paoulkaye-blog

[paoulkaye-blog]

The Boomers Bust.

                Whatever happened to the dreams of the greatest generation? Those brave men who went to war across an ocean in places like France, Britain, and Germany? Men who time and again have it said of them that they had a job to do and they did it? A generation that gave rise to our nation’s very self-image of the protective leader of the free world?

                The men (and women that were allowed to) who fought in World War II were the last of a breed that was unaware it was dying. Before getting into the war spurned the American economy to new heights, we were going through the Great Depression. This was after the Roaring Twenties, so it wasn’t like they were all born raised in the hard times, but when the time came for them to stand with our allies across the sea, they did so. They kicked Hitler and his entire gang out of France and drove hard to meet with the Russians in Berlin. They fought against the fanatical Japanese and drove them back to their homeland, and fought until the world’s most powerful weapon could be dropped to cow the enemy into submission.

                Of course, they did so with a healthy (unhealthy?) dose of self-aggrandizing propaganda. Superman and Captain America both helped our boys in print. Even Donald Duck got in on the action. I’m serious. And when the war was over and they came home triumphant, they changed the face of America for the next five generations and counting.

                Out of this massive and well-deserved celebration came the Baby Boomers. Our parents and grandparents. We love them, of course. But lately, I’ve been feeling… let’s say apprehensive toward this particular generation. The Baby Boomers represent a non-trivial slice of the American populace, they are predominately white, and they were hitting their stride and getting families of their own just about the time that Ronald Reagan stepped into the political limelight.

                Reagan was what he was: A cultural cheerleader. He etched in stone what the American Dream should look like. Wife, kids, a house, white picket fence. The Nuclear Family. Supported by a man who goes to work every day and comes home to his adoring children as their mother cooks food and helps them little ones with their homework, it was an idea so prevalent that popular culture of the time went with this family dynamic as the norm, brooking no deviations. Even the Addams Family, arguably the most subversive of these examples, still adhered to the basic structure of the nuclear family.

                Reagan’s legacy would have a lasting impact on the politics, attitudes, and economics of every day Americans, and not always for the better. In fact, rarely so in the long run. And it is that for a simple reason: The Baby Boomers are (and I love them dearly, don’t forget) still here.

                How many medications do you see advertised on cable TV? More than you can count? Usually aimed at older people? Even on kids’ networks, you say? Baby Boomers. Republican politics today? The ones that appeal to an America 40 years ago? The policies that are so lovingly crafted to take us back to the ‘good old days’? Boomers again. Both for them and by them. Look at C-Span some time, or even just a CNN picture of the House of Representatives. White skin, whiter hair. The average age of a member of Congress 57. A Senator? 61.

                Boil that down: The same age group being pandered to by televised ads for drugs with side effect lists that are almost laughably long are also the people who are nominally running the government of America. By sheer dint of probable statistics, half of our Congressmen and women and Senators probably both take and suffer the side effects of at least half of those medication you see on TV, right? Here’s a fun game: When you see an older congressional house member or Senator on TV, try to guess what medication they’re on. God knows they’ve got to be on something, it’s not like they have to pay for it.

                Digressions aside, the fact remains blatantly obvious that in the absence of term limits and the entrenchment of ideological differences and the polarization of our national conversation, the same damn people have been in power for longer than any previous office holders in history. Hell, Mitch just celebrated the milestone of being the longest serving head honcho in the Senate.

                And I know a lot of this owes to the apathy that was basically bred into both my generation and the one that came after. Mommy and Daddy will take care of it, right? Or Grandma and Grandpa, depending. But here’s the thing, they aren’t. Not nearly well enough at any rate. The Boomers have held the rudder of our country for too. Damn. Long. Long enough that the idea of public service is almost distasteful to my generation and the next because we’ve seen what ugly monsters it seems to turn people into.

                So, term limits. Let’s have ‘em. And a set retirement age. 90 year old Senators? Come on, this is ridiculous. I have issues with the Supreme Court being lifetime appointments as well, but one wildly overaged branch of government at a time, hm?

                And it isn’t ageism, really. I don’t dislike people based on their age. I dislike them based on the fact that spending as long as they have in politics has made them defensive, self-interested, close-minded, money grubbing assholes who see public service as an avenue to keep everything exactly how they like it, voice of the people be damned. And that goes for both parties with a few very rare exceptions.

                And thanks to all of those endlessly advertised medications we mentioned before, they’ve been able to live this long, and are dangerously close to living even longer. This crap has to stop, because every senate hearing and congressional floor vote is looking less like bodies of the people and by the people and for the people and more like the landed gentry desperately trying to hold back Time itself for forcing change and progress upon my country.

                I have a distaste for religions that espouse the virtues of times before us. That want us to adhere to old ways and view new ideas as heretical. That same definition applies to the current version of the people’s branch of government, and I know enough people to know that view is not one shared by the majority of America, moral or not. 2018 is here. The midterms are coming. Let’s forcibly inject some fresh blood into the process before the old blood steals our future for itself. AGAIN.

                Thanks for reading.

#politics #midterms

[paoulkaye-blog]

Contentious Return

So it’s been a while, huh? I mean, least time I opened my mouth to spew my opinion all over your browser, I was talking about the Mooch. That seems like so, so very long ago.

                Quick personal update: My wife gave birth to a daughter in April. Her name is Blake, she is super healthy and sleeps through the night (Thank god!) and she is almost impossibly adorable. The boys are doing well, they came in top of their class in Pre-K and are currently trying to figure out how to ‘Sleep in’. At least, I hope that’s what they’re doing. We’ve been taking slow steps to learn what the kitchen is for and also how to play Battletech. They’re five. Slow steps is what I have.

                But, of course, these happy children of mine are not what has roused me from my silence. I had to take a break from it all, you guys. I did. I kept an eye on the news and maintained a suitable level of nausea about the events of the world, but I held it in. I kept it back. I’m just one more opinionated, left-leaning guy on the internet. Nobody cares what I think, really, because I’m not here to change minds, I’m here to vent.

                But boy, do I need to vent. So, vent I shall.

                I’m not going to address the family separation thing. Doing so endangers both my consistent use of the English language and my keyboard’s state of freedom from my own vomit. It is disgusting, awful, unbelievable and totally in character for Trump and Stephen Miller. Seriously, this was a situation that got me so sick to my stomach I just wanted to curl up into a ball and ignore everything. But, I have kids, so the better solution was to let everyone else be furious about it (and boy, were they! I’ve never seen Seth Meyers that angry.) and move on with my life for the time being.

                Another thing that happened, and this one is relevant, was a Supreme Court ruling that homophobia (or ‘Religious Reasons’) is grounds to refuse someone service. Okay, fine, I guess we’ll just backtrack on that issue a good ten, twenty years. Why the hell not?

                Since we left off with the Mooch and the White House press presence, I guess we’ll pick right back up there with Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Turns out a restaurant in Virginia decided it did not want to serve her or her family on stated grounds of morality. Cue the outrage and triumphant nonsense from both sides.

                So this is a bit to unpack. I do not disagree with the restaurant owner or his actions. Almost every place of business I’ve ever been to has reserved the right to refuse service to anyone. It’s a clause normally used against belligerent assholes so that places that serve customers can remove the unruly element and prevent it from affecting their business. All well and good.

                But here’s the thing, I also get why the conservatives are mad about it. She was asked to leave because of her job. Her job is in the Trump White House, so obviously, this restaurant owner does not agree with her politics and that’s a pretty poor reason to ask someone to leave. Disagree with someone all you want, but until the shouting and screaming starts, there’s no real grounds for ejection there.

                However, and you knew this was coming, it was already established by the highest court in the land (the one currently leaning more conservative than liberal because the Senate refused to fill the vacant seat on the bench for a whole year) that this sort of thing, or at least a version of this sort of thing, is okay. So, where does that leave us?

                The problem with the celebration of the left and the outrage of the right is the same problem it has always been: These two loud-ass house parties don’t care what the other side thinks because what they’re trying to do is win people over in the middle part. The quiet part with day jobs, kids, car payments, and lives to live. And personally, for me, this was a moment that just made me sigh and rub the bridge of my nose and move on.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is going to have to live with the consequences of her professional, highly televised career. It’s no different than Johnny Depp getting raked over the coals for his personal life, or Andy Dick being kicked out of several restaurants because, well, he’s Andy Dick. Put another way, she was judged by the content of her character, not the color of her skin, and asked to leave a place of business that has every right to do as such. Again, I may not agree with the reason myself, but to each their own.

But this was the very definition of a thing that didn’t matter. So she got dinner somewhere else. So she said something about it on Twitter (a platform I cannot use because I cannot limit my characters when I get going). Her treatment by the private sector isn’t really my business, nor is it yours or Wolf Blitzer’s especially when there are more important matters to attend to. Separated children, an American island still struggling to recover from a hurricane, looming trade wars, strained alliances, appeased dictators and the fast approaching midterms are all more important issues than this.

What happens to the President’s mouth piece, regardless of why it happens, is a waste of time. And frankly both parties should shut up and sit down about it because it makes them all look like morons. Really, both parties should shut up and sit down anyway, at this point, because they aren’t actually doing much aside from making noise, but that seems unlikely to happen.

So I’m still here, and yes, I still have an opinion. If you’re still here too, thanks for waiting, and thanks for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

Being 'Most'

                 I didn’t even get a chance to talk about the Mooch. Not while he had the job at least. Sad for me.

                So let’s recap a tad. Trump finally manages to drive Sean Spicer to resign by hiring perhaps the most cliché Italian business shark to ever exist, and then 10 days later after the foul-mouthed Goodfella ran his chief of staff out of town, Trump fires the Mooch.

                To say that Mooch (whose real name I am not even going to bother trying, since it’s all mooch-er… moot now) was the best real life cosplay of the 80’s guy with boneitis from Futurama in the history of mankind would only be parroting the rest of the internet at this point. Double points for lasting just about as long and having almost as disastrous an impact of the credibility of a beleaguered company run by a wizened old crackpot. Now without a communications director (save Captain Tweet-tastic himself), the White House is back in the familiar position of being understaffed and having no direction. We are, as they might say, back to square one.

                So what would drive an irrational, paranoid, ego-centered man-child to fire and irrational, paranoid, ego-centered suck up? Honestly, I think at this point it was just because Mooch was drawing too much attention and Trump didn’t want to compete with him. The pattern, if you could call it that, seems to be that Trump is the ‘big man’ on campus, and anyone who distracts from that fact or makes him feel small gets attacked, belittled, and threatened. Either that, or it was only after Mooch got appointed that Trump discovered Mooch hadn’t been one of his supporters during the campaign. Even money, really, as to which one is the real reason.

                With the collapse of the Republican attempts to deal with Healthcare on their own terms, the increasing pressure of the investigation headed by Mueller, and the astounding-only-in-how-long-it-took rallying of more and more Republicans to a place that can at least be described as ‘Morally Gray’, Trump’s tiny platform of ‘I’m the President, you’re not,’ is rapidly collapsing. Small rebellions like Mayors and States vowing to remain compliant with the tenants of the Paris Accord have combined with ugly realities, like those workers at Carrier losing all of their jobs anyway despite the promises of the President. Bigger untruths and scandals like Russian meetings and the weasel-like self-serving nature of most of the Trump cabinet are getting mixed in with more tacit refusals to follow Tweets like Presidential edicts and the outright rebellions of Senators who would rather serve the public than the party.

