Tidbits from my skimming of the Supreme Court decision relating to Guantanamo detainee trials:

1. The Detainee Treatment Act specifically removes (or tries to remove) judicial review of pending Guantanamo military trials, and limits review of closed trials “exclusively” to the DC Circuit Court — excluding the Supreme Court from jurisdiction in any matter related to the trials.

2. The DC court ruled that violations of the Geneva Conventions can’t be dealt with because they are not enforceable. Contrarily, the Supreme Court ruled that they are, since armed forces regulations require following them.

3. You cannot be put on military trial if you are a POW. If you may be a POW, then you must be treated as a POW until a commission determines that you are not a POW.

4. Even if you are not a POW, “conspiracy” (the vague crime which Hamdan, Osama’s former driver, is charged with) is not a war crime under the Geneva conventions. As such, it must be decided by a court following a civilian-minded format (I’m paraphrasing), not a military tribunal.

5. Justice Thomas believes that you can’t make a Geneva claim about the violations of your trial until your trial has completed.

6. The government (and Justice Thomas) contend that Hamdan is not a POW, but he IS an enemy soldier, and therefore he can be tried for acts he committed. In any case, Thomas and Scalia seem to think the court’s job is to shut up and trust the president.

7. The government’s long-standing line that Geneva doesn’t apply because the enemy is al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda is neither a nation nor a Geneva signatory, doesn’t wash. Firstly, territory is relevant, and the territory of conflict on which Hamdan was captured was that of Afghanistan, a signatory. Further, even if the parties in a conflict are not signatories, those that are signatories are compelled to uphold a minimum set of provisions for those who are not actively fighting (e.g. surrenderers).

For the daring, the 185-page ruling is here.

“It’s All In Your Head FM“, the live sound collage performance by Negativland and based on their Over The Edge radio show (and which R and I saw in Seattle in March) is available on CD.

The show, “It’s All In Your Head FM”, is a two-hour-long stereophonic look at monotheism in all its fundamental forms worldwide, and the all-important role played by the human brain in believing them. Dr. Oslo Norway is the founder of an all-new radio network, and his provocatively-reasoned position of God-less objectivity can actually start arguments. Is monotheism now doing more harm than good? Christianity and Islam are this year’s featured religions as Negativland asks you to contemplate some rather complex ideas about our brains’ beliefs in “documentary collage” form.

News stories on the same day:

China Weighs Fines for Reports on ‘Sudden Events’

Chinese government considers penalizing news outlets for reporting on events before the government gives its approval.

Bush Condemns Report on Bank Records

United States government calls NYT reporting on government privacy invasions “disgraceful”, Senator considers criminal investigation into paper’s acts.

In Japan, in 1992, someone had a great idea…

What would be the best way for easily bored Japanese to learn stodgy old English?

Let’s teach people English by having slender young girls do weird calisthenics to bad pronunciations of the lesson’s phrases!

See them move on YouTube.

If you like online (and maybe not-so-online) treasure hunts revolving around trivia and logic puzzles, give GPS The Game a try.

Though the name suggests a very Geocaching-oriented game, the game seems to currently be a primarily online project. However, players are invited to hide “stashes” (the original term for geocache, a term which has some contention over its ownership) in the real world.

The game website is affiliated with a C-grade independent movie named, appropriately, GPS The Movie (or just GPS). Many of the game’s puzzles will involve the movie or its participants, which, if you’re at all curious about it, you will be sufficiently familiar with through the course of playing the game.

New puzzles seem to be added to the website every day.

A Canadian guy who goes online only by the name Angryman has, in the spirit of so many Internet-enhanced amateur research projects since Strawberry Pop Tart Blow Torch, begun a personal experiment to eat nothing but monkey chow for as long as he can stand, and see what happens.

His stated motives are fairly uninspiring: laziness, complacency, basically not wanting to deal with the onerous tasks of selecting food, cooking food, and cleaning up after cooking and eating food. On the other hand, his promise of “less than $1 a meal” seems at once cheapskatey, yet fundamentally economical.

But one redeeming line of thought he makes is this: Do we, in fact, have any biological need to have the extent of food variety that we have? If our closest animal-kingdom cousins are expected to be fully healthy on a steady diet of pellets, why can’t we?

Food, at least for Americans, is very emotional and psychological. For the average American, the question “what do you want to eat” is answered by the tongue and the brain, and influenced by habits and cravings, instead of being answered by the stomach and the body, influenced by actual dietary needs.

