GTA gets jacked

Thanks to a furtive industrial spy and a bunch of meddling kids, a pirate version of the new Grand Theft Auto game is now available for download on the internet.

Obviously, Rockstar games is pissed. They intend to make a gazillion dollars of this game, and they don't want some punks getting to be the first to play it without laying the bucks on the barrelhead.

The developers released a statement expressing their outrage and disappointment.


Saliently:

"The proper authorities are investigating the theft and are continuing to investigate all possible leads to ensure there is no further dissemination of our creative content. Downloading, possession and distribution of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, including making the game available on the internet, is theft.

We take the theft of our intellectual property very seriously and we are and will continue to diligently and aggressively pursue this matter."


I like the GTA games. They're fun to play and artfully wrought and tremendously funny and all that good stuff. But that doesn't mean I can't delight in the irony of this situation.

They're outraged about the theft (and make no mistake, they say, it's THEFT!) of their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, which is a game comprised principally of carjacking. Unthinkable that the fans of a game about crime would have so little regard for the law!

I don't mean to be sanctimonious by suggesting that they deserved this based on the content of their games, but I don't think, given the content of their games, they should get to be beat their chests with moral outrage over the esoteric crime of apparently noncommercial software piracy.

John Kerry: X-treme to the Max

I guess  this   is Drudge's response to Michael Moore's derisive comments about Bush's time spent at Camp David and at his ranch in Texas. 
 
Moore's accusations were pretty much bullshit.  A lot of the time Moore said Bush was "vacationing" he was meeting with foreign leaders, who he typically receives in Crawford.  Michael Moore is kind of full of shit.
 
Of course these pictures actually make Kerry look really, really cool.  I think I want to vote for him now.

Kerry/Edwards

Cheney told Leahy to go fuck himself, but it's George Bush who is getting fucked this week.

Starting out, you have the chubby face of Michael Moore leering out from the cover of Time Magazine. That's not the kind of thing Georgey-boy likes seeing on the newsstand. Like many of his right-wing counterparts, Moore is much more committed to ideology than to truth, but he's made a powerful piece of propaganda that will reach a lot more swing voters than the Republican party's talk radio blather factory.

Since his personality and platform are largely amorphous, and his campaign is without a message, John Kerry's biggest selling point right now is the fact that he is not George Bush. "Farenheit 9/11" is a two-hour campaign commercial for not-Bush.

Meanwhile, Karl Rove and the strategery squat had presumed that Bush's commanding campaign war chest would allow him to smear John Kerry without fear of retaliation. But lavish spending on campaign commericals in swing states haven't broken the dead-heat in the polls, and Kerry has been raising money like crazy. Meanwhile, Kerry has picked a running mate whose presence will stretch Bush's resources very thin by forcing the republicans to spend money in states they thought they had locked up.

Early in the campaign, some pundits proposed that the nation had divided neatly into "red states" and "blue states" and that the battlegrounds were in an increasingly small number of "swing states" like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. In order to win, Kerry would have to ignore the South; his Massachusetts liberal pedigree was likely to drive moderate southern Democrats into the Bush camp. Kerry's choice of Edwards as a running mate gives the Democrats a fighting chance in the Southeast. Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and maybe Georgia are back in play, and every dollar Bush spends to shore them up is a dollar he can't spend in Florida.

Dick Cheney, meanwhile, is dead weight on the Republican ticket. Does anyone actually like this guy? He's mean, he is damaged by the suggestion of corruption, and he has a mouth like a toilet. If you ask me, Bush either needs to send this guy packing, or start packing himself.

Fixing the world

Somebody thought my post about how the everything was going to hell in a handbasket was really pessimistic. That's probably true, but it's the reasonable conclusion given the evidence.

Thousands of smart folks go to law school every year. Thousands of smart folks join the peace corps or get Masters' of Public Policy, or get PhDs in sociology, and the great mass of humanity is still miserable. Hell, thousands of smart, dedicated people go to teach in US public schools every year, and they don't even manage to fix those.

Meanwhile the world population is expanding exponentially, exacerbating overcrowding and various other problems of major cities, while also geometrically increasing the rate at which we deplete our natural resources.

Any realistic viewpoint has to acknowledge that there are major and serious problems that can't be fixed. Sometimes we manage to be oblivious to them, sometimes we manage to deny them. But that doesn't change things. There is genocide in Sudan and the Congo whether you know it or not. Social Security is headed for bankruptcy whether you know about it or not.

Physicists will tell you that everything inexorably slides to entropy, and maybe that's the problem. I can't look at the world and reasonably believe that it will be a pleasant place in 50 years or so when my grandkids might be setting out into it (If I don't catch a stray bullet or get hit by a taxi or become sterile as a result of exposure to pollution, and if I can somehow persuade, cajole or trick a woman into bearing my offspring).

It's not optimistic, but I can't figure any other way. Anyway, stay tuned. My next post will be about why I think we should torture terror suspects.

Slut! Tramp! Whore!

Britney Spears is marrying a backup dancer who has two kids by another woman. They've been dating for two months. I guess you can take the trash out of the trailer, but you can't take the trailer out of the trash. You know, because Britney is trailer trash.

WHORE!

Reagan

When I saw that Ronald Reagan had died today, my immediate reaction was to wonder how this would effect the 2004 presidential race. This will doubtless build a lot of good photo ops for Bush, and a lot of uncritical television discussion of conservative policy goals.

I think that the Republicans will be able to successfully milk this for political benefit, and do it subtly enough to avoid a backlash. The Republican political machine is sinister, but it's more deliberate and calculating than the Democratic "grassroots" organization, which turned the Wellstone funeral into a political rally that was viewed with distaste.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, still remains an undefined factor. His book is scheduled for release on the 22nd, and he could either use the media attention that will result to boost Kerry, or to marginalize him. I think Bill Clinton probably doesn't want to see four more years of Bush, but I'm not sure he's on board with Kerry's vision of the Democratic party. It's clear now, though that this election will take place in the shadows of Reagan and Clinton.

Law school in one minute

This is the basic, distilled lesson that I have drawn from my 1L experience:

Society's problems are systemic and intractable. Attempts to resolve them will only create new problems. Human civilization is, thus, not sustainable. If you have a Sisyphus complex, you can waste your life trying to prevent the fall of society. Otherwise, you should put on a suit, and go make enough money to build a monument over your grave that will be large and durable enough to survive the inevitable cataclysm.

How much do you think it would cost to get a 50 foot equestrian statue of myself molded out of titanium?