Greg Sanders

No food for oil: End corn ethanol subsidies

Steven Mufson has a devastating piece in the Washington Post on how attempts to harvest corn-based ethanol are contributing to the world food crisis.

One quarter of U.S. corn production is now going into ethanol. At the same time farmers are shifting from other crops to grow corn so that percentage means more than it would have years ago. And for what? According to a recent study in Science magazine ethanol produces more CO2 than gasoline does. This isn’t a new idea, corn-based ethanol has always been a boondoggle. Without subsidizes this wouldn’t be happening because the process is unprofitable. Many defenders point out that corn grown for ethanol isn’t usable for food for humans, true enough, but the land could be used to crow crops that are edible.

For a long time, this sort of policy wasn’t worth that much political capital. Everyone knew it was a problem, but the U.S. system is heavily biased towards farm state Senators so fixing it was often thought to be more trouble than its worth. Ezra Klein cites a NY Times article by Andrew Martin where the International Food Policy Research Institute attributed a quarter to a third of the spike in commodity prices to biolfuels. The Food and Agriculture Organization at the UN predicted "predicted late last year that biofuel production, assuming that current mandates continue, would increase food costs by 10 to 15 percent."

Well now we’ve got a silent tsunami (via PCR) on our hands. The world food crisis could push 100 million people into absolute poverty.

No food for oil.

Economics confusion

Daniel Drezner has a new post up that confuses me. For some reason I can never get the comments on his site to work, so I’m posting my puzzlement here.

One of the more invidious comparisons analysts like to make is to compare the size of something with a country’s gross domestic product. An old warhorse of political economy/anti-corporate types, for example, is to say that the sales of multinational corporations exceeds many countries GDP. This is true but irrelevant -- GDP measures the value-added that an economy generates per year, so the proper and correct comparison is between a firm’s profits and GDP. When using that metric, corporations suddenly don’t look so big.

If I’m reading the make-up of GDP right, profits aren’t really a valid comparison either. Wouldn’t that be comparable to the net domestic product? Or am I missing something here?

Update: Kevin Drum also questions Drezner on this.

Blog roll addition: James Fallows

I’ve been meaning to update my blogroll for a while and it seems like now is a good place to start. My latest add is James Fallows over at the Atlantic. He’s a journalist presently living in Beijing and does great coverage of China. The man is also quite tech savvy and it sounds like we all owe him a debt of gratitude.

We all pick our causes. During my brief and enjoyable stint at Microsoft long ago, I worked on various big-think projects. But my claim to have changed the world may rest on my all-out war against "Clippy," the moronic "help" feature that popped up to say "Hey, you seem to be writing a letter!" each time you typed "Dear ..." I don’t want to overstate things, but before I arrived, Word came with Clippy turned on by default. Now it’s turned off by default. Judge for yourself.

His current quest is to get people to stop using the "boiled frog" analogy. Turn up the heat fast, frog jumps out, slow, frog stays in and boils. Apparently it isn’t true. I’m not going to fully join that crusade, but I will make sure I don’t use that particular parable.

Fallow’s is also the author of a classic 1996 piece on why Americans hate the media. Great read and still holds today.

Alternatives to war crimes trials

Over at the PCR blog another blogger friend, Shannon Hayden, raises the question of how likely war crime trials of Americans, possibly by foreigners could be:

We were once treated to an off-the-record briefing with a former Member of Congress on the state of all things congressional; when a question about possible war crimes prosecutions arose, it went over like a lead balloon. Can you even imagine the firestorm of debate and soul-searching that would ensue if an American official was detained abroad on such charges?

The general read is that it doesn’t seem that likely, at home or abroad, at least for now. That said, JB over at Balkinization discusses in America short of trials.

A series of congressional investigations into the interrogation and detention policies of the previous Administration, or a special Presidential "truth commission" like the 9/11 Commission would have certain advantages. They would require only that the next Administration cooperate with Congress-- for example, by declassifying certain OLC opinions and other documents that should never have been classified, and by giving permission for certain executive branch officials to testify before Congress.

He goes over a few obstacles but concludes that it’s far more likely than criminal trials of someone in the current admin.

Zimbabwe Round-Up

Quick news from Zimbabwe round-up. In the latest elections the opposition won the parliament and had somewhere between a plurality and majority victory for the Presidency. The official results haven’t been released for weeks and will be highly tainted. Opposition figures are being arrested and harrassed, although that’s fairly par for the course for Mugabe’s regime.

Johanne over at Democratic Piece found that Mugabe is having a hard time getting more guns. The reason is that citizens of other African countries, out of solidarity, aren’t let a Chinese cargo ship dock to offload them

The New York Times reported today that Angola prohibited the offloading of the arms shipment destined for Zimbabwe. The Chinese vessel carrying the cargo - the “ship of shame” as it’s called in African newspapers - previously attempted to unload the 77 tons of arms - including rockets, ammunition, and bombs - in Durban, South Africa, but was blocked by dock workers.

Angola, a longtime ally of Zimbabwe, was probably Zimbabwe’s best hope for receiving this arms shipment. After Durban, the vessel bypassed Namibia when the Legal Assistance Centre of Namibia announced in advance that it