because the welfare checks get bigger.  He’s talking about the ones who don’t use birth control because they can always just have the embryo vacuumed out at Planned Parenthood.  Are you skeptical that these people exist?  Just search YouTube for old Maury Povich clips.

Not to mention, of course, that Bristol Palin both knows who the father of her baby is, was in a relationship with him before and presently, and is now engaged.  She’s young, and I don’t have high hopes that their relationship will last, but Sarah Palin married her high school sweetheart (as millions of other Americans do) and is still happily married to him, so there’s hope.  In the old days, we called this a “shotgun wedding” (the groom was marched to the altar by the bride’s father at shotgun-point).  Traditional family values did have provisions for this kind of thing because people are people.  Young people wanted to (and did) have sex before they were married in 1708, 1808, 1908, and 2008.  In the good old days, before democrats decided that girls (and mothers) needed men like fish need bicycles, there was this thing called responsibility where if a man knocks a woman up, he must look after her and the baby.  There were these other things called consequences that people actually respected.  If you’re thinking of voting for Barack Obama you may want to look up these terms in the dictionary so you can be prepared for this season’s debates.  Otherwise you might accuse McCain of trying to confuse you with fancy talk and big words.

I’m not going to bother finding the statistics on how many unwed mothers in this country either don’t know, don’t care, or can’t narrow the father of their baby down to a single man.  Go look it up if you’re interested. 

I’m about to equate feminists and democrats here.  As soon as you show me a repulican feminist, I’ll work up a different explanation just for you.

Democrats and their policies said that women don’t need men, mothers don’t need fathers, so they gave men a free pass to pump and dump without really caring about whether the girl gets knocked up.  If all of these unplanned pregnancies resulted in babies, the people of the 1970’s would be scandalized enough to realize that the National Organization of Women and their fish-and-a-bicycle campaign was actually doing more harm than good.  Then along comes Roe v. Wade, conveniently preventing those scandalizing (and visible) babies from derailing the feminist movement.  The consequence of this cultural degredation 20 years later is Victoria.

That is what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are railing against.  And I hope I’ve explained why Sarah and Bristol Palin are not the hypocritical ones.  If anything, it’s the elitist democrat who’s diverse facade is hiding some ugly truths about how the typical “liberal” really feels.

Review of AGD’s Quest for Glory 2 VGA

This isn’t my usual political/philosophical/hate-mongering diatribe today.  Unless you care about Sierra On-line adventure games from the late 80’s to early 1990’s, you can skip this post.

A few weeks ago AGD released its Quest for Glory II - Trial by Fire VGA remake.

I’ve been a huge fan of the Quest for Glory series.  Quest for Glory 3 (back in 1992) was one of the first computer games I played.  Before that, it was all consoles.  QFG1 and 2 were originally 16 bit EGA.  QFG1 was remade in 256 colors (VGA) by the vendor in 1991, but QFG2 never was.  That’s where AGD came in.

I’ve had my eye on this fan project (done with Sierra’s blessing) for at least the last 7 or 8 years.  I just finished playing it a moment ago and I wanted to comment on a few things while it’s fresh.

First – the graphics are not what I would call beautiful, but they are true to the original series, and I think that’s the most important part.  It looks and feels like it could have been made by Sierra Online, so it gets points in that category.  The weakest part, by far, are the character portraits.  Many of them are amateurish and not quite in the right style (Issur, Keapon Laffin, Khaveen).

The music kicks ass.  I’ve been a fan of Tom Lewandowksi’s work for a long time, and one of the best things to come from this release is his digital soundtrack finally being available from his website.  I love track 15.  It’s a new, original track for casing one of the houses as a thief.

The gameplay feels like a Sierra original and is mostly true to form.  The alleys were redone, and although they look better, I can’t say they were any easier to navigate.  The major change was in the combat system though – it’s much more complicated than any of the other VGA titles, and I actually found it difficult (QFG games are typically very easy).  Another thing which is both good and bad is the fact that the difficulty slider actually does something.  If you put the “skill” bar all the way up, most of the game is virtually impossible.  Even with 200’s in all combat skills, I couldn’t even hit Khaveen.  No matter what I did, he parried me.  This was irritating because I had to quit and restart, since saves/loads aren’t allowed in combat.

In fact, this is one of my biggest complaints – too much of the remake is unnecessarily hard.  Most of the people who are going to be playing this game are not playing it to be challenged in an arcade-like fashion – we were kids, or teenagers, when we played the first one.  That makes us all at least in our twenties but probably older.  For the majority of the people interested in this project, we’ve already played through the EGA version at least once.  Hard combat is not high on our list of turn ons.  In fact, it really pissed me off.  I am used t putting the slider all the way up on QFG games because they are so ridiculously easy anyway, even on hardest, that I instinctively put it on hard and I couldn’t even beat the easiest monster in the desert, even after importing a perfect 100-stat character from QFG1.

