Rove: Trying to be a game-changer

In this 5/16/06 op-ed piece in the Washington Post, writer E.J. Dionne Jr. says you can tell by the way Rove lies that BushCo is running scared. Not in so many words. But the writer prints a few of Rove's choice Republican lies and handily and in plain language rips the lies to shreds.

The title of the piece is Rove vs. Reality. More like BushCo vs. reality. Rumsfeld teetering on the brink, Rove likely to get charged in the Plame leak, DeLay over the brink, the Ambramoff corruption scandal on and on.

What next?

Next it's going to be envirionmental crimes- see the story re: the closing of EPA libraries here in the Washington Post.

Meanwhile here in Tucson the biggest environmental crime to hit the news is the reclassification of the Pygmy Owl as not endangered, so that thousands upon thousands of acres of unspoiled Sonoran Desert can now be bladed and graded and replaced with shitty cookie-cutter houses. There are only 12 of these owls left in the Tucson area. Hopefully the lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Defenders of Wildlife will succeed. Of course there's no mention of protecting this desert for what it is. Details are here in the Star.

Following orders like we always do

Link to a machinima where the characters in a game start wondering what the hell they are doing there. "Why are we doing this?"

Yes I read about it on Boing Boing. As I try to always tell people, if you're not reading Boing Boing, then you should be.

Machinima I first understood when I attended a lecture by a Stanford librarian who was cataloging and constructing an online archive of such things as well as studying the sociological side of in-game communities. People manipulate computer games to turn the audio/visual output into a story, that's what machinima is. The Wikipedia article in the link above is really quite good.

Boing Boing today also had another machinima post. Here is the link.

And here is a link to a machinima "talk show" done from within a game called Halo.

Also see machinima.com for more.

More on Fantasy Island

I rode out there yesterday and wanted to ruminate a bit on the situation and the actuality of this wonderful trail system.

From my house you ride a couple miles south and then turn east, where the urban bike trails take you, in a most civilized fashion, in a zig-zagging course along the local airbase's northern fence. Along the way you pass what is known as the boneyard, which is where thousands and thousands of old planes are stored. You'll see f-14's, f-111's, b-1 bombers, f-4 phantoms, and many other types of planes sitting mothballed in the desert. The last 3 miles of the approach to the bike trails of Fantasy Island is dirt, and sets you down right at the trailhead. It's an excellent warm-up ride, and although the trails at Fantasy Island are not that technical, the first part of the course is full of steep little washes that're more enjoyable when you're all warmed up.

All Fantasy Island's optional loops branch out to the right as you follow the inner, 6-mile Lone Cactus loop. Yesterday I wanted to ride the "Bunny Trail," which is on the land that will most likely be developed as part of the compromise for not blading and grading the whole 3 square mile plot. The Bunny Trail is kind of flat and twisty, through land grazed by cattle that looks like something from an old west movie. It's a good place to gear up and haul ass and find out why you put those good tires on your bike. The rest of the loops are rockier, and when the weather is dry rocks accumulate at the bottoms of the some the steep wash-crossings and make a nice challenge as you try to maintian momentum in order to get up the other side. The steepest hills are the end of the ride, so I recommend stashing a beer in your hydration pack and taking a breather at the picnic table at the trailhead.

Always a wonderful ride no matter which loops you take and especially if you ride them all.

Fantasy Island is described nicely in this piece in Dirt Rag by local rider and trails-access advocate Mark Flint.

I went out there with a camera on a ride once but the poor thing never worked after that, so I was a little skeptical about bringing my digital on the ride with me yesterday, much as I'd like to post a few pics of the desert and the trails. Most of the images you find in a Google search are kind of rider/jock oriented- yuck.

The debate over national ID

In this Cnet article Dean McCullagh presents a well rounded look at the threat to civil liberties represented by what is being called The Real ID Act. The article is full of links providing background on the subject, but focuses on the issue by describing New Hampshire's efforet to outlaw National ID. What National ID would boil down to would be a card that everyone would probably be required to carry which has all your personal data on it, and which card can be read via radio at any time. In other words, privacy and the concept of personal information would be pretty much out the window. I have to agree with the article's thesis that most people won't tolerate something like this and the outcry against it will be huge.

My own point here is that we all need to make it clear to our government that we won't tolerate the trashing the of the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I did find the article via a post in the excellent Boing Boing.

Bush goes to Stanford

"for every pig there will be a Saturday"

So they hate Bush at Stanford. He can't really go anywhere these days without people turning out in droves to protest. The Stanford Daily gives a lot of detail in this article- a lot of detail.

“I think there’s going to be a new wave of student activism around the country,” [Steve Westly, CA demo guv. candidate] said. “I’m glad to see some of that’s happening at Stanford. I found the protest peaceful and well-organized.”