                Trump’s presidency, his administration, and really the whole Republican platform is in a burning tailspin, plummeting to Earth in a show of incompetence, divisiveness, and backstabbing self-interest unlike anything I have ever seen before. This is historical, if not in its catastrophic details, then in how it is being viewed and reacted to in real time. It was inevitable that something like this would happen one day, all it would take was a careless finger on a touch screen in today’s modern world for the wrong text or e-mail to get into the hands of someone who could do some real damage to the country with it, but it was never even considered that the careless finger and the damaging person would both be the President.

                And all of this, arguable, traces back to one fundamental truth. Not a truth about politics, or the internet, or the news networks, or even any of the truly important issues like Healthcare, Education, and the global economy. America was not brought to this teetering, dangerous place by its institutions, built in corruption, or even misguided idealism. We aren’t here for any reason but one.

                Donald Trump has to be ‘Most.’

                Most loud. Most offensive. Most accomplished. Most successful. Most important. Most trusted. Most loyal. Most loved. Most intelligent. Most needed. Most remembered. If there is a ‘Most,’ Trump wants to be it. Above all other things, Trump wants to be everything to everyone, and the real problem is that he believes he is already and just needs to be recognized as such, and really its everyone else’s fault for not seeing that he’s the most amazing, interesting, successful, honest, and effective President this country has ever had.

                Yes, there were deep divisions in this country before Donald Trump. Yes, there were spider web cracks in the system through which a select few would pull shady gains in intelligence or money. Yes, Washington was already on the brink of being broken, but for everything to shatter so phenomenally, so totally, all at once? There had to be a catalyst, and that catalyst was Trump.

                I don’t know what happens next. I hope against hope that soon, very soon, Trump will be removed. I can deal with Pence, snake in the grass though he may be, because Pence at least knows how the system is supposed to work. Can anyone imagine, show of hands please, President Pence acting in the same manner as Donald Trump? Even a little? The contrast in statesmanship would be striking, even if the policy goals don’t really change. Pence might be able to present a more coherent message than Trump’s white house when all is said and done, but at the end of the day I don’t think he or any Republican going right now has the chops to sell the current Republican plan for America in the face of the Trump-tastrophe the Republican party is currently trying to survive.

                I turned 31 this past Friday, and in all of the years I have been alive I have never experienced anything like the mismanaged $#!#show currently playing to sold out houses all across the country. I sincerely hope that when all of this is over, and the rhetoric has died down and we can all get back to a semblance of civil discourse that this will be that aberrant moment in history that I’ll look back on when things get crazy and say ‘Yeah, but at least it isn’t like Trump being President again.’ This is not the first administration suffering from flaming-death-spiral syndrome, but it is the loudest one.

                Trump is the ‘Most’ failed American leader in modern times. Maybe he can hang his hat on that one. Thanks for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

A Moment of Truth

                 Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve been wrapped up in a few things, getting my boys ready to go to school and my wife ready to go to school and so on and so forth. Haven’t had the most time to write a lot here, so I’ve been sort of saving it up. It’s been a weird couple of weeks. So… this is all getting pretty crazy, huh?

                I took a break from the political scene for a while. It’s been crazy, too crazy and too fast to really keep up with and do the things I like to do with my life. Semi-disclosed meetings with Russians, Trump’s ever expanding number of people who a now beneath a bus because of him, the rumblings of the political tide turning against the President, the total implosion of the Republican Healthcare Bill, Mueller’s silent work with only flashes of what is transpiring inside, and an inarguable American hero being diagnosed with brain cancer.

                I’ll admit, this last one legitimately saddens me. John McCain has always been a man who spoke his mind, stuck to his guns, and did what he felt was right. I may not have always agreed with him, but damn if I didn’t respect the man. In the 24 hour media parade, McCain is one of the few politicians I could count on to give me an unfiltered look into how he felt about any given issue. I applaud his determination to return to his work despite his diagnosis, and I hope and pray he is around long enough to see this ship get turned back toward a course that makes sense.

                Because it doesn’t, really, right now. Not to me, not to my wife, and certainly not to the rest of the world. The President’s son got a heads up that the papers were going to publish an e-mail chain where he was enthusiastic about meeting with a Russian woman in Trump Tower during the campaign, because she might have damaging information on the Clintons. In what has to be the truest and most beautiful instance of an old axiom of Sun Tzu, nobody interrupted him as he made a cavalcade of mistakes to follow, releasing the e-mails himself and then lying about it three or four or… I don’t even know how many times. “I wanted to collude, but I didn’t get anything,” is the absolutely stupidest defense I have heard in my life.

                And so Temper Tantrum Trump went on the rampage again, pointing tiny fingers at the media, at Democrats, and even now at Jeff Sessions, a man I have never liked but can’t help but feel… not sorry?... but maybe a little empathy for. Sessions was the first major political figure to endorse Trump on his at-the-time farcical Presidential run. And now that Sessions has demonstrated, after a lot of hemming and hawing, an amount of ethical fiber, Trump has declared he never would have hired Sessions had he known. It was a moment where Trump told the truth, and I think we can see why he doesn’t do that very often now, can’t we?

                Worse still for the Republican Party as a whole was the realization that 52 people with the same political letter next to their name might just have different views on how best to help people. The Republican Healthcare Bill can be perfectly summed up in the metaphor of a rejected marriage proposal. I’d like to show you what I mean if you’ll indulge me. Check this out:

                Moderate Republicans: “Hey, Conservative Republicans, you sound cool and look edgy. We should get together!”

                Conservative Republicans: “Okay, baby, you got it!”

                Moderate Republicans: “Man, daddy Obama is such a pill. Making us get socialized medicine and stuff.”

                Conservative Republicans: “Yeah, he sucks. But one day, baby, you and me are gonna get rid of that jive crap and do it our way!”

                Moderate Republicans: “Take me you sexy beast.”

                Time and a few elections later, and…

                Conservative Republicans: “Baby, we’re finally out on our own, and we can do whatever we want now ‘cause we got the power!”

                Moderate Republicans: “Sure we can, baby! What’s the first thing you want to do?”

                Conservative Republicans: Get down on one knee. “Let’s get rid of that socialized medicine like we always talked about!”

                Moderate Republicans: “Oh. Uh…”

                Conservative Republicans: “What’s wrong?”

                Moderate Republicans: “Well… um… it’s just that… well, all my constituents actually really like the socialized medicine. It’s been, like, letting them live longer and not get trapped in debt because of simple medical problems and-“

                Conservative Republicans: “But, but baby! You always said you wanted this!”

                Moderate Republicans: “Well, yeah, I do… just… not the same way you do. I just want to make sure my constituents will still like me and have their coverage, you know?”

                Conservative Republicans: “But new daddy Trump thinks this is a great idea!”

                Moderate Republicans: “That is not a ringing endorsement.”

                Conservative Republicans: “Well… well fine then!” sniff. “Keep your stupid socialized medicine! I don’t need you! I can do this on my own!”

                Reality: “Um… no. No you can’t.”

                Conservative Republicans: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

                And scene. I’m not sure why I couched the Conservative viewpoint in that kind of language, but it felt right. I’ve mentioned before that the Republican Party, as we once knew it, doesn’t exist anymore. There are two factions, the Moderate and Conservative factions, and this was never highlighted more starkly than on the issue of Healthcare. On any issue that divides the Moderate and Conservatives, the Democrats wield the greater amount of power due to their united front, and that simple fact seems to have escaped the White House.

                Trump doesn’t need Democrats to pass his legislation, but the ‘great negotiator’ does need to bring his own party together. The problem with that, aside from the total inability of Trump to negotiate any deal without resorting to money or threats, is that the Republican Party is going through a ‘failed marriage proposal’ break up, and those can get pretty nasty.

                In the middle of this mess is the eternal cloud of Russian influence, and in this respect the gathering storm is Mueller. The silence from the special investigator is both comforting and nerve-wracking. We haven’t heard from him yet because he’s still working. He’s also been working for a while now. What has he found, and what leads has he chased? I don’t know, but I bet you it’ll make a damn fine movie or miniseries in about twenty years. Should be pretty cool to watch.

                For now at least, the roller coaster continues. I’m trying to limit my exposure to this nonsense, if only for my own sanity, but rest assured that I’m still here, and I still have an opinion. Thanks for reading.

#*politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

Get Your Musical On

                 So it’s possible, although I cannot be bothered to check, that I’ve mentioned that I like musicals. In fact, I know I’ve gone on about La La Land before, so I’m almost certain the subject has come up. So there you have it. I like Musicals.

                What’s that? Which ones were my favorite? What would I recommend to you?

                Well, since you never asked…

                Pirates of Penzance: This was and still is my jam. A group of pirates must say goodbye to their apprentice, signed up with them through some truly terrible hearing, and the apprentice swears himself to the goal of their destruction, but must deal with a niggling contract detail about the day of his birth. There are singing pirates, singing maidens, singing police men, and a singing model of a Major General. The best part of this musical, to me, is that everyone is terrible at their jobs: The Pirates are merciful to orphans and gullible enough to believe everyone is an orphan, the maidens are a little mean, very dumb, and basically set dressing aside from their sister Mabel, the policemen are a cowardly, cringing lot, and the Major General knows next to nothing about actually being a General. The bombastic climactic song ‘With Cat-Like Tread’ is the loudest song you could possibly have about sneaking in quietly to commit a crime with no one noticing, and of course there is the incredible patter song to end all patter songs, ‘The Very Model of a Modern Major General.’ It is silly and satirical for the time on a level the modern musical hasn’t even tried to touch, because Penzance did it first, and did it best.

                The Producers: The musical take on The Producers with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick remains my favorite take on the Mel Brooks classic. When down-on-his-luck producer Max Bialystock hears a financial theory from public accountant Leopold Bloom that a man of less than honest nature could make millions by producing a flop rather than a hit show on Broadway, the two go into business together to do just that by putting together all of the wrong elements for a show called ‘Springtime for Hitler.’ Nathan Lane’s portrayal of Max Bialystock is just perfect, and Broderick’s somewhat wooden acting is actually well within character here. Moreover, the supporting cast is a shining example of colorful characters and the music they all get up to is well-constructed and hilarious. You have to look for the cut content on the DVD to see Max’s original intro song ‘The King of Old Broadway,’ but it’s truly worth it, and the actual presentation of Springtime for Hitler is an actual show-stopper.

                Hairspray: John Travolta in a fat suit, married to Christopher Walken. I didn’t see this one in theaters, but that sentence alone lodged it in my brain and insured that one day, yes, I would sit down and watch the hell out of it. A young girl with a heavy frame makes the effort to become a dancer on a local television show during the darkest period of the civil rights and integration movements, and local conventions are broken open not just by her but by the show’s annual contest when whites and blacks end up dancing at the same time to rave reviews. With the social commentary as a backdrop, this musical is a bit more pointed in its message than most, very much saying that equality regardless of race, shape, or gender is coming, and there is nothing you can do about it. It’s a good message, because it’s about acceptance, not imposition, and it has the trappings of a great musical around it to drive it home. Among my favorite songs are ‘Lady’s Choice’, where Zac Effron (yeah, that guy) sings a song that would have been considered almost sexually flirtatious at the time, and the finale where everyone gets a turn to express how they feel about the world moving forward.