Some infant nutrition experts, such as pediatrician Clara Davis in the 1940s, advise parents to let young children pick their own food, because they are reacting purely on physiological responses. If their body has enough vitamin C but needs protein, for example, they will likely go for the peanut butter but maybe not so much for the orange juice.

R told me once that Europeans have a more pragmatic attitude towards food, where food is seen more as an energy source rather than a form of entertainment. Most animals don’t have a widely varied set of food sources; they may have seasonal preferences, but mainly seek out a small set of food options. As an extreme case, the koala eats nothing but a single type of leaf, and barely even any water. One rumor has it that the military tried developing a perfect food sometime in the mid-1900s, trying to approach full nutrition with minimal waste.

All this puts the human or at least Western attitude towards food into question. What is the purpose of food? Have we added an additional purpose that provides no survival value? Is this a positive or negative purpose, i.e. do the emotional/psychological benefits outweigh the physiological and nutritional detriments?

Well, whether or not it is, monkey chow may not be the answer. Angryman’s results by Day 5 are not promising. As it turns out, the manufacturer of his new dietary intake has made it clear that their product is not intended for humans, though it’s anyone’s guess what the distinction is that makes it it is appropriate for a wide variety of other primates.

It seems that about 99% of home video games out there fall into a handful of what are now fairly uninnovative categories:

1. FPS
2. Sports
3. Racing
4. Platform scroller (this never seems to really go away)
5. RPG (even more so)

Lumping games into these few fairly vertical categories means that there isn’t really a lot of innovation in gaming. The only trends in gaming seem to be across the board: graphics get better, levels get larger, controls get more complicated and nuanced. But these aren’t so much gameplay innovations as they are a form of game developer dick-waving. Game studios are more inclined to release a new game in one of the above categories and announce it with “OMG look at the graphics! We push the GV2199 chip to its absolute limit! You can see the hairs in Tetsuko’s nose wave when he breathes!” Yawn. Game connoiseurs know that graphics don’t enhance gameplay, and frankly rarely do more complicated controls — they just make it more physically demanding to play, rather than mentally demanding, which is what games are supposed to do.

Add to this the number of the above game categories that are often “improved” by adding violence and criminal activity — ranging from vandalism in Tony Hawk, to speeding and road rage in Full Auto, to out-and-out mass murder in the GTA series (which started out a bit innovative, but eventually settled into the FPS camp). To be fair, these trends had their early predecessors — Rampage, Road Blasters, etc; but those predecessors were unique in their time, not part of trends as these themes are today.

With this in mind, I’m here to suggest some games for the home systems that are outside these trends, many of which have become staples in the K-rad household.

1. Dance Dance Revolution series and clones
This has to come first, because it is perhaps the most physically demanding game format you’ll play in the home, and among the most physically demanding you’ll find in the arcades. This one gets a lot of chuckles from the established 25-35 gaming crowd, and the general public, because the music is a little weird, and the games are always populated by giggly teenagers with no rhythm, or else skinny pretty boys who show off by doing three-pad hand tricks every other measure. Let’s not forget every cheap shot in the book, a la “if I wanted to dance to workout music, I’d get a gym membership.” The irony of this crack is that DDR has been adopted among segments of the otherwise frumpy gamer-geek universe (and even some civil fitness bureaus) as a bona fide workout routine.

So maybe secretly, you’d see the benefit of all this, but aren’t really keen on jumping around like an angry whirling rabbit in front of all those bratty kids who are better than you at it (the same reason perhaps you don’t go to a gym, either). Whatever the reason, the good news is that many different iterations of DDR are available for the home, for PS2 and XBOX, soon coming to the XBOX 360, and even available for the PSone, a Mario themed one for the Gamecube, and for the true collector, even a Disney themed Japanese one for the N64. So now, you have no excuse.

2. Katamari Damacy

A lot of you may have heard buzz about this but never actually seen it. And even if you’ve heard how the game is played, you still weren’t impressed. Still… Katamari is widely considered one of the most innovative game ideas to have come along in a very long time, breaking the above categorical dead end, but unfortunately not breaking it enough for the notion to be considered profitable. Still, Katamari 1 did well enough for them to make a Katamari 2.

Long story short, you are the son of a space supergod who has scattered crap throughout the universe. Your job is to roll a big sticky ball throughout the universe to collect all this junk. The more junk you collect (measured in diameter), the better you do. Fun, right? Who wants to be an intergalactic garbage man, Douglas Adams fans notwithstanding? This dismissal misses the point. You start at a very small scale, on the table and floor of a house, picking up coins, toothpicks, batteries, toothbrushes, flowerpots, etc., avoiding dangers like the household cat, and racing against a clock. As you progress through the game, your scale gets larger, until such time as you are rolling over a city, picking up cars and houses and maybe even people and livestock. (No one seems to get hurt, just stuck.)