“I thought Stanford was really a bubble, but seeing all the people that are out here has shown me that people really are concerned,” [Alejandra Aponte] said. “I’m Latina; I’m from Guatemala. Right now President Bush is doing some very interesting things in Latin America. We have a phrase ‘For every pig, there will be a Saturday.’ Basically, his game is over.”

Fantasy Island in Tucson

Unidentified dork out at the Tucson Mountains, opposite side of Tucson from Fantasy Island

One of my favorite mountain bike trails is Fantasy Island, about 10 miles from my house, located to the east of Davis Monthan AFB's "bone yard." Fantasy Island is full of cactuses and steep washes and rocks and lizards and old jack rabbits with gray muzzles. There's about 18 miles of trail there. The land was going to be developed, naturally, which around here means they scrape the desert bare- our Sonoran desert, a unique ecosystem, and one of the things us desert rats truly love- and put up ticky tacky houses. Local bikers and other community members fought back, joining up, writing letters, going to meetings, working with the city government and trying to work with the State Land Dept. The latest news, according to this AZ Daily Star article, which looks very encouraging, is that the state legislature has passed a resolution calling for Fantasy Island's preservation. The article quotes a Republican from Tucson, a Tom Paton, as saying it's important for the government to listen to and respresent the people. Way to go Mr. Paton. Right you are. The protest against ruining this huge strech of desert, which I put at about 3 square miles, was apparently quite large.

Republicans mountain bike too, and true Republicans are all for the preservation of nature. In this case a Republican argument can be made that having the Fantasy Island area preserved increases property value all around.

The State's resolution is non-binding, however, and the southern part of the mountain biking area (encompassing the Bunny Trail and the Snake Dance Loop) is supposedly going to be developed anyway, but the City of Tucson is behind the preservation measure, and has been working with Tucsonans on the issue for quite some time. The real snake is the State Land Dept, which has been somewhat secretive. They are the ones to watch out for- to many of us the State Trust Land situation is a slimey one, with a PR face and millions of dollars going somewhere but not where they'd like you to believe.

More about protesting against Republican policy in Tucson

Update, 4/20/06: the fuckin idiot who burned the Mexican Flag was arrested, according to the Star. They just mentioned it in passing and did not say why. Apparently 20 or so people attended a meeting and spoke out against the local police using pepper spray and etc, and that was the subject of the article.

It seems to particularly rile the state's backwards right wing legislators that youth have become interested in speaking out against Republican immigration policy. State Representative Jonathan Patton of Tucson is up in arms over local school district's use of buses to take kids back to school from protests. Patton is also busily working up the hocus-pocus machine against U.S. Representative Raúl Grijalva- one of the few Democrats not afraid to speak out against Bush and Company- for giving a speech to students at Tucson High School about the current immigration legislation and Grijalva's role in it. The speech was after Monday's protests. So a congressman with an Hispanic surname giving a speech to students in his district is enough to get the congressman on our good local Republican Jonathan Patton's shitlist! Wow. I can't think of a better illustration of stupidity and racism and attacking freedom of speech than this. I can't think of a better illustration of current trends in "Nuevo Republicanism" - stamp out debate and opposition, create a fuss like there's something wrong with it, divert attention away from the issue at hand, etc. etc.

The story in the Star I refer to above is here.

The Arizona Daily Wildcat, the University's daily, ran a couple stories about the Monday round of protesting- one about the local side of things and the other about state angle. 100,000 to 200,000 people turned out in Phoenix, by the way, depending on who ya talk to.

One of the stories included an excellent picture of what is apparently a pair of fools or professional troublemakers burning a Mexican flag in the middle of the protest. Just trying to get people pissed off and make everyone else look like fools, give the protest a dangerous, violent, unruly subtext.

According to one of the Wildcat stories the current Republican bill, HR 4437, would "require church and humanitarian aid organizations to check the citizenship of parishioners before they provide any assistance." So if you're a U.S. citizen, or anybody at all, and you go to a church and ask for help, you have to prove your citizenship. There you have current Republican philosophy in a nutshell- no ethics, no presumtion of privacy, no attempt to mind their own business.

But the Republicans in government, as many "real" Republicans will tell you, are actually supposed to represent us the people!! Not xenophobes, people who think everyone has to join their church "or else," or other whackos, but those of us who are a part of civil society, who acknowledge that we all want the same things in life from the government, etc. The protests over immigration seem to say a lot of people's voices are not being properly represented in the current round of Republican domination. One student put it succintly:

"I think that there needs to be a counter voice to the conservative right that has been pretty outspoken," said Brett Lovick, a Latin American studies graduate student. "I think that (conservatives) are a minority, but I think that they have had a much louder voice."