Remember Egypt?

Things aren't going very well in Egypt right now (link to Socialist Worker article):  

But the Sunday maneuver by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was an even bolder grab for power. "With the new Constitutional Declaration issued by SCAF tonight, Egypt has completed its full transition into a military dictatorship," human rights activist Hossam Bahgat wrote on Twitter.

First, despite half the population voting for revolutionary candidates, in the presidential election they ended up with a choice between a Muslim Brotherhood (Islamist/capitalist hack) and a Junta official.

Now the Supreme Court is shredding the rights of the people it ostensibly was created to protect.  (kinda sounds familiar...)

Find out if any solidarity rallies are taking place near you and show up!  This is important especially if you live in a larger city with an Egyptian consulate- protests alone won't help anything, but it is important to do whatever we can to keep this in the popular consciousness here in the United States, especially since it is our tax and corporate money that feeds the Egyptian military and without US pressure for change nothing good will come from the situation over there.

(minor edits for formatting)

WATCH IT NOW!!!! (assuming you like Starcraft...)

If you enjoy Starcraft 2 pro-gaming you need to go watch this video.

Don't read any of the comments!  Just trust me that around the half-way point things get amazing.  (update: Specifically, 21 minutes into the video if you're impatient.)

If you aren't a Starcraft 2 fan, well- uh, not much to say at the moment.

Random Review: "Relapse" by Ministry

meh.  Ministry's new album isn't as shamefully bad as a lot of people were expecting, but it isn't particularly great either.

Except for Double Tap.  That song is amazing- it perfectly captures the strange mix of joy, frustration, and gruesome catharsis so many people felt about the assassination of Osama Bin Laden.

*sigh* - The Democrats drop another easy victory.

Governor Scott Walker has won against his Democrat challenger in the recall election here in Wisconsin.

Forget the Democrats- the real losers here are everyone who want an escape from the suffocating Two Party System here in the US.  The mass demonstrations that kicked off because of the Republican government's assault on worker's rights were not about getting Democrats elected.  The fact is that the Democrats and their enablers in the labor movement successfully co-opted the the protests and converted them into a grand electioneering campaign, and this would be to the detriment of everyone even if Barret had won.

Because we're essentially only allowed one candidate from each of the two major political parties in most elections here in the US, both sides abuse the "well the other side is worse!" argument.  In this instance it was nauseating watching the whole spectacle; the fact that Barret is a hack who used many the worst parts of the Republican legislation to attack organized labor in Milwaukee is just adding insult to injury.

So yes, as always I would have preferred for the Democrat to beat the Republican.  I'm still not going to lose any sleep over this particular loss- there is hard work to be done outside and away from the Democrats, and none of it would be any easier because of the Democratic Party, even though it will be much more difficult with the Republicans instead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/06/wisconsin-governor-scott-walker-survives-recall

Random Review - In Progress: Dust 514 (NDA Compliant!)

So I'm in the Dust 514 beta, and the non-disclosure agreement is pretty draconian for a semi-public beta.

Nonetheless!  I have a few things I want to record as I slog my way through this thing.  Here is the NDA; I've read the confidentiality agreement and an confident that nothing here violates if.  If anyone wants me to take this post down just let me know.

Let's start with some background.  Dust 514 is the "ground side" compliment to the zealously-love-it-or-rabidly-hate-it EVE Online.  EVE is an a "massively multiplayer" game contained entirely within a single persistent universe where hundreds of thousands of players (though there are usually only 20-40 thousand on at a time) engage in pretty much anything you can imagine, from working the player-driven markets for a quick (and fake, this isn't Diablo 3 with its insane "real world money" mechanics) buck or fighting in 1000+ person battles for control of large sections of space.

It's kind of hard to explain, but I love it.

All of the action in EVE Online takes place flying in spaceships for the most part (you spend an unfortunate amount of time staring at menus in space stations though).  Dust 514 is an attempt to add planet-side warfare to the macro-strategic elements of EVE.  While EVE is a PC/MAC exclusive game, Dust 514 is only on PS3.  There is no space combat in Dust, instead you get a FPS in the vein of the Halo/CoD/Battlefield series.  Right now there isn't any real connection to EVE other than thematically, so I can't really comment on how well it integrates into EVE's radically different style of gameplay, but that will change as the beta test progresses.

Impressions after about an hour of gameplay, including dead-time sifting through menus:

• I play on a standard-definition television, and CCP (the creators of EVE and Dust) unfortunately hasn't taken into account the effect of HD-text on a proletarian's TV.  I literally can't read half of the things written on the screen.  This isn't a unique problem to Dust, but there are plenty of contemporary games that don't have this problem and I hope CCP addresses it soon.
• The visuals in general seem low-resolution and ugly.  The battlefields are rather large, but the lack of visual fidelity is alarming.
• It is way too frustrating to tell the difference between allies and enemies.  The low-quality visuals and the lack of easy identifiers means you often can't pick out who is who in a firefight, and will inevitably waste some ammo on team mates.
• Overall it is still fun, and character customization does feel a lot like spaceship 'fitting' in EVE.

An unelected and unaccountable official who I'd vote for!

America, Fuck Yeah! [link to article by Glenn Greenwald]

copy/pasted:

A federal district judge today, the newly-appointed Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York, issued an amazing ruling: one which preliminarily enjoins enforcement of the highly controversial indefinite provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last December. This afternoon’s ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs — including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Birgitta Jonsdottir — alleging that the NDAA violates ”both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Yes Virginia, the Public Sector is the problem. [micro-updated]

Whenever the so-called Great Recession* is discussed the conversation has a tendency to become binary in nature.  If you read the comment threads on a site, such as Matt Taibbi's excellent blog, the discussion becomes this-

Person A: "The financial industry is to blame."
Person B: "No, the Government is to blame."
Sometimes Person C will butt-in (and rudely turn the discussion into a ternary one) to pin the tail on the lazy donkey, "No, the Idle Masses are to blame!"

As with most any over-generalized caricature there is a modicum of truth to all three, though in this case it is not in equal amounts.

The main problem is that A and B both fail to realize that the government and financial industry are indistinguishable at this point.

There are small pieces of the various governments, such as the public sector unions and populist politicians, who don't view their role as shoveling wealth upon the elite economic interests.  Those pieces are being marginalized and excised with increasing zeal every day by the real powers in government.

In order to understand the role of government in this mess you have to start with the hack politicians.  They are funneled through an electoral apparatus such as the US's Two Party System which requires them to cozy up to the economic elites in order to have a chance of being elected, though typically the politician is one of those elites to begin with.  Once in office the politicians appoint unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, drawn from the corporate and financial sectors, and it is those bureaucrats who do all of the actual work of governing!


To blame only the public or the private sector, to only blame one or the other, is to miss entirely half of the problem!  They are not competing interests, but rather are one unified power structure which thrives on confusing and dividing the general population.  Just look at how the American Republicans blame the government that they inhabit and the Democrats offer tepid chastisement of everyone while both the Rs and Ds execute political programs that are merely different interpretations of the same economic strategy.  Incidentally, while the differences between different main-stream political parties are very important, in the long run the end results are nearly indistinguishable!

And the "idle masses"?  They, including the non-idle masses, have yet to organize themselves and smash apart the systems of financial, corporate, and government exploitation.

Unfortunately I'll need some more coffee before I'm ready for that.

* I'm sure that the citizens of the Southern Cone were happy to be informed by Serious Economists that the '70s and '80s weren't a time of great economic suffering like they remembered.

[Updated because I forgot a paragraph and also can't spell.  Sorry.]