                Into The Woods: Sondheim, has there ever been another one like you? This mishmash of fairy tales takes you through Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Jack and the Beanstalk, and then right out the other side with the ‘truth’ about their Happily Ever After. Disney remade this one recently, and it was a good remake with James Cordon and Anna Kendrick, but if you can find the original stage production on DVD with Bernadette Peters. Meryl Streep is fine, but Bernadette Peters as the witch is simply the best thing ever. This is also a rare example in that both versions are good for their own reasons: Chris Pine as a prince in Disney’s version is awesome, especially during the Princely duet of ‘Agony,’ while the entire play takes one a whole other feel in the original with a character cut from Disney’s version; the Narrator. There’s a delightful moment when the characters gang up on the Narrator in the original that made for an excellent allegory for not only making your own bed, but having to lie in it, and that juicy little extra layer of depth made the stage show a superior production to me in the end. The beginning of the story on both counts is a winding, rambling ensemble piece fittingly titled ‘Into The Woods,’ and is Sondheim at his best.

                1776: Any chance I get to watch Benjamin Franklin bask in his own glory is a welcomed one. This one follows the tumultuous formation of the Declaration of Independence amid the backdrop of the Revolutionary War and quite a lot of congressmen in powdered wigs wondering if treason to the British Crown is worth standing up like men. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are the stars here, although the entirety of the Continental Congress circa 1776 gets namedropped. The music is great and catchy, with one of my favorites being Adams railing against the defeatist attitudes of his allies in the dark of the night during ‘Is Anybody There?’, or the joyful trolling of Jefferson as the members of the Declaration Committee decide who will write the damn thing. Most striking in this musical, however, isn’t actually one of the songs, but the long debate held early in the show between John Adams and John Dickenson. While Adams argues the virtue of Independence and displays his anger over Britain’s treatment of the colonies, Dickenson is the mouthpiece of the opposition, who argues for England and the glories of the British Empire of the time period. They both love America, but it isn’t clear who is ‘correct’ in that moment, even though we know that Adams will eventually win out. There is no joyous resolution to the plot, however; the Declaration is signed as a bell tolls, and every man there knows that if the war is lost, they will all hang. It’s a powerful look at the reality of the time period, backed by some great music.

                Beethoven’s Last Night: My final recommendation is probably the one you haven’t heard of, but you’re familiar with the artists. The Trans-Siberian Orchestra constructed this rock opera and stage show around the life of Ludwig Van Beethoven, specifically around the last night of his life as the deaf composer is plagued by visions and voices from the world beyond. Mephistopheles comes, claiming dominion of Beethoven’s soul unless the composer allows the devil to erase his life’s work, and Beethoven must walk the path of his life again to find where he went astray. Since it’s TSO, you know the music and the singing is going to be top notch, and it’s refreshing to hear them play something without a Christmas vibe to it. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen the entire stage show, but the music with liner notes is available in album format, and you can get a good idea of the story from that. TSO’s take on ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ is sufficiently rocking for those of you who might be into that, but Beethoven’s ‘Here in the Night’ and ‘Who You Are’ are perhaps the best individual songs. The final song, where Beethoven weighs the worth of his 10th symphony against the life of a nameless child, has made me cry before, and is one of the most beautiful pieces of music TSO has ever produced. If you’re at all familiar with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, you know that is certainly saying something.

                I’m not an expert music critic by any means, and honestly I could go one and on about any one of these productions at length, but I hope this gives you a nice set of pieces to start with if you’re looking to have that musical itch scratched and you’re already seen Rent, Moulin Rouge, and Beauty and the Beast a dozen times. Thanks for reading.

#music musical movies

[paoulkaye-blog]

Glancing Down the Rabbit Hole

                 How was everyone’s Independence Day? I trust it was sufficiently free of extraterrestrial aliens and Jeff Goldblum (apologies to Mr. Goldblum, I’m sure he’s a great guy) and full of fried food, grilled food, and explosives. I enjoyed a personal tradition of watching the musical 1776 with my kids, getting out of the house to watch fireworks and have root beer floats, and a four day weekend, so that was pretty rad.

                NPR celebrated by tweeting out, line by line, the Declaration of Independence. This got lost on a few people, I think, who decried the act as an attempt to incite revolution against our current President, and not the intended and long dead target of King George. I’m not sure what I found more amusing: how some of the descriptions the founding fathers laid down in their paragraphs-long insult to a man who was one of the most powerful people on earth at the time apply today to one of the most powerful people on earth right now, or the fact that his fanatical followers were the ones to call attention to the parallel in their own ignorance. Good job guys, way to nail that one.

                But then again I guess it’s easy to see why they’d jump to that conclusion. Trump and his followers, and to a lesser extent the GOP as a whole, have been complaining a lot about a liberal bias in the media. Our current commander in chief has made famous the phrase ‘Fake News’ and gleefully applied the label to anything he doesn’t like or want to hear. How wonderful it must be to be convinced that such a basic lie will solve your problems, but I digress. The idea remains that the men and women who find, corroborate, and report the news are somehow biased toward liberalism, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see their point a little.

                So I made a decision to actually look into the Liberal bias, and in doing so I wanted to answer a few questions. If there was a distinct Liberal bias in the mainstream news media, why? Were the reasons personal for the news teams, or were they being pushed toward such a thing by a corporate mission statement or some shadowy financial backer with a liberal bent? Was it conspiracy, or consensus? And was impartiality being maintained in spite of personal bias, or was even having a bias at all enough to render a news source unreliable in the search for objectively independent information?

                And I knew I was in for something when my first stop was YouTube, the Internet’s most unfiltered source of raw opinion, and searched for ‘Liberal Media Bias.’ Take my advice: Do not do this. That is a deep, deep rabbit hole and the soil around it is soft and unstable. I pride myself on accepting multiple viewpoints and listening to people who do not agree with me and trying to see their point, but I swear to you that some of the video titles alone started to make my eye twitch.

                Still, I managed to find one titled ‘Liberal Media Bias Confirmed by Numerous Studies’, by a guy called Mark Dice. In the video, he lists several studies spanning my lifetime, starting in 1986 and continuing to the present that look into the donation histories and voting record of people who work for mainstream news media companies. Mark’s information leads to him concluding that roughly 80-ish% of the mainstream news media votes for and donates to Democrats, and it’s presented in a tone that, while somewhat… severe, I’d say?... lacks the mouth foaming raving quality I admit I was sort of expecting. All in all, Mark Dice is a competent presenter of information and I can recommend looking him up if you’d like to take this trip with me.

                But, and you knew there was a but coming, all of the information and the way it is presented means nothing if you have to make a logical leap to come to the conclusion he does. And the leap is pretty clear for someone not already sold on his point of view: Mark seems to be unable to separate the personal acts from the professional calling. I’ll admit not a lot of us have to do that, I don’t work a political job and I’m sure he doesn’t either, but I know that a good journalist, especially a good journalist who wants to be taken seriously, has to learn how to distance their opinion from their reporting.

                Taking a number of reports through a 30 year span of donor and voting records is a good way of finding out how a Politician thinks. Votes show their conscience and conviction, and who they pay money to or get money from can and will very often inform both of those things. It does not work for a serious journalist. A serious journalist has to get the facts and has to check them and double check them and get sources and protect those sources and work with other journalists and come to a place where they have the story, the what and who and where and why and how, and then make sure that they tell or present or write that story in such a way as to leave a minimal ideological fingerprint upon it. It is a seriously tall order and a difficult task, and the only job more thankless in the country right now is being a public school teacher.

                The teacher thing is a whole other bag of previously canned worms that I’ll circle back to some other day, but back to the matter at hand.

                I can’t bring myself to make the same logical leap Mark did. To say that ‘This man or woman has expressed this opinion in their personal life with their money and with their vote, and that means that everything they say and do must be viewed with that qualifier in mind,’ is a stretch. It’s a bigger stretch than it sounds, actually, because the ideal journalist in that case would be a non-participant in the political process. Like a sports analyst who was in Chess club and never touched a football in his life. That doesn’t happen. And it is impossible, totally and completely, to be exposed to political news and not at some point think ‘That makes sense’ or ‘What the hell is this guy talking about?’

                A lot of mainstream media news casters and crews see a lot of the same raw information. They are constantly checking with countless sources and learn what they can so they can break the story first. They want to be as correct as they can, or they have to retract the story and that never looks good (Does it, CNN?). And the only delay between having the information and presenting the information is in collating it and making it presentable. That last bit is where your bias comes in, by the way, as they tailor it to their intended audience.

                And isn’t it strange, then, that more journalists across the board seem to lean a bit more left than right? I mean, they have the same information, right? Why would the greater consensus land on the liberal side of the political spectrum? It’s not like the left is supported by facts and verifiable information, right? Conversely, why does every right wing journalist sound exactly the same? Sure, some appear a tad more crazed than others, but the conservative side of news media is a bit more on point and on the same page with itself than the liberal side. Almost like they were being coached.

                See? I can do conspiracy stuff too.  It’s easy. Too easy. And that makes it easy to see why the idea of a Liberal Media Bias is enough to make a lot of conservatives buy into the president’s idea that anything published that makes him look bad is ‘Fake News.’

                I’ve done a little bit of digging so far, and I have to say the experience wasn’t necessarily eye opening in the way I think the right would like it to be. My mind hasn’t been changed yet, although I’m more aware now of the perception the right has of the mainstream news media, and I suppose that’s something. This is a deep, deep rabbit hole, and it’s interesting in that it travels in both directions. YouTube’s trending page is full to brimming with liberal news clips these days, a fact decried by conservatives on the site itself, but is that indicative of a bias on the part of YouTube’s trending algorithm or does liberal media just get more shares and retweets or whatever the kids are doing these days? I don’t have that information. Not yet.

                I’ll keep looking. I’ll keep trying to gain insight into the other side’s point of view. I want to have the conversation, and I think we all should. In the meantime, accept more than one idea, and celebrate your freedom to do so. And celebrate the freedom of people like Mark Dice to make as many logical leaps as they like, but always remember to take whatever you see on YouTube with a grain of salt. And possibly a hefty shot of whiskey. Thanks for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

The Nostalgia Box

                 So, Nintendo announced that they are doing something that makes a lot of sense in light of their recent efforts with the NES Classic. Which is, obviously, release a SNES Classic. Much to the cheers and rejoicing of the internet at large, and my age group in particular.

                I remember the SNES. Vividly. When that thing entered our house, on an Easter morning if I recall correctly, the whole of the play room where I spent most of my time changed. The system and its accompanying screen became a centerpiece of the room, a focal point. Before, the NES had just taken up some space in a corner, played occasionally when I felt like trying to best a set of eight robot masters. But the SNES was a totally different animal.

                I sunk days of the following summer into Super Mario World. Getting into every nook and cranny of that game was challenging, fun, and rewarding in a way that games these days just seem to miss the point on. I remember, in a time before the internet, arriving on the star road for the first time, and thinking that was the most amazing secret in the game. I’d later find out that there were even deeper secrets, and every new world was an astounding milestone: How big WAS this game?

                Then came The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past. My father and I player through that in tandem, each of us taking turns on our own save files to try and beat it. I learned about chucking the shield and boomerang into the Zora waters from my father, and in turn I taught him how to get into Turtle Rock. He beat Gannon about a week before I did, but I had spent that time getting the last upgrade to the Master Sword and I had an easier time than he did as a result.

                Super Metroid legitimately scared the hell out of me as a kid. I remember watching my brother play it, trying to help him spot every secret and warning him of every little danger. When the Metroid Larva met its fate at the hands of Mother Brain, I ran from the room, devastated, as Bryan mustered his courage and took the fight back to her. Watching that evil bitch get her comeuppance wouldn’t happen for me until I played the game myself, and I have to say that whupping her titanic ass with the Hyper Beam remains satisfying to this very day. This is the game that taught me how to use shoulder buttons. Ridley still makes my hands shake every time I face him in any Metroid game, and Super Metroid is the most iconic encounter.