Once I got past these facts and got the hang of the combat system, it was actually quite fun and well-done.  I could tolerate the irritation of having to play with the slider on a fight-per-fight basis since it was impossible to predict how my character’s stats would line up with the encounter (for example, I had straight 200’s against the earth elemental, and even though I flawlessly dodged his attacks, he still destroyed me multiple times.  I had to use 2 healing pills).  The combat is rather slow and choppy, but that actually adds to the nostalgia value since these games originally ran on 80×286 processors.

The engine itself was a little annoying.  I’m running Vista and I had to screw around with the video options under settings before I could get a resolution that was useful (640×480 didn’t work on my hardware).  I also had to hide my task bar since it had the tendency of flickering through into the game window.  If you switch tasks and switch back in, dialog doesn’t work anymore – the text comes up and disappears before you read it.  I am a software developer by day, so I have a high tolerance for bugs (and high aptitude for working around them), so this didn’t bother me too much.  Given what they accomplished a few minor hardware/environment issues shouldn’t be held against them.  When AGD started this project, Windows XP hadn’t been released yet, so the fact that it runs on Vista at all is impressive.

I only ran into one crash, and that was during the Fire Elemental issue.  If you use the mouse to click your character through the alley way (instead of using the arrow keys to walk him through the door), the game has a tendency to cause your avatar to walk around with the incense forever (instead of stopping and being prompted that “you have successfully lured the fire elemental into the alley” message).  I also noticed this happens if you screw up the first time, where you use your incense but don’t capture him before the time runs out.  If you fail once, each subsequent attempt to lure with incense will cause this behavior.  During one such experience, the game crashed.  This caused me some frustration, but not much.

A word of caution: during any time-sensitive sequence, like the fire elemental, or Ad Avis at the end, set the game speed to super slow.  The animation speeds and the event clocks are not in sync (this is also a problem for the original QFG series by Sierra too) and I found that reducing the game speed doesn’t solve the problem but it still gives you enough time to finish the puzzle.

The vast majority of the game behaves exactly like you would expect it to, in keeping with the original.  In some situations, simple skill checks were replaced by minigames.  The acrobat tight rope, for example, now requires a balancing interface similiar to the balancing beams in QFG3: Wages of War.  The only problem was that for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out whether to lean left or right.  The unbalanced animation looked exactly the same in either case – I just had to randomly guess, and I was always wrong.  Even with an agility skill of 200 (max), I couldn’t walk the rope with the skill slider all the way low.  This frustrated me.  Also, the EOF thing was kind of annoying – having to duck the swords, having to use special combat moves like “lock swords” (whatever that meant – I never got it to work - I just slid the skill slider to low and slashed him to death).  It was more irritating than fun.

They greatly improved the Raseir experience.  In the EGA version, arriving in Raseir was one of the low points in the game because, since it’s day linear, you have to wait until day 28 for anything to happen.  You’re stuck killing 2 days in a place where there’s nothing to do, the game won’t let you rest, and you can’t “fast forward” at the inn.  The only solution in the EGA version is to use cheat codes to set the day/time, or bang your head against the keyboard for a while.  I didn’t notice this at all in the QFG2VGA version.  It seemed like Ferrari was ready for me as soon as I was.  Once you witness the Ugarte event and help Zayasha, it’s sunset.

The changes to the skill system were, from a game dev perspective, the right choice.  Earning perfect 200’s was much harder in VGA remake than the EGA version, which is kind of a good thing (and kind of not, depending on how you’re playing it - I’ve played QFG dozens of times, but I’m also a powergamer and must max my stats or I don’t feel like I’ve completed the game, so this equated to wasted time for me).  Even after you accept the slow rate of skill increase, the stats are not consistent.  For example:

In QFG1 VGA, Luck is almost always the first stat to hit 100.  Raises in any stat seem to have a chance to also raise luck by a point.  In QFG2VGA, I couldn’t max luck even after virtually everything else was maxed.  My luck hovered around 170.

It is impossible to increase communication skill to 200.  I spent an enormous amount of time greeting, saying farewell, bargaining, etc. and I couldn’t raise communication past 130.  I know this stat gets eliminated later in the series but it is still in place in QFG3 and 4, and it does affect gameplay in 2 (minimally).

I couldn’t find any places to learn climbing or throwing.  I could climb my magic rope, but apparently magic ropes expire.  I never had pause to use my rope enough in the EGA version to know if this is true to the original, but for 100 dinars (a huge ticket item for the thief/anyone with climbing), it shouldn’t wear out after 50 skill points of use.