Bottom line is, as long as you aren’t terribly motion-sick, this is a fun game. There are seemingly infinite number of identified 3-d objects in this game. The game is littered not only with esoteric junk, but also with of a sort of lightly aloof-absurdism that not only is universal, but should be well received by any member of the domestic gaming culture that is, like so many are, a fan of British comedy (though the game is decidedly not British). Throw in the one-on-one games where you can roll against (and even up) your opponent, and you’ll never have so much fun cleaning anything up.

3. Karaoke Revolution

The name may be a bit of a rip off, but the game is not. The game has more to do with American Idol than with dancing, though the newer release, Karaoke Revolution Party, is dancepad compatible and can optionall throw in some footwork with your singing. In case you hadn’t guessed, KR is a game that plays backing music, and rolls the words across the screen, with which you may sing along. Far from being a passive party gimmick, KR goes one significant step beyond what the suitcase karaoke DJs offer at the local happy hour bar. KR not only gives you the words, but even more importantly, the notes of the song, and scores you on how well you match them. Like Randy and Paula, KR won’t let any “pitchiness” slide; if you don’t meet the note reasonably well, you don’t get points. It behooves you to actually sing well if you want to do well in the game. And the songs range from the jukebox-wailing classics (one release includes That’s Amore) to some particularly challenging feats of vocal versatility (such as Mariah or Bowie). Where the drunken nightclub crowd will sing along with your wailing, KR will actually let you know just how good (or bad) you are. And aside from the dance steps option (which adds a significant difficulty to the game, let me tell you), the Party version (for PS2) also throws in EyeToy candy for cute stage-show video effects. (It’s also worth noting, after the comment in the second sentence, that KR will be picked up as the engine behind the next American Idol home console game. The original AI game used button-pushing to rather laughably and unrealistically simulate vocal talent.)

4. FreQuency and Amplitude

FreQuency, and its sequel Amplitude, were made by the same studio as KR, Harmonix; a music-oriented studio that likes to specialize in alternative game interfaces and paradigms. Their Eye-toy game Antigrav is perhaps the most physically integrated game for the PS2, using the camera’s view of your position to control your character on a hoverboard. I mention this because it’s worth noting just how much this studio has contributed to innovative game play and interfaces, though not all their games are mentioned here. Their games routinely get raving critical reviews, though this does not seem to lead to raving commercial success. Their latest venture, Guitar Hero, with a guitar-shaped controller, is already turning heads.

Back to the game at hand, the FreQuency series does use button-pushing for its interface, but to simulate musical note triggering rather than vocal quirks. At any given time, you are controlling the triggering of notes (indicated as they scroll towards you, with timing and measure marks) using three buttons, the sequence of which attempts to follow the musical progression: stable, rising, dropping tone. Get the timing and sequence just right for two measures, and you clear the music for a while — for one intstrument. To keep the music (and score) going, you switch to another audio track to control and clear another instrument, from drums to guitars to vocals and even SFX tracks. The music is catchy, modern, and increasingly complex and difficult. If you’ve ever found yourself tapping along involuntarily to a rocking or frenetic hook, or even air guitar or drums, your fingers should find themselves invigorated by a few good rounds of either of these games.

5. Donkey Konga

Now, don’t laugh. The idea is laughable, but in practice, it’s hand-pounding fun. Though a few of the music selections may not seem like natural conga-accompanied tracks, you have to admit, whomping on a couple of real drums to play a video game sounds like fun. And once you get the hang of it for a little bit, it is. While I might secretly wish for Babalu to be among the included tracks, Oye Como Va is a half-decent replacement. And there’s nothing quite as intellectually amusing as Conga-ing (and clapping) along to Louie Louie or Hungarian Dance No. 5. Like the other games here, DK has done well enough to spawn a 2 and 3.

6. Mario Party

This series stands out a bit. Unlike some of the other games above, which have spawned a number of copy cats, no one but Nintendo seems to have dipped into the party dynamic-board game market. Probably, the Gamecube and N64 being the only systems in their generations to be built from the start with four controller slots available.

Now, granted, perhaps the average gamer doesn’t have three friends handy that all want to play a game together, and those that do tend to bring their laptops or desktops over and have a good old LAN party on an established, hardcore multiplayer (near-universally FPS) game.