                It took me almost a week to realize that Mega Man X was a very different game than my beloved Mega Man. Sure, the title and the hero were similar, but X required a flowing brutality, a higher momentum style of play, dashing forward into danger and reacting with speed and precision unnecessary in Mega Man’s more plodding, deliberate style. Busting up Vile and beating that frustrating Mechanical Spider were real accomplishments for me, let alone reach and taking down Sigma. Digging into every stage to find every secret eventually yielded me Ryu’s famous Hadoken, a move which I still famously cannot perform for the life of me.

                Hence my resorting to tactics of a less flashy nature in Street Fighter 2 Turbo. My brother probably still hasn’t forgiven me for a few of those fights. I’m not allowed to use Ken anymore. But moving on…

                Every game I’ve mentioned and more is going to be included in the SNES Classic, and it was only after reading through the list of 21 games that something occurred to me. Something that I think I’ve known for a while but didn’t really occur to me as something that mattered until I noticed it.

                These games represent the pinnacle of the intersection between limited technology and imaginative gameplay. 3D wasn’t even a consideration in the SNES days, and wouldn’t even be all that widespread in the next generation of consoles. So 2D was king in those days, and graphical fidelity took a back seat still to gameplay and story. No better example of this exists than Final Fantasy 6 (3 over here, and included in the SNES Classic as such).

                In 16 bit graphics and sound, Final Fantasy 6 stands today as one of the best, if not THE best Final Fantasy title. An incredible story, great music, an interesting world, and when most games would have ended, FF6 tore the world apart and scattered your party to the winds, forcing you to reassemble your team before trying to destroy Kefka, the laughing clown-mage who was arguably the central character of the game. There are hours of gameplay, secrets, story, and events to play through in that game, and it is only a fraction of what a lot of people consider to be one of the best game libraries of all time.

                And it wasn’t DLC or Achievements or pre-rendered cut scenes or life-like polygons or collectable widgets that unlock some hidden level that made this and these other games so good. In an age before console FPS games and online multiplayer and HDMI these games were as good as you could get, and it may be easy to argue many of them still are just that good. Super Metroid alone still shows up quite regularly in the top 10 of most ‘All Time Best Video Game Ever’ lists I’ve seen, and each of the entries Nintendo has deigned to include in their 80$ nostalgia box will often be found on those lists as well.

                For me, this will be like going to visit some old friends. For my boys, this will be a glimpse into a time long lost, when gaming wasn’t really about making blockbuster-movie like dollars on AAA releases, or making sure everyone could see that fancy cut scene you put after the end credits so they could get excited about playing multiplayer until the sequel came out. If you were bad at these games, you didn’t see the end, and you certainly never got to see everything they had to offer. No tutorials (as we know them today in gaming) and no training wheels. Just A, B, X, Y, L, R, and a D-pad, and you better bring your A game or you will not survive past level three.

                And I hope I’m not alone here. I miss this feeling, that the game itself was the reward for playing. People don’t read books and expect a secret chapter to unlock if they read every word aloud in chapter 6.  You can’t watch a movie twice in a row and be rewarded with a bonus scene or more visceral action on your second time watching. Almost every other form of media is static, and the experience of it doesn’t change in substance from person to person. Sure, the meaning behind the substance can be interpreted thousands of ways, but the breadth of experience in a video game is nearly infinite.

                And I had to accept the fact that games were trending toward Pavlovian ‘Bleep-Bloop’ effects to entice more and more people to play them. And FPS after FPS because, hey Americans like guns, right? And dumbed down tutorial after dumbed down tutorial. And having to play a game three or four times to unlock a difficulty I found to actually be a challenge. Or having to get every damn highlighted widget on the mini map just so I can see a two-to-three second bonus piece of content. Or even having to pay 10-30 dollars more just to get a complete game through DLC. I got used to all of that.

               And then something like this comes along and reminds me that I don't need that. I never did. These games are some of the best, and have been so for longer than most CoD fans have been alive. It's a wonderful feeling. And one I know I don't have all alone. Thanks for reading.

#gaming

[paoulkaye-blog]

My Many Worries

                 Is anyone else having this problem? That there is too much to care about?

                I mean, okay, I’ll admit I have not always been the most outward looking person. I’m a creature of habit and I enjoy my little comforts and if that bubble remains undisturbed, you could probably rob my next-door neighbor and I wouldn���t bat an eye. I mean, yeah, I’d like to see justice done and that sucks that it happened, but it sucks even more for other people than me and I don’t see the point in getting all worked up about it.

                But lately, this year especially, I find myself more and more getting wrapped up in these massive things where I am that crippling combination of emotionally invested and devoid of any real agency. I am the impotent flame of the candle, raging against the storm outside my windowsill. My glow may provide some measure of comfort for those that look for me, but in reality I can do nothing to abate the fall of the rain.

                I can turn a neat phrase, though. That I can do. And I can rant with the best of them, and appeal to the better nature of my reader with the… probably top 60% of them? I don’t know. I do not have a metric to measure the general moral compass and my effect upon it. Google ought to get on that. And I ought to get back on topic.

                As I have evolved from self-interested lay-about to competent father and husband with a real stake in the world, I have developed purely as a side effect of exposure to responsibility, a nasty a pervasive condition known in the medical community as ‘opinions’. Now the severity and disabling effect of opinions are many and varied. Opinions supported by facts and life experience tend to be chronic, but you can live with them. Opinions based on outlandish claims and news cycles tend to be socially fatal and leave a certain kind of scaring that can make you a pariah in certain circles.

                But the main thing opinions are is exhausting. If you have an opinion, it seems like you have to share it with as many people as loudly as you can as often as you can. At least, that’s the example provided to me by the rest of the world at large. This takes a lot of time and effort for a former introvert who now has opinions on real life issues because, surprise surprise, that stuff actually affects me and my family. And lately, as I’m sure you have noticed, I have opinions about many, many things.

                Healthcare, honesty, politics, taxes, work ethic, children’s toys, traffic laws, guns, planes, trains, comedies, tragedies, elections, police shootings, civilian shootings, crime of all collars, international relations, those fucking pricks at UPS, gas prices, children’s shows, video games, books, television, musicals, movies, comics, news, clothing, shoes, and the list… pretty much stops there, I think (edit: Corporations as people. See below). For now. I’ll probably think of more later. But still, that is a lot of things to have and maintain an opinion about.

                And frankly, it’s too much. I have a hard time shutting my brain off in a normal rest state, let alone with that cavalcade of possible disasters on my mind. This year more than any other, I have felt artery hardening stress about things that are well and beyond my control or ability to influence. I know what’s to blame, that’s simple enough. But there will always be that apathetic man in his bubble of comforts inside of me that wonders if it’s even worth it to give a damn in the first place.    

                Even worse, I’m not the only person with this problem. And since corporations are people for some stupid fucking reason that has never been adequately explained to me… and let me go back and add that to the list… it turns out that news organizations have the same problem. Between the Russia hacks, the Investigation into the Russia Hacks, the investigation into the possible collusion between Russian agents and American idiots, the Republican Healthcare bill, the lack of vital government positions being filled, the general demeanor and mood of the President on any given day, the terror attacks across the globe, the horrors and hardship facing the refugees from Syria, the divorce of Britain from the EU, the leaks, the lies, the scandals, and Beyoncé’s new twins, news media coverage doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself.

                All this to say nothing of the opinions the various channels are afflicted with. CNN is convinced that all of the news, everywhere, is breaking. They may not be far off in hyperbole, but still, CNN is exhausting to watch. MSNBC pretty much picks a topic to care about every morning and beats it into the ground, and lately their topic of choice has been the obvious disconnect between Trump and reality. Don’t get me wrong, that is news and something worth discussing, by the others things happening in the world as a result of that disconnect? Those deserve some attention as well. And spending some time on those issues might go some way to helping MSNBC appear like something other than the leftist conspiracy network its detractors are so convinced it is.

                And FOX… good lord. The loudest and proudest voice of the right wing of the political spectrum actually used to be okay. I mean, it was a counterbalance, of sorts. I could always flip to FOX really quick to get the right wing view on the events of the day and sort of temper my view of the world by trying to understand how the other side was interpreting events. But lately? Boy, if corporations are people, FOX needs to go into rehab. Sexual misconduct and getting way too high on Presidential edicts and pyrrhic Republican ‘victories’ while ignoring the raging fires that are almost literally burning the network down around their heads are all signs of a broadcasting network too far gone on the media equivalent of free-based heroine. With even more paranoia somehow added to the mix.

                FOX stopped being an opposing viewpoint and went straight into propaganda machine territory sometime during the Obama administration. And then they were de-facto promoted to chief spinners of presidential bullshit when Trump moved into the White House and made FOX and Friends a known part of his morning routine. During no other era in American history would such hypocrisy and sycophantic waffling be even remotely acceptable in a national news network. But hey, that’s the times we live in, apparently.

                But in the end, all of this is only a collection of symptoms of the real problem: The life I lead, with a wife and two kids, two cars, two jobs, school starting soon, and bills to pay, is not an isolated animal. It’s tied up in all of these strings that moor these unfathomably gigantic issues and surreal conversations to the grounds of reality. There’s too much, too many things to worry about. And I DO worry, and it’s going to kill me at this rate. Issues don’t come in a ‘This or That’ state anymore. It used to be if you had a job, you knew you could pay your bills and your rent and still eat things that were not Ramen noodles until the next paycheck. Now? Not so fucking much.

                We’re not secure like that anymore. There is no state someone like me can get to that will ever completely eliminate any of these worries for me. It just isn’t possible in this day and age. I know too much, I pay attention to too many things, and in the end I worry, even just subconsciously, about too many things that night time is often an exercise in staring at the ceiling until the alarm clock goes off.

                What I think I need to do, and maybe you might want to try this as well, is to figure out the things that deserve, really need my attention, and just focus on that. Wife, kids, work, bills. Those parts of my life and their related worries and joys should be my focus.  But that’s hard.

                I won’t give a damn about CNN, MSNBC, and FOX anymore, but I’ll still hope they get their collective act together. I wish I didn’t have to be worried for the environment of the planet we all live on, but hey, guess what, someone has to. I’ll happily cut out politics if politicians would just cut it the fuck out themselves and stop playing games with legislation that could feasibly deal real, lasting harm to the people they are supposed to be listening to and being the voice of. I’ll even stop getting rationally angry every time I see the words ‘President Trump’ or his big fat orange stupid face if the man would just shut the flying fuck up and be a responsible adult.

                And there’s the really bad problem: I’m worried about a lot of things, and the people who can and should actually be worried about those same things are not doing a whole lot to help put my worries to rest. And I know I’m not alone in feeling like that. I shouldn’t have to pray to higher power, asking for help in getting these jackasses to pull their heads out of their self-congratulatory asses and do their jobs, but I find myself doing it more and more lately.

                I don’t want to be my old self, ignoring the world and thinking only about myself. But it shouldn’t be so goddamn stressful to want the best for my fellow man either. I’ve said it before in this space, but it’s true: We are ALL in this TOGETHER. And I know I’m not the only person suffering with the opinion that it’s time some people in some high profile positions started picking up their fucking slack. Thanks for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

A Mandering Gerry

                So this is a thing that’s been bothering me for a while, and apparently it’s been bothering a lot of people. Gerrymandering is a political tool to boost the effectiveness of your voter turnout while minimizing the impact of the people who vote for your opponent. It’s all about drawing district lines to separate your political opponents and grouping up your political supporters for maximum effect. Both sides do it, and that is a fact.

