I hear they want to be there
From nearly everyone I meet
at restaurants and parties
cos happiness is relative
that would be my theory
perched up here above the world
so desperate and so greedy
“Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the high-octane antiterrorism thriller developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, took top honors on Thursday night at the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the video game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars.”
LI is thrilled for Activision. There are those who say that America has forgotten it is occupying Iraq. Our gamer warriors, though, are semper fi – not our brave, not our proud.
Bobby Kotick is the CEO of Activision. You can’t fault him for ingratitude. He knows the cultcha that fed him...
“In addition, a handful of Bush Pioneers and Rangers who now give heavily to Republicans have a history of giving almost exclusively to Democrats in past elections. Activision CEO Robert Kotick gave $25,500 to Democratic candidates, leadership PACs and party committees and nothing to Republicans in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles. But in the first nine months of 2003, Kotick gave the Republican National Committee $25,000, the maximum amount allowed under the law.”
LI’s idea is that the video game industry just hasn’t gone far enough. Imagine if the box came with bandages, cotton wadding, and some dull bladed knives – so you could quickly get rid of limbs or eyes chewed up by the fragments of flying glass and metal that result from car bombs, or perhaps the cleaner, surgical bombs let loose by American aircraft! Excitement would build as one tried to play with one eye plastered over, or one leg crooked into a painful brace. Awesomeness wouldn’t be the word for it!
Call of Duty 4, released in November for PCs, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is the first game in this acclaimed series that is not set during World War II. Thought to be risky at first, the game’s modern setting and story line involving deranged ultranationalist Russians, loose nuclear bombs and a Middle Eastern coup have made it a commercial and critical success. Activision has said the game has sold more than seven million copies across its various systems.
Meanwhile, the Dems have a scary opportunity in this year of sinking real estate values. Apparently, many Americans have come to the conclusion that the sticker price for the vanity war has gone too high – imagine that!
“WASHINGTON (AP) — The heck with Congress' big stimulus bill. The way to get the country out of recession — and most people think we're in one — is to get the country out of Iraq, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
Pulling out of the war ranked first among proposed remedies in the survey, followed by spending more on domestic programs, cutting taxes and, at the bottom end, giving rebates to poor people in hopes they'll spend the economy into recovery.
The $168 billion economic rescue package Congress rushed to approval this week includes rebates of $600 to $1,200 for most taxpayers, the hope being that they will spend the money and help revive ailing businesses. President Bush is expected to sign the measure next week. Poor wage-earners, as well as seniors and veterans who live almost entirely off Social Security and disability benefits, would get $300 checks.
However, just 19 percent of the people surveyed said they planned to go out and spend the money; 45 percent said they'd use it to pay bills. And nearly half said what the government really should do is get out of Iraq.
Forty-eight percent said a pullout would help fix the country's economic problems "a great deal," and an additional 20 percent said it would help at least somewhat. Some 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal; 36 percent said cutting taxes.”
There's only one problem with this - it would actually work. And that would bring down upon the Dems the collective wrath of the Petro-Gun club in D.C. Imagine, if you will, a sort of nightmare in which Pinocchio sees all the candy canes at the fair melting before his eyes - that same sinking feeling would inhabit the poor generic Dem Politicians soul as the opportunity for legal graft from the people who have the serious money in the country evaporates. It is one thing to ineffectually oppose Bush’s war plans – throwing sops to suckers is just good business. But to follow the money – why, that’s getting personal.
LI however, is ever the optimist. Maybe somebody will pick up on those poll numbers and actually use them. In the meantime, I'm getting back to picking off that crazy Russian, givin a neutron bomb to the mad mullahs - I think I'm gonna use the saturation bombing option.
Are you really sure it would work? The same elite that benefits from the War Industry has largely off-shored and shipped out any civillian industries. War is what we do. The only thing we do. I live and work in a town with a military base that has 16,000 employees. They are not going to be able to transition over to making i-Phones. War is much more profitable-at least for the short term. Eventually, empire will crumble, but cutting the war machine would not lead to an economic boom.
ReplyDeleteBrian, I'm pretty sure that destroying America's manufacturing base has left the country with bad short term choices. In the long term, however, we do face the most expensive disaster ever - massive environmental disaster - and that has the shape, at least, of war - which could lead to the responses that modern industrial societies produce in the face of war: massive R and D programs, massive borrowing, and massive injections of public money into manufacturing.
ReplyDeleteWill that work? Is the analogy a bad one? Well, in one way, right off the top of my head, it might be a bad one in that, perhaps, the response to our environmental crisis might be to de-grid - that is, to return to the model of local or freestanding power generators - return to a less heavily fertilized agricultural routine - figure out what to do about the lessening roi from irrigation. Etc.