Weapon skill/dodge/parry were annoying as sin to level.  I had to sit in Uhura’s room popping vigor pills for over an hour to get from 150 to 200 in those two stats.  Very boring.

I couldn’t max throwing.  I picked up over 1000 rocks and couldn’t move throwing from 190 to 200.  Throwing daggers did not seem to help either.

These are all somewhat annoying, but what really got me - and still gets me – is that somehow I managed to not become a paladin.

I have played QFG2 dozens of times.  I know exactly what can and cannot be done to become a paladin, and even though I solved the puzzles the exact same way I usually do, it didn’t happen for me.

I chalk this up to two possible reasons.  First, I made the thief sign to Dinarzad.  I also made the mistake of visiting her at night later.  She asked me if I wanted a job.  I said no.  The other possible transgression was stealing the bellows.  In the EGA version, stealing the bellows does not qualify as stealing for the purposes of paladin qualification.  There is a specific reason for this.  A bug in the EGA version (which suprisingly was also ported to the VGA version) causes you to be unable to acquire the bellows from Issur if you happen to beat him in arm wrestling before the Air elemental shows up in the Palace Plaza.  Normally, he bets them against 20 dinars, you win, and you get them.  But if you beat him in a straight wager, he refuses to arm wrestle you any more, so when you need the bellows, he won’t give them to you.  Your only recourse is theft.

Needless to say I was pretty pissed when Rakeesh didn’t hook a brother up, but it’s OK because QFG3 lets you turn any character into anything (including a Paladin that you didn’t earn) when you start it, so no big deal.

Overall, the project was really quite impressive.  I can appreciate the sheer amount of will required to reproduce a commercial work that took a huge team many months to do when working full time.

However….

Would I ever play QFG2VGA in place of the EGA original when I burn through the whole series?

The answer unfortunately is no.  I like the graphics, but honestly, there were enough annoyances to make it less enjoyable than the original.  Glitches aside, the difficult combat (in which some fights are simply impossible) and the weird stat raising is enough to keep me on the EGA.  Plus, even though the AGD team did an incredible job staying true to the original and truly remaking the game, it felt like I was drinking New Coke instead of the original.  Almost like I was cheating on Sierra, but more importantly, cheating on my own memories of the series.

Bottom line: awesome remake, really impressive work, high quality, innovative.  Too innovative for its own good in areas that are highly important to me.  I’ll stick with the EGA.

How to Succeed in Business (and in life)

No matter what industry, if you follow these simple rules, you will be successful.

• When searching for a motive behind a behavior, always look for the most selfish motive possible.  You will be correct almost all of the time.
• Understand the selfish drives of other people.  Figure out what they want.  It is usually either money, power, or respect, or a combination of those to varying degrees.
• Understand your own drives.  Decide what you want (money, power, respect, the path of least resistance, etc.)  Always keep your longterm goal in your mind when you take action.
• Figure out what you want to get out of each and every relationship.  For example, from a coworker, you may want to learn from him, you may want to make him one of your loyal minions, or you may want to drive him to leave the company.  From a boss, you might want a raise, you might want more responsibiity, or you might want to be left alone.
• Figure out what each relationship wants from you.  Decide how much of that you are willing to give, based on how it will affect getting what you want from them.
• Remember that people, and their motives, are almost always transparent.  If it seems like it’s too obvious, it isn’t.
• When your evaluation of a person turns out to be wrong, for example if they do something you aren’t expecting, be very careful around these people.  These people are typically the ones in charge, and if they aren’t, they are likely to be in charge soon.
• Hide your motivations from other people.  Do not give them time to predict your moves.  If they don’t know what you want, they can’t guess how you’ll get it.  For example, if you really want to be in charge, project the illusion that you are falling in line like a good soldier (bosses call this “being a team player”).
• Be extremely careful about what you put in writing.  E-mail should be a last resort.  Once you put something in writing, you can be quoted, and your word becomes binding.  This is especially true of criticism.  Any criticism, no matter how subtle, should only be used in e-mail when you’re responding to the same or when you’re drawing a line in the sand.
• If someone e-mails you, respond verbally.  If someone approaches you verbally, respond in e-mail.
• Don’t say anything that, if quoted, would reflect poorly on you.  Avoid committing to anything, even verbally.  You now control the paper trail.
• Be aware of who is taking the minutes in a meeting.  If it is an enemy, you can expect that any positive contribution you make to the meeting will either be understated, omitted, or misquoted, and anything that might reflect negatively on you will be at least a paragraph long and remembered perfectly, or biased against you.
• Volunteer to take the minutes at a meeting.  You now control what the record shows was and was not said.  This lets you paint yourself in the most positive light possible.
• Even if you are not keeping official minutes, take your own copy and make sure the minute-taker sees you doing this.  You could be writing a shopping list.  As long as they think you’re taking minutes too, they will be truthful and won’t invent commitments that were never discussed at a meeting.
• Pick your battles.  Do not get roped into a discussion about something if you are not prepared.  It is always acceptable to say, “can we talk about this at [insert some later time]“?  People, especially the ones who fill useless managerial positions, love to waylay people with issues their targets aren’t familiar with so they can control the conversation and appear to be the competent ones.
• Revenge is only served cold.
• Control your emotions.  If you begin to feel emotional (anger, frustration, stubborness), make up an excuse to excuse yourself.  The bathroom works 100% of the time.  Then invent another excuse to delay resumption of the discussion until later.
• Be very careful around people who you know to be worthless, especially if they have direct reports.  Managers are virtually always paid better than employee direct reports.  If the company is springing for a manager who is not productive, chances are they have some ace up their sleeve.  People do not keep high-paying jobs unless they are competent, they have dirt, or they are ruthless.  Either way, better to steer clear of them (unless you want their job).
• If you want to survive, always make your boss look good.  If you want to advance, always make yourself look good.
• Always take the most visible, high-profile assignments.  If an assignment involves externals (customers, employees from another office, etc), it is preferable to one that does not.