                First off, right up front, how the hell is that a thing? Questions of constitutionality aside, who was the first asshole who was like ‘Hey, my voters should all be grouped in the same district, but I’ll also shove in enough of the other guy’s voters that he can’t win anywhere at all!’ How was that guy not immediately kicked in the nethers for being an awful person? Seriously, public servants and elected officials should uphold the spirit and the word of the constitution and its amendments as equality and rights for all, without the need to put a fucking asterisk at the end of the sentence and four paragraphs of fine print at the bottom of the damn page.

                Gerrymandering seems to successfully score itself on Wasted voters and Lost voters. Wasted voters are the number of voters in a district over the amount needed to secure a victory for the desired side, while Lost voters are people who vote or the losing side and thus have no further impact on the election. Apparently the ideal is to minimize Wasted voters and maximized Lost voters for your side and your opponent, strictly speaking. It’s pretty much the most widespread use of the idea of reducing people down to numbers, as well as one of the most asshole-ish.

                It gets caught and struck down when there is an apparent racial component to it, like North Carolina is so fond of providing examples of. It is less of a big deal, presumably, when people of every stripe are getting screwed to prop up whoever is drawing the lines. Like I said, both sides do it, but in recent years, Republicans have become very adept at this particular part of the political game, and since most district re-drawings happen every ten years to coincide with the census, it’s harder to combat in the moment, since lines get drawn for at least two presidential elections and probably five congressional and senate races. That’s a long time and a lot of elections for gerrymandered influence to stack the deck in a party’s favor.

                Hell, we’re seeing the effect right now, and I can give you a prime example that isn’t even the best one. The last Presidential election saw 136,628,459 votes cast. That is a lot of damn votes. All for the popular part of the election. In the breakdown, the votes got cast as follows:

                65,844,610 votes for Hillary Clinton (D)

    ��           62,979,636 votes for Donald Trump (R-ish)

                And 7,804,213 votes cast for 3rd party candidates like Jill Stein and the other guy whose name escapes me.

                In pure numbers and ignoring districts and the Electoral College, we have an obvious winner. With 2.1% more of the popular vote, Hillary Clinton wins, hands down, no matter what anyone says or how small their hands may be.

                But here’s the thing: There IS the Electoral College to consider. Out of 538 Electoral cast for the two major candidates in the classic ‘winner take all’ style, 232 EC votes went to Hillary Clinton and 306 EC votes went to Donald Trump.

                Fair warning, there is some math ahead. This is the part of the essay where my brain starts to smoke, but I’ll attempt to keep my rabid outbursts to a minimum.

                To break it down, in order to secure an electoral vote, Clinton required 283,813 votes from the public (Divide 65,844,610 by 232). On the flip side, Trump needed just 205,816 votes from the public to secure an electoral vote (Divide 62,979,636 by 306). Following the math, and with a bit of generous rounding UP, you can easily arrive at the conclusion that a vote for Hillary counted about as much as 3/4ths of a vote for Donald. The math is below.

                283,813 / 205,816 = 0.725, or 72.5%. With the generous rounding mentioned earlier to bring that up to 75%, we arrive at the 3/4ths conclusion.

                Now, please, do not get me wrong: I am not a stats major or even a mathematician of any stripe. This is all basic addition and division with some percentages thrown in. I will never claim to be an expert here, but in a way that is sort of the point. In like five or six steps I can demonstrate, via basic math, how 48.2% of the country was, for at least the election of 2016, valued at three quarters that their fellow Americans were valued at the ballot box. To say nothing of the 7.8 million votes that amounted to virtually nothing in all of this.

                And while some of this is an issue of the Electoral College and the method by which electoral votes are gained, there are strong signs of the aforementioned gerrymandering having a profound effect on this election. And it worked: Democratic voters were broken up and Lost, and a minimum of Republican voters were Wasted. And no matter what you believe politically, whether you won or lost in the last election, you have to live with the fact that we, collectively, just sort of accepted being counted as a percentage of a person.

                For Trump voters, I’m sure they were thrilled that they mattered 25% more in the end than all of those wishy-washy leftists. Hillary voters were justifiably upset at being valued at 3/4ths of a person politically opposed to them. For the last election, and doubtless for elections before and still to come, the values of the conservative right have been given, by default, a more powerful voice in our election system, and ergo a more powerful hold over the country at large.

                And were this situation reversed, I would still be pretty pissed off about it. I may not agree with the guy who drives the pick-up truck with the huge wheels and the confederate flag emblazoned on his back windshield and the AR-15 in his passenger seat, but at the end of the day he is still an American citizen the same as me, and our values and opinions and our vote should count the same as any other. That’s the ideal this country was built upon, and it’s the ideal men and women have fought for and died for, and given and given and given for, and our current unbalanced electoral system, at all levels of government, is an insult both to them and their memories, to say nothing of the rest of us.

                The Supreme Court is set to actually hear about gerrymandering in general to determine its constitutionality. I hope and pray they help outlaw this ridiculous practice and help reverse its effect on our system. No one may be innocent in this, but it is an evil and a subversion of the most idealistic of our principals that we could all certainly do without. Thank you for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

Redemption in 8 Bits

                I’ve mentioned before how I have been a Mega Man fan ever since I’ve been able to pick up an NES controller. If you missed it, hey, brief recap: I’m a fan of a game series by Capcom that stars a blue robot who jumps and shoots other robots and acquires their powers to stop a mad scientist. And I’ll tell you, it’s been a difficult time for me and fellow fans of the series.

                We used to be spoiled for choice in Mega Man. There was Classic, X, Battle Network, Zero, ZX, Legends, and Star Force. We’d get one, maybe even two games a year. Mega Man used to be more common than Call of Duty. And I’m not going to say it was always quality stuff, and personally I had no use for Star Force at all, but they were all fun to play and spoke to the nostalgia of my youth.

                But that’s a time long past now. Capcom decided to bury my favorite Video Game character for various reasons, and managed to completely piss off the fans as they did so. I’ve never seen a company treat an intellectual property like this, and I am anxious for the future because the only news about Mega Man I have seen is in a cartoon show made by Man of Action (the guys who are doing the current rendition of Ben 10), and last I heard they were looking for writers familiar with the series.

                So my confidence in that isn’t high, is what I’m saying.

                So, I am a Mega Man fan in what is, for the time being, a post-Mega Man world. Sure, it turns up now and again as a cameo or as a reference or a character in one of Capcom’s bland and increasingly vanilla-flavored fighting games, but I have serious doubts that I’ll ever be able to play a seriously produced, well-crafted game with the title ‘Mega Man’ in it ever again. So what do I do to get my 2-dimensional jump and shoot itch scratched?

                Sure, there are fan-games and indie projects. 20XX comes to mind, a rouge-like take on the mechanics and aesthetic of Mega Man X that plays pretty well. Other projects, like a total Doom conversion called Mega Man 8 Bit Death Match, offer a loving homage to the series while also having some fun with the characters, weapons, and formula. Keiji Inafune even formed his own company after his split from Capcom to create a new Mega Man style game from scratch called Mighty No. 9, which was a ridiculous Kickstarter success that faced delays and disappointment and sort of left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

                But for sure, it was important for an official, known quantity to enter something into the conversation to lift the spirits of disheartened fans. Enter Inti-Creates. These guys did a lot of the work on the Mega Man Zero series, four games that are among the hardest the Game Boy Advanced ever offered, and a wonderful progression of the story and mechanics of Mega Man X. They also put together Mega Man ZX, an open-world platformer that followed the Zero series and built even further on it. With Capcom’s edict to put Mega Man into seeming retirement, Inti-Creates took it upon themselves to create something new, and yet familiar.

                Azure Striker Gunvolt has an obvious family history. It looks and plays like Zero and ZX, but tweaks mechanics like dealing and taking damage and the way you engage with opponents that put a fresh coat of paint of gameplay basics older than I am. It had a deep story, an interesting world and aesthetic, and really did help fill that particular gap. As a bonus, Inti-Creates would also create Mighty Gunvolt, a crossover between their new hero and Inafune’s Beck from Mighty No. 9, presented as an 8-bit adventure in the most classic of styles.

                It was a short game, maybe an hour or less from start to finish, but it felt perfect to me. Beck in Mighty Gunvolt is the perfect emulation of the classic Mega Man, with a few mechanics tacked-on from his lackluster debut. After a Gunvolt sequel, Inti-Creates also went back and remade an old NES hidden gem called Master Blaster. Master Blaster Zero was an excellent dip in a different kind of nostalgia pool, and through the magic of DLC, they went back and added in a full game mode for playing other characters through that story. I actually beat Master Blaster Zero for the first time playing as Gunvolt, who’s skill set can come off as over-powered if you’re careful with your energy management.

                Fast forward to this week, when a game I’ve actually been waiting for since I heard about it came along: Mighty Gunvolt Burst. A sequel to a one-off bonus game. Another hour-ish romp through nostalgia land, right?

                Except, no, it was way more. After an hour of play, I hadn’t even played more than three stages. Along with a full complement of Mega Man-style gameplay, complete with an intro stage, eight themed boss stages, and four full end-game levels (including the classic boss rush, mirror boss, and final boss rolled into one grueling finale), Mighty Gunvolt Burst would feature the return of the two titular characters. Beck feels great to play, absent his ridiculous xel-absorbtion dash-through-enemies thing which was counter-intuitive as hell for me as a long time Mega Man player. The only thing missing was stealing a weapon from your fallen foes, but…

                Well, Mighty Gunvolt Burst features the deepest, craziest customization system I have ever seen for a 2D side scrolling shooter. You unlock options in the customizer, as well as expand the number of points you can spend in it, by acquiring items hidden through the levels, and being able to choose a select reward whenever you clear a stage (three per stage, so you have to play through the game virtually 3 times to unlock everything, minimum.). Once you have a wealth of options and custom points, you can literally design anything.

                Do you want lightning balls that bounce and explode? Or to machine-gun knives in any direction? What about a spinning barrier of ice blocks that shatter into smaller blocks on impact with an enemy? Homing missiles that corner on a dime and explode five times? Spinning blades that bounce off walls and slice through enemies? Charge shots that cover the room in homing fireballs that congregate around an enemy and burn them to ashes? Or maybe just one big regular shot that just does a crap-ton of damage? You got it. All of it.

                Classic Mega Man would give you a weapon that worked really well against another boss. This game gives you an element that does more damage to a certain boss, yes, but how you deliver that is entirely up to you. The depth of this infinitely increased the replay value for me. I love trying crazy combinations to see what I can come up with. And there’s a challenge in coming up with the best way to hit certain bosses. Every boss in the game from the first eight stages hails from Mighty No. 9, and this game is a glorious representation of what that game could, and maybe should, have been.

                Inti-Creates knows what the hell they are doing with Mega Man-like things, and I’m thrilled that they’ve seen fit to fill that now-vacant market. They’ve mentioned releasing more character for Mighty Gunvolt Burst in the future, and I am totally down for that. This game? More of this, please. More of this until I am dead. Please. Thanks for reading.