For the other crowds, or those looking for more entertaining and good-natured fun, the Mario Party series provides. Now on #7 (1-3 were on N64, 4-7 on NGC), each game provides a selection of unstable game boards full of tricks, pitfalls, switches, gimmicks, and all sorts of ways to get ahead. But it doesn’t stop there; at the end of each full turn around the room, all players get together for a head-to-head challenge of one of many dozens of randomly-selected competitions, where the other half of the getting ahead is done. Win coins, buy stars, play tricks on your opponents, steal, jump ahead, or even find yourself standing aside your opponents facing an evil and unforgiving Bowser. It’s not entirely inherently Mario, any more than any other unlikely Mario-themed game (Mario Golf, Tennis, Kart, etc.) is, except that no one else has really done this style of game besides Nintendo. Like few other games, Mario Party can bring a handful of people together for a truly fun time.

On a lark, I was taking the Naturalization Self Test, an online practice test provided by the department formerly known as INS. I was getting them all correct, until I stumbled on this one:

Obviously, no one in Congress has taken the above test.

http://www.draftgore2008.org/

Best quote from an earlier site for 2004, draftgore.com:

“He won it once. He can win it again.”

PS: Yep, I gave $5. So should you.

The military needs to be unfucked.

Soldiers (and airmen, and seamen, and marines) aren’t really trained to do the right job outside of an out-and-out front-facing combat situation. OK, maybe marines are trained a bit more infiltratively, but still as part of a forward assault.

What arm of the military is trained in policing? In community relations? In humanitarian assistance? In reconstruction?

More to the point, which military branch has the expertise in not shooting children and families? In not raping and exploiting convicts? In not blowing up historic structures? In not letting ancient treasures get stolen under their noses? In finding a single shred of any nuclear, chemical, or biological programs less than ten years old and not letting any such evidence theoretically drive right out of the country?

The military has been trained since… well, forever, in doing little more than blowing shit up and shooting the fuck out of things. And that’s war, right? Destroy defenses and infrastructure to bring about some form of political change. Fine. Okay. If that’s all you want, then don’t pretend that you give a shit about anything else.

The problem is that now we have these grizzled warriors doing things like policing communities, searches, investigations, trying to get services restored, etc. And despite the number of perfectly good engineers among the military ranks whose task it really is to do this, there’s lots of other troops around them whose core skill set is ultimately to break shit, or to support the effective breaking of shit.
So Abu Ghraib and now Haditha (and Bagram, My Lai, No Gun Ri, and frankly, any other similar incident by any other military [in Darfur, Kosovo, Rwanda, Nanking, the Crusades, etc.]) should surprise absolutely no one, except those who are misled to believe that soldiers (etc.) are trained to be honorable and moral, or somehow gain honor and morality through their experience in killing people and blowing shit up. (I suppose in all fairness that these are even odds. You either come back from such experience with a newfound sense of responsibility and respect for life and property… or you come back wanting more people to kill and more shit to blow up. See conquistador.)

Now, real troops do get some limited exposure to softer skills than fucking shit up. Career troops may get some training in such novel things as learning the local language and culture, sensitivity to civilians, etc. But the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have been repeatedly dipping into the pool of reservists, many of whom never really expected to be shipped off anywhere except maybe once when things are really bad. And some reservists have been over multiple times. So the question is, if career troops get community-facing soft skill training as an afterthought, what sort of training do reservists get on their one weekend a month? Answer: Reservists go back one weekend (2 days) each month (30 days) to make sure they still know how to shoot things, blow shit up, or assist in blowing shit up, in case they are ever sent to an entrenched guerilla war where they may have to do any of it. Aside from specialties (policing, building bridges, flying chinooks, that sort of thing), that’s the main thing.

What sucks even more is that reservists only get called in when things are really bad. They’re the least trained of any troops, yet they’re brought in only when help is badly needed. One might argue that reservists ought to be called in when things aren’t really bad; say, to take the load off the regular troops who are going to have to bear the brunt of what’s coming, or so they can be redeployed somewhere where things are bad.

Things are messy in war, apologists say. Well, maybe things are a lot more messy in a messy war, that is barely even a war, and isn’t even officialy so. I suppose the more tenuous a war is, the more messy it will be. And the US government and military certainly have made it as messy as possible, and it will just be a big mess to clean up (or not clean up) for a long time. One can only hope that someone will figure out that you don’t send in a demolition team to do a custodial job.