There are some others, but I’ll go into more detail since they deserve full posts.

“Bisexual” Girls

When I was in highschool, I knew several girls who purported to be bisexual.  They went as far as talking about it, watching girl/girl porn, french kissed each other, and even once in a while got in on some mouth-to-nipple action.  But that’s as far as it ever went.  Although many heterosexuals don’t consider oral sex to be “sex” when it comes to things like virginity, with two girls there really isn’t much else if you aren’t old enough to buy sex toys (internet shopping + parents willing to give credit cards and not look at bills were not as prevalent in those days).  So as far as I know, these girls never actually had sex with each other.  They never went down on each other, so I always took the claim with a grain of salt.

Ten years later, every single one of them is in a committed heterosexual relationship and not a single one of them has ever admitted to actually hooking up with another girl.  And these are the kind of girls who would have told me if they had.  They couldn’t shut up about it when they were in high school; if they had ever sealed the deal, would they keep silent?

These days, with the Facebooks and online dating sites, it appears to be trendy for girls, most of whom are in relationships with men, to list themselves as “bisexual” or interested in both men and women.

My fiancee told me stories of girls she knew in college who claimed to be bisexual, and by her reckoning it was entirely to rouse the interests of some nerd who bargained her enormous ass on the possibility of a 3 way with a human-sized girl.  Said 3-way has never, and in all likelihood will never happen.

When I was in college I knew a girl who told me that during her university orientation, two girls from different states who were not likely to see each other ever again despite enrolling in the same (large) university decided to put on a show for all the other kids at orientation and 69 on the lounge floor.

Her reaction was: what whores.

My reaction is: what whores.

Don’t get me wrong, I like girl on girl as much as the next heterosexual man, but the preponderence of fake bisexual girls is disheartening.

What it amounts to is fraud.  If a heterosexual male is lured to display an inordinately high level of interest in a self-purported “bisexual” female where he otherwise wouldn’t were she a plain vanilla heterosexual girl, any future those two would ever have is based on a giant lie.  She’s basically selling him a lemon – herself – when she never actually acts in any way consistent with the bisexuality the man was initially attracted to.

If a heterosexual girl labels herself bisexual to get male attention, she is deceiving him from the start and it means she is likely to deceive him in any number of ways (e.g., “it’s your baby, honey, I promise!”).  Note to male readers: don’t date these girls.

Some of the fake bisexual girls I knew in high school, I believe, genuinely do have some bisexual leanings – chiefly in the realm of vivid, orgasm-guaranteeing orgasms – but that doesn’t count.  Every human being is capable of having sexual fantasies that fall well outside the realm of something that they would ever actually do if given the chance in real life, much less actively pursue said fantasy.  Fantasies about girls once in a while does not a bisexual make.

If I were ever to begin a relationship with a girl who claimed to be bisexual, I would demand that she put up or shut up within 1 month of the beginning of our relationship.  I would demand that she provide me a photoshop-proof photograph of her going down on another girl, or admit that she’s full of shit about being bisexual and never to mention it ever again.  For some guys, failure to provide said proof would be a deal breaker, but fortunately I never treated a girl’s purported bisexuality as an added draw in the first place.  I suspected they were lying through their teeth then, and a decade or so later, I know it definitively.

Remember, men.  90% of the girls who say they are bisexual – especially on the internet – are lying to get your attention.  Don’t fall for it.

P.S. if a “bisexual” girl you’re dating actually passes this shit test and provides the photoshop-proof photo, blur her eyes out and post a link to the picture as a comment.  It is better to give.