#gaming

[paoulkaye-blog]

United Against to be United At All

     It’s a strange thing, the state of American Politics. In my lifetime, it’s undergone a few transformative events to be sure. I was not aware enough to know much more than the name Lewinsky and understand that then-President Clinton was in trouble for something when his Impeachment was under way. Especially over a reason that, today, seems banal and inoffensive by comparison. Not that I condone adultery, at all, no matter who or where it is done, but in the face of what would come after it such a thing seems… less pressing?      I vividly remember 9/11. An ashen faced teacher rushing in to interrupt my English class and turning on the TV. That’s all we did in school that day; watch the towers fall. Up till that point my life had been video games, board games, and a minimal amount of weeding my parent’s landscaping. Suddenly I was living in a country with other people, and those people were under attack. We all got swept up in the patriotism of the times. We were told the terrorists were sent after us by forces in the Middle East and they were capable of doing it again. I graduated High School the year George W Bush won re-election, riding a wave of patriotic fervor and a general line of thinking that the ship would be best kept stable if the hand on the wheel was left in place. I rolled my eyes at the idea of ‘Freedom Fries’ and ‘Freedom Toast’, but I’ll admit I made more than my share of cowardly French jokes (my favorite being ‘Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys).      But by the time they pulled Saddam from his hole in the ground, I and others had the sense we had been… fooled somehow. There had been no WMDs. Nothing about why we had sent troops into Iraq made sense now, absent the gauze of enraged patriotism that had descended upon us all with the dust of the towers. To say nothing of the domestic issues like Katrina, and the scope of Homeland Security, or the far-reaching implications of the Patriot Act. And as those questions swirled in my mind, suddenly there were other things to worry about. Another election, more candidates, and the sudden and terrible collapse of a healthy portion of our economy.      Barack Obama became president at the end of the first Presidential Campaign I was truly invested in. I followed the narrative of the election, and it was the first political race I really talked about with someone. My Wife and I agreed on a lot of things regarding our choices in that election, and we both voted for Barack Obama, a vote I have never been more satisfied with. And the change in political tone was immediate. We stopped focusing so much on the war abroad and began to pay more attention to the issues at home.      Healthcare, minority rights, abortion legislation (or lack thereof) started to be the more palpable headlines, drowning out the troops we’d left in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, or the drones our President was using to darken those skies at time. There was a sense, for me at least, that we were moving forward. While the previous President had suggested a Constitutional Amendment to legally define marriage as being between a man and a woman, the guy I was proud of voting for managed to help make significant progress for the LGBT community (they became the LGBT community, for instance, instead of just ‘the gay community’) in the realm of federal law. Osama Bin Laden was finally killed, bringing me some measure of closure for 9/11, but that was just one of a dozen things that were done that felt impactful on the national level.      Some of it was good. Some of it was questionable. A few things were bad. But we entered a holding pattern of normal where progress seemed to be made, despite a massive amount of foot-dragging by the President’s opposition, slowly and surely.      And then this year happened. And normal was shattered and replaced with the most partisan, hate-fill rhetoric I have ever seen. Violence against minorities, seemingly spurred on by the speeches of our new Commander-In-Chief, spiked in a truly concerning ways. Marches, protests and demonstrations on a scale not seen since the height of the Civil Rights movement broke out or were organized across the country. Bad blood on both sides came to the fore over not just the election and the incredibly counter-intuitive result it produced, but also in the form of the hatchet the party in power quickly tried to take to everything with Obama’s fingerprints on it. My feelings on that have been made plain, so I won’t go over it again.      And then a shooting happened. An older white man, apparently a supporter of Bernie Sanders, opened fire on a group of Republican lawmakers as they were practicing for a baseball game. A game that would showcase the limited amount of unity still available on Capitol Hill these days.      As terrible as this was, I’m almost thankful for it. Violence and hate are never to be applauded, do not get me wrong, but what followed was a show of support from both sides of the political spectrum all over the country. Yes, there were people who sought to make this yet another polarizing issue, but in the mainstream the idea that we are one country came to conquer all of vitriol and bile on ample display in the houses of Congress.      This was the first day in several months that gave me a hint that, when all is said and done, we will be okay. We will be fine. We still abhor the idea of actually shooting each other, and as long as we are more willing to talk than shoot, we can, and we will, back away from this abyss that is threatening to swallow all reasonable discourse in my country.      There is a long road ahead. I hope that this act of violence will serve to remind our public servants that they are beholden to the people that sent them there. I hope that this will make them think twice before making a gross generalization or reject an idea out of hand just because it came from the other side of the aisle. I hope this will be a reminder to our President that words and actions have consequences, and that those consequences are very real and sometimes fatal. I hope that this will show everyone that there is an entire open valley behind them, away from this edge we’ve felt pushed up against for so long, that is full of space for all of us to have our opinion without having to scream it at each other. I hope this is the start of things beginning to get better.      But most importantly, because of this, I hope. I actually have a feeling of hope. I thought it was heartburn or something all day, I swear. But no, this was hope, mixed with sorrow and sympathy for the victims of the violence, but hope nonetheless. I am thrilled to be able to feel genuine hope again.      I’ve heard a lot lately that we are a country divided. That is very true. What we needed was a reminder that we aren’t enemies, we’re allies with different points of view. We need to stand united, and we need to stand united against that which divides us. Our current divisions are ideological, political, and financial, but they are not insurmountable. I regret that it takes an act of violence to remind us of that. That’s on me as much as anyone, but it is now up to all of us to change the conversation, ratchet down the name-calling and rhetoric, and fix the problem.      My most cynical view of mankind is that we require something to stand against in order to stand united at all. And in many ways, that’s true, but now we have a clearly defined foe. We need to take action and become better. If we don’t, we might as well just fall off the edge and straight into ruin. Thanks for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

Good Publicity, or Good Story?

So… Suicide Squad. Okay, I know. I know. I keep saying I’ll get to DC vs. Marvel at some point, but come on. It isn’t even a contest at this point, is it? DC’s last hope to keep me at all interested is the Wonder Woman movie, and I hope against hope that they don’t completely screw it up somehow, because my wife is very much looking forward to it. Marvel won this fight ages ago when the possibilities became endless simply by putting Samuel L Jackson in a post credits scene in Iron Man. The only thing DC seems to have going for it, aside from a horde of blind fanboys who ceaselessly shout down the detractors of the collection of messes DC is trying to put together into a collected movie universe, is that they can make a damn fine commercial. DC’s movie trailers, I will admit, are good at building hype. They have successfully convinced many, many people to keep going to DC movies, oftentimes against their better judgement. DC’s marketing budget is ridiculous, if only in the fact that it seems to outstrip their budget for pretty much everything else that isn’t actors and special effects in their movies. Certainly the writing and editing don’t factor in here. Jabs aside, DC’s marketing team is without peer. Marvel’s trailers have a decade plus of material to draw on and legitimately anticipated movies coming out. DC’s ads are, by comparison, magic for making something out of nothing. Repeatedly. And while that works out for DC because they can post good opening weekends out of sheer marketing draw, it does have… let’s say collateral damage. When Suicide Squad opened in theaters, the world met it with a collective “… meh?” The story is a mess, the characters are wasted with the exception of Harley and Deadshot, the much-advertised appearance of Jared Leto’s Joker was quite possibly the most vicious letdown in recent film history, and the whole movie literally only happened because Amanda Waller is portrayed as a world-class idiot who would, ironically, probably be right at home in the current administration. If that was intentional, bravo, but the body of available evidence does not strain to suggest as such. So if the Marvel movies are clearly better, as I have stated, why talk about Suicide Squad at all? Well, because it impacted the movie landscape when it came out the same way any blockbuster does. It drowns out everything around it. Because for a few weeks, all anyone seemed to care about was Suicide Squad and the amount that it made, despite being an objectively bad movie on a lot of levels, and other movies fell by the wayside. Buried under DC’s marketing blitz. Such a movie was Kubo and the Two Strings, made by the studio that brought you Coraline and ParaNorman. I don’t tend to get into dollar amounts when I choose to care about one movie versus another movie, but I feel it’s instructional here. On its opening weekend, Suicide Squad raked in about $147 million against the $175 million the film cost to make. Making that amount of its costs back on opening weekend is, by all measurements, a successful film. From a purely financial standpoint at the very least. By contrast, Kubo and the Two Strings, a movie which hit theaters roughly a week or so after Suicide Squad, brought in about $12.6 million against a production cost of $55 million. This was, by the financial metric, a flop. Partially, it can be surmised, because many people went to see Suicide Squad to see if it was really as bad as they had been told. Here is my problem: Kubo and the Two Strings is unquestionably a better movie. Almost a third of the cost, and not even 10% of the opening weekend, and you may ask how that’s possible. If you haven’t seen Kubo and the Two Strings, I invite you to do so now. It’s on Netflix. Go ahead. I can wait. Okay, so since we’re all on the same page now, you may understand my problem a little better. Kubo and the Two Strings, for those who have ignored my advice and just kept reading, is a stop-motion animated movie based on Japanese folklore that tells the story of a boy who can control little pieces of paper by playing his magic Shamisen (a three-stringed guitar, effectively). He goes on a journey to learn about the fate of his father and to take up his quest to find three ancient magical artifacts to combat the villainous moon king. And that really is the least of it. Kubo’s story is beautiful. It’s touching, funny, awe inspiring, and frightening in a mix unlike any I have seen since… I dunno, Secret of Nihm? Not only is this movie critically acclaimed, it is also a much better fit for its rating than Suicide Squad’s ‘We can swear this many times without getting an R so we can appeal to a wider audience’ brand of nonsense that drives me up the damn wall. Kubo is, by all of the metrics I care about, a much, much better movie than Suicide Squad. And I don’t think I’d have a hard time finding a lot of people who agree with me. DC’s movie-making army, able as it was to leverage release dates and marketing pushes to plan and scheme about the perfect time to unleash its mediocrity on the world, inflicted a lot of damage on the studios and films that did not have the financial clout to play that game. Kubo came out when it did because that’s when it was done, and the studio wanted you to see it. Suicide Squad came out when it did to compete with Guardians of the Galaxy, which had come out the previous year, because DC was trying to imply that their movie would be a similar fun-fest to Marvel’s surprise blockbuster. And DC is well within its rights to play that game, because apparently that matters to marketing people. But I think they have managed to do us a disservice. For that matter, Marvel does the same thing. When one of these action-blockbusters with the trailers with over 2 million views on YouTube comes out, it buries everything else. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing, and bad movies get buried without getting condemned like they should because no one cares. But sometimes a good movie, a really good story told well and presented in a wonderful visual style gets buried by a bloated budget movie that claims to do the same thing. Kubo is a beautiful movie, with a great story, fantastic pacing, wonderful visuals and a message that is truly heartwarming. Suicide Squad is so obviously a cash-grabbing copy-cat that fails at being half as good as the movie it is trying to ape. One of these movies made $147 million on its opening weekend. The other made $12.6 million. One of these movies was trying so damn hard to be part of a larger, consistent universe of movies in a desperate attempt to catch up to the competition that has literally been doing this for a decade, and the other is a stand-alone story with no expectation for a sequel. One of these movies was a massive disappointment because of how it was built up, and the other was a delightful surprise the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long, long time. Suicide Squad had good publicity. Kubo and the Two Strings had a good story. The difference should not be so staggering. If there was justice, really, in the world, nothing but the financial scores would be exchanged. Even just on a percentage basis. Alas. I’ll admit. I don’t really have a point to this, but it was bothering me. If I did my job right, now it’s bothering you, too. Thanks for reading.

#movies

[paoulkaye-blog]

The Burden of Knowledge

                 There is a saying that ‘Knowledge is Power.’ It’s true. The more you know, the more you understand, the better you are able to adapt to your situation and the more control you tend to have over your life. It’s the reason we have schools, colleges, books, tests and exams, and even the Internet. The more you know, as it were.

                And it’s a good thing. It really is. Education is a wonderful thing and teachers simply do not get the recognition or praise or compensation they deserve. They are the replacement for the tribal elder who knew all that the tribe had ever known and passed it along to the children. Those elders were revered and honored, and we managed to screw that up completely. Good job, us.

                And yes, I could decry the state of education in my country at length. I really could. This profiteering attitude some people seem to have towards education for the next generation is disgusting to its core, and the wrong people are getting rich doing the wrong things to prepare our children for a lifetime that no one can anticipate. Kids learning basic math, literature, science, and how to be decent people should not be a tally mark on some jackass’s annual financial report.

                But there is a problem with too much knowledge. And I mean specific knowledge. There is no such thing as being too smart, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just some asshole who has realized that if you are dumber than he is, he can convince you to pay him for something. But you can know too much to remain comfortable in certain situations.

                For example: I am a bit of an entertainment media enthusiast. I like video games, I like movies, I like TV shows, and I have seen a lot of them. Enough, in fact, to recognize certain things. And see certain trends. And recognize tropes and clichés when they are being used. And… I’ll be honest, the movies and games and shows I like these days tend to be mindless fluff or something that honestly surprises me.

                So recently, my Wife and I watched La La Land. I like musicals and dancing, and this was a great movie for both. The ending left me… a little sad, let’s say. I was not expecting it to end the way it did, because it took me by surprise. I didn’t get the big happy musical number to close out the show like I was expecting (or at least the way I expected), and it made for a phenomenally good movie.

                Compare that with something like, say, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. I had a few expectations going in, based on my knowledge of movies in general, a few brushes with a couple of Marvel comics, and a bit of basic intuition. Pretty much all of them were met, in regards to the general arc of the story. There were some minor surprises for me, as well as the countless delightful bits of dialogue and the inventively done action, but it would be hard for me to say I didn’t see the major story beats coming ahead of time. I won’t go into too much detail to avoid spoiling a truly awesome film for anyone, but the Mary Poppins line was pretty much the last surprise I had.

                And don’t mistake my meaning here, just because Guardians was a bit predictable did not make it a bad movie. On the contrary, while I had a basic idea for how the story would play out, that expectation was nothing compared to the spectacle of comedy and character I got. It was awesome from beginning to end, and there is never going to be anything wrong with that. Likewise, La La Land’s twist ending was a total surprise to me, and while I may not have been emotionally delighted about the note it ended on, I still appreciate that it made me cry, and there is certainly a lot to recommend in an experience like that.

                The problem for me happens when I see something that is not only predictable, but is acting like it isn’t. I’m going to pick on DC a bit here: Batman v. Superman was the most predictable, clichéd mess I have seen in a while. It was almost Transformers levels of bad in its winking ‘You’ll never guess what happens next’ attitude that just permeates the whole damn thing. Yeah, Batman and Superman are going to fight. No, of course they won’t kill each other. Of course Lex Luthor is the bad guy. We already knew Wonder Woman was going to be there. Doomsday, huh? Oh boy, who would have guess it? And Superman died? No, seriously. Stop. I can’t handle the drama.

                And that’s the burden of knowledge. BvS was built on clichés and storylines that DC has been doing for years. Passing familiarity with either movies or comics would have been enough to spoil the whole story for you, and at that point the movie had to rely on spectacle. And even the spectacle was predictable. More shaky cam action with over-the-top effects of guys punching other guys through things. At least in Transformers the main characters can also turn into cars and trucks. This was just yet another ‘Trying to match Marvel’ attempt that was abysmally predictable and, while fun at times, was pretty unforgivably dumb. It could have been a much better movie if it had avoided being so painfully formulaic that I could almost guess 100% of the time what the next line of spoken dialogue was going to be, word for word.

                This is starting to tread dangerously into the grounds of Marvel vs. DC, which is a many-headed beast upon which I have several opinions, and none of them are meant for this. We’ll get back to that mess later.

                Because the burden of knowledge is heaviest for those who deal with reality. This is an issue that affects my wife much more vividly than it affects me. She works in a hospital, and has worked in hospitals for a number of years. She’s never been a nurse or a doctor, but in her various capacities, she has seen things. A lot of things. She only tells me about some of them.

                It takes a certain mindset to be a nurse or a doctor. An ability to compartmentalize the things you see and to be able to make your peace with horrible things while you find a solution or, at least, a Band-Aid. This is not something my Wife can do, and she realized that a long time ago. The worst part is, working where she does now, she sees a lot of these things come through the door: car crashes, gang violence, fires, the homeless and downtrodden, parents too stupid to properly look after their children, broken bones, psychotics, and the just plain drunk, the list is pretty gruesome. And aside from doing her job, she cannot do anything to help these people.

                This gets especially bad when it is children. I know she sees our boys in every child that comes through those doors, and she carries that weight with her every day. I can’t help her with it, either. I understand what she is experiencing intellectually, but I have no frame of reference for the emotional toll it takes on her. As a result, she is a very protective mother, and gets very fired up whenever anything might possibly harm them for any reason. Myself included.

                She can’t shut it off. I know that. It’s the burden of knowledge. She has seen too much, and she has been powerless to help these people in her professional life. My heart aches because there is little I can do to help her except keep trying to be the best husband I can be and support her as best I can with hugs, love, and understanding.

                Knowledge is power, yes, but it can also be pain. It is experience, hurt, and mistakes. Knowledge is for everyone, but there are some things man should not have to know. The next time someone seems to overreact or dismiss something out of hand, or even just behave in a manner inconsistent with your own experience, take a second to ask yourself what they might know that you do not. We are the product of our experiences, and no two people can ever totally share all of the same ones.

Just be aware of the burdens of knowledge we all bear, whether it just be a simple blunting of our enjoyment due to cliché and overused story beats, or a constantly fed fear of the ‘what if’ scenario that you have an all too vivid mental image of. We may all be different in the way we look at life, but we are undeniably in this together. Thanks for reading.

[paoulkaye-blog]

Intelligence v. Trump

                 So, happy Mother’s Day to everyone. I hope it was a good one. I tried to make sure my Wife had a wonderful day. We saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 in theaters, and man was that ever worth it. Such a good movie. I’ll probably get into that later.

                The Monday after Mother’s Day was… difficult. We introduce a big process change at work that had everyone scrambling and made the day just a catastrophe. It was a long and hard slog, and when I finally got to go home I was excited to see my kids and wife. I sat down on the couch to relax and figured I would check the news before I found something better to watch.

                Boy, that was a mistake.

                Last week, President Donald Trump fired the FBI Director, and the next day he had a meeting in the oval office with the Russian Foreign Minister and the Russian Ambassador. No American Press were allowed in the room for the meeting, but Russian State-Run media was there. And yesterday, it was revealed that during that very chummy looking meeting, President Trump shared Code-word classified intelligence with the Russians.

                Yep. Read that last one again. Go on. I’ll wait. You done? Cool.

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. ME?

                In what reality have we landed in where this is even slightly okay? We couldn’t have gotten here, surely, from twelve months ago when every Republican on the planet was saying Hillary Clinton should be locked up because she wasn’t careful enough with her E-mails. There’s no way we could have gotten here with all of this fake news about Russia and Trump and there being a connection between the two, right? It strains credulity, obviously, to assume that this is the place we have come to be after only 120ish days, doesn’t it?

                And yet, HERE WE ARE.

                The insanity of this administration has hit an all-time high. None of what I described was actually denied by them, by the way. McMaster told us that sources and methods were not revealed to the Russians, but that doesn’t change the fact that HE TOLD THEM SOMETHING. Something that sent the precious few Americans that were allowed in the room running to the NSA and CIA. Something that, with a little critical thought and some counter intelligence work, would reveal the name of a very important Intelligence source in one of the most tumultuous, anti-American regions of the world. Something that does not at all stretch the imagination to say that will put lives, probably American lives, at risk.

                So we’re going to quibble over just what Trump did tell the Russians? He gave away classified intelligence for no reason to a hostile foreign power. End. Of. Story. I don’t care if he can legally do so, that’s not the point. He has put dozens, maybe thousands, maybe even all of us, in danger. He is supposed to be the leader of our nation, not some gossipy teenage drama queen with too much money and a folder full of secrets he just can’t wait to tell his buddies.

                This shit is untenable. He needs to go, and he needs to go two weeks ago. I don’t even care how it happens anymore. Someone get him the hell out. For all of our sakes.

                This story is still developing, and I’m sure I have nothing of value to add to the conversation at this point. Suffice to say that of all of the lines he has crossed, this is the one he should be hanged with. Until I’ve taken something to calm me down and maybe had some more time to process this, I’ll keep this one short and end it here. Thanks for reading.

#politics

[paoulkaye-blog]

Words to live by.

 ‘Illegitimis non carborundum.’

If you don’t know what that means, or how to pronounce it, don’t worry. Latin can be a little obtuse. Although, fun fact: That’s not actually real Latin. It’s a mock-Latin aphorism. You can tell because Carborundum isn’t a Latin word, it’s an industrial abrasive better known as silicon carbide. It looks Latin enough, and it does resemble a gerundive (basically a Latin verbal adjective), but this phrase is about as legitimately Latin as a high-school dead language project.

Genuine or not, it’s still a good motto. It got its start back in World War II early in the war, where it’s originally attributed to British army intelligence. It got adopted as a motto by an American General named Joe Stillwell and was later popularized by 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The rest, as they say, is history.

Direct translation yields the following: “Not fit to be ground by the illegitimate.” Most people seem to prefer the other version, however, which is “Don’t let the Bastards grind you down.” I have a hard time denying the charm of the former, but the latter is a more viscerally pleasing turn of phrase.

It’s easy to understand why a war with quite a lot of grinding and an endless supply of bastards would yield such a phrase. And why an American Presidential candidate would adopt the mindset for the length of a political campaign. Fake Latin though it may be, ‘Illegitimis non carborundum’ are great words to live by, and always seem applicable to the moment.

Bills to pay? Keep your chin up and don’t let them grind you down. Annoying coworkers? Don’t let the bastards get to you. Starting to feel tired and worn out? Get up champ, and don’t let those bastards win! You are not fit to be ground by the illegitimate! Every joyous moment becomes a triumph that despite life’s countless injustices, you still stand to enjoy those moments. You haven’t given up. They haven’t beaten you yet. It’s a great mental middle finger to those who would try to break you for their own ends.

This is one of those few phrases that inspires familial camaraderie between myself and my brother. We have phenomenally different views of the world. He’s a bit overbearing, to put it mildly, and I can be sort of a stubborn jackass, to be nice about it, but we agree on more than we shout at each other about. This British knock-off of Latin wisdom, that I am certain we got from my Dad, really does bring out the best in our relationship. That back-to-back teamwork that can take on all comers and had my Mom telling us that if we ever actually got along, we could take over the world. It got us through a lot of Halo’s Legendary mode, too, but I digress.

It makes a great battle cry. “Don’t let the Bastards grind you down!” is probably the second thing I would shout charging down a hill. Right after “How many of them can we make die?” I have weird battle cries. Leave me alone.

More than anything, however, ‘Illegitimis non carborundum’ carries with it a distinct quality you don’t get from a lot of words to live by. It is implicitly inspiring because it is framed, in the English translation, as reassuring words spoken from one friend to another. It props up the group, better able as it is to weather the grind of the world at large, against the storm of those who disagree, or belittle, or ignore, or hate, or who can’t bring themselves to care about anyone else. Living by those words makes you a partner and a peer among a group that lives by the same creed. Don’t let the Bastards grind you down. You’ve got this, man, and we’re right here with you.

I know I sound a little self-help book-y today. And I’ll happily admit this is pretty schmaltzy, even for me, but hey I can’t be complaining about things all the time. That’s how the Bastards win. I’m happily married, a father of two, employed, insured, in possession of two cars and blessed with the ability to walk and talk and articulate my thoughts in a time and a place where I can easily share them with the world at large. And if I can manage all of that, you bet your ass I am not fit to be ground by the illegitimate. And when you think about your own life and its many joys and comforts, please realize that you aren’t fit to be ground by the illegitimate either.

Pass it along. Don’t let the Bastards grind you down. They are words of encouragement, of brotherhood, of confidence and of hope. Don’t let them get to you. If possible, watch as they grind themselves to dust trying to break you. Don’t let it happen. Keep your head up, and a smile on your face and your friends and family at your side. You aren’t alone in this. We’ve all got your back. Say it as loud as you can and as often as you can, and take comfort in knowing that even if you do break, even if they do win, we’re still here to help. You can always come back, and be stronger for it. All we ask is that you do the same for us when we falter and crack. When the time comes that you are the strongest of us, just say the words and you can lift us up and restore our resolve and we can get right back to thrashing those bastards.

Illegitimis non carborundum. Thanks for reading.

#motivation

[paoulkaye-blog]

The Same, but Different.

                 Let’s talk about equivalencies, shall we?

                There are a lot of people out there, myself included occasionally, that use an equivalence to justify their actions or stance or opinion. ‘Well, this is the same as that, so it’s fair’ is a common thought among probably all of us. We like comparing things to other things, it’s what we do. We also like to decry the injustice of one thing being treated one way and another, seemingly equivalent thing being treated in a completely different and usually much less positive manner.

                And lately, that seems like the world in a nutshell, doesn’t it? We all like to think we’re going through the same thing, so we all feel like our point of view is valid because our life experiences are equivalent. But if I can continue to be brutally honest in my little closet, they aren’t. Your experience is not the same as mine and is not the same as my brother’s and is certainly not the same as that of my children or your children or anyone’s children. We all experience life at a different speed.

                It would be idiotically brazen of me to claim that my experience in life is equivalent to that of someone my same age and economic background who joined the military. Especially in the last two decades. I have grade school friends that I’m still mildly connected to through Facebook who have served, and their perspective is wildly different from mine: much more grounded, much more passionate about the things they care about, and frankly a lot more respectable. To say that my experience in food service and retail and warehouse inventory management is equivalent to boot camp, being posted to a base in a foreign country, and serving a tour in a warzone is ludicrous. It’s not the same.

                Now here’s the bit where I stop my self-examination and start getting topical, so fair warning. I’ve gotten on the case of a certain Irish Bill and his predatory workplace antics, and how it took 13 years and a ridiculous amount of money to finally convince his bosses to get rid of him. And then this past Monday, a late night host who shall remain Stephen took the time to insult our commander in chief for his treatment of a journalist in the Oval Office. Now, I’ll readily admit that I haven’t often heard the phrase he used, and in fact I’ve only ever heard my brother say it out loud before, likening something to a holster for bits of the male anatomy. I suppose I can understand how something like that might offend people.

                But here’s the problem: Right after that, a lot of the President’s supporters (where does he keep these people?) were calling for Stephen to be fired. Less, I personally felt, for his crude joke and more because the right had just lost a visible champion in Bill, so they figured they could get one back by trying to get Stephen off the air. The implicitly declared this one-off rant equivalent to the reason Fox had just lost its big, shouting star. But guess what: They are not the same.

                Fox’s Factor personality was a serial sexual harasser, an angry self-righteous prick, and spent a large portion of the previous republican presidency referring to his political opponents as ‘pinheads.’ The Late Show is hosted by a man with no currently known major character flaws, a happy and accepting individual, and spent a large portion of the previous republican presidency portraying an outright parody of Bill O’Reilly. One of these things committed a crime in his workplace that his network had to pay 13 million dollars to cover up. The other occasionally needs to be bleeped because he said a bad word. To say there is an equivalence here is to willfully ignore reality in pursuit of your own gain.

                Now why does that sound familiar? Oh yeah. After three months of trying to get their metaphorical shit together, the Republicans finally, after three tries, managed to pass something through the house. They had such a hard time passing it, the perfect metaphor would have been to treat it like a kidney stone: break it up into smaller pieces and try passing it then. But hey, if Republicans have their way, no one will have to cover kidney stones anymore, so I guess chucking out that procedure was a fine first step.

                This was pushed through the house so hard and so fast, a lot of people who voted for the thing haven’t even read it yet. Hell, nobody had managed to read it because it didn’t exist in text until the night before the vote. Nobody had the time to examine the thing and figure out what sort if impact its measures would have on the individuals it supposedly covered or the way it would affect roughly a sixth of the national economy. Republicans literally passed a piece of legislation to show that they could, and they are comparing this to the way the Democrats handled the Affordable Care Act.

To hear the right wing spin doctors tell it, Democrats literally snuck Obamacare through the house and senate right under their noses in the middle of the night. They decried it then, and they’re using the equivalence argument now to justify the absolute insanity of passing a law no one has had the time to read yet. This is, they say, the same tactics the Democrats used to impose Obamacare on a populace that didn’t want it in the first place. This is the Republican equivalent.

                Here’s the thing, and I know you know what’s coming here: It’s NOT THE FUCKING SAME. The ACA, or Obamacare as Republicans gleeful took to rebranding it, spent months being worked on, campaigned for, debated, lied about, defended, modified and outright gutted before it got anywhere. Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement didn’t become law until 2010, two years after he became the President, and didn’t come into full effect until 2014. Hell, there are provisions in the law that are still on hold until 2020. It’s not like that change came overnight.

                Never mind the probable millions of people who will lose their health insurance. Never mind hypocrisy after hypocrisy pouring out of the mouth of any talking head on cable news with an [R] next to their damn name. Never mind the implied racism, the actual racism, the Russian men behind the curtain, the underqualified staffers, the stupendously unqualified President, the hearings, the press conferences, the gaffes, the soundbites, the words and the words and the words and all of the best fucking words you could ever have. Never mind civil discourse, rational debate, or putting the country you supposedly serve over the party that you registered with. Never mind cooperation, or thought critically applied to action, or even reading your own proposal. None of that matters to Republicans now.

                All they wanted was a Win. All they wanted was to show that, hey, we can govern and pass laws, guys, honest! We’re gonna pass so many laws, you’re gonna want us to stop, you’ll get tired of all the laws we pass, and of winning, and of having affordable medical options or affordable food or an atmosphere that does not choke the life out of you or of having the right to say anything you want to anyone you want.

                What is that attitude? An equivalent for a governing group of responsible individuals? An equivalent to a workable ideology in a global society where there are, you know, a majority of people that disagree with you? An equivalent to anyone who isn’t so deeply corrupted by special interest money and big donors with opinions they really should just keep to themselves?

              Say it with me now: It’s. Not. The. Same.

Thanks for reading.

#polotics

[paoulkaye-blog]

When They Come for One of Us...

                Twenty years ago, there was an all-out battle. Not in the Middle East, not on the shores of Britain, or even between drug lords in Columbia. No, this was a fight in Detroit. A long time coming for many a fan of that most confusing combination of graceful figure skating and violent beat-downs: Hockey. I of course am referring to the massive brawl between the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche.

                I am not a traditional sports fan. I watch the Super Bowl more as social homework so that I know what everyone is talking about the next day. I think Baseball is soul-crushingly boring and that Basketball is just too simple. I watch professional League of Legends because it’s something I can relate to, but my first and most long-lasting sports relationship is with the Detroit Red Wings.

                This is mostly because of my parents. Die-hard hockey fans, I sat with them and watched pretty much every playoff game the Wings were involved in during the 90s, which was a good time to be a wings fan. To this day, I keep track of how the team is doing in order to help gauge my mother’s mood during hockey season. If the wings do well, I should call her that day. If not… well, radio silence is golden.

                I kid of course, but it’s easy to understand how someone can have a deep personal investment in a team. And every team has to have a rival, and the Wings had the Avalanche. Cripes, I hated these guys growing up. Every time the Wings went up against Colorado, I watched, because we were all eager to see them get beat. This all got amplified by a single man: Claude Lemieux.

                Now, my mother has… let’s say disapproved of various sports figures over the years, but no one has ever inspired her vitriol like Lemieux. He delivered the absolute cheapest of shots to a Wings player named Kris Draper that shattered his face and gave him a concussion. At the time, there were serious questions about whether or not he would live, let alone play the game ever again. Afterward, Lemieux offered a lame-ass half apology and shrugged his shoulders. EVERYONE hated this guy. To make matters worse for the Wings fans, Lemieux and the Avalanche would go on to win the Stanley Cup that year.

                If this had been Football or Basketball, Lemieux would have served his suspension and it never would have come up again. He might have been fined something, actually, but still, that’s all the punishment he would have seen. But this is Hockey, and this is one of those things people do not easily let go.

                Darren McCarty, a Wings player who was close, close friends with Draper, had decided that Lemieux was going to pay, and in the next season a fight broke out that gave him the perfect opportunity. In front of a sold out crowd in an arena named after a boxer, a brawl broke out in the high-tension environment between Colorado’s Forsberg and Wings player Igor Larionov. Forsberg had put Larionov backwards into the boards and Igor had simply had enough. The two locked up and wrestled each other. This got the attention of the Linemen, the Ref, and Lemieux.

                Another Colorado player went for McCarty, probably seeing the writing on the wall, but Brenden Shanahan stepped in and freed McCarty up. Darren sailed across the ice and completely blindsided Lemieux, and proceeded to deliver possibly one of the most cathartic one-sided beatings ever given to such uproarious applause and cheering. The Joe Lewis arena exploded along with our living room as my parents, my brother and I watched from home, cheering right along with all of them. I was ten years old, and this was during the good old days when people were concerned that video games would make me a violent person.

                Pay per view boxing night has never hosted a brawl like what followed. It seemed like every Avalanche and Wings player erupted into a swirling melee of total chaos. I still firmly remember Roy and Vernon, both still decked out in goalie pads, slugging it out at center ice while McCarthy continued to pound on a panicked and turtling Lemieux. When the goalies collapsed, Vernon on top of a bleeding Roy, the crowd went totally nuts. I think that’s about when the officials got brave enough to try breaking it up, but good lord that fight lasted forever.

                The start of the next season saw a rematch of sorts. Lemieux went for McCarty as fast as he could, the other Colorado players body blocking to let Claude get his revenge. But that wasn’t to be. McCarty rallied and put the beating on Lemieux that made the crowd cheer like the Wings had just won the Stanley Cup again. Roy would get in on the action again, this time against Wings goalie Chris Osgood, during another large brawl in a game I can’t remember much about. But I do remember Osgood leaving his feet to tackle Roy at center ice.

                McCarty’s vengeance for Draper was the first and greatest in a series of brawls between the Colorado Avalanche and my mother’s Red Wings. It stands as one of the greatest sports moments I have ever witness. A true Team Fight, like you’d see in League of Legends, but without health bars and cooldowns. And after you’ve seen that at the age of ten, every other sport seems… well, less exciting.

                That attitude displayed by McCarty on Draper’s behalf has stuck with me though. It was a plain statement of ‘You come for one of us, you come for all of us.’ The team was truly that: A team. United in purpose and willing to go down fighting for one of their own. That Darren outright won both the initial fight and the follow-up brawl made it all the sweeter. I think that sort of teamwork is a glorious thing, and maybe something we need a bit more of.

                Because when I was a kid, Claude Lemieux was the most despicable, cowardly, smug son of a bitch in the world who would cower at the first sign of trouble. There are still people in the world like that, and while I know we can’t just beat them up and feel better about ourselves, it’s important to stand together, regardless of internal squabbles. If they come for one of us, they come for all of us. We need to be prepared to protect our own. Thanks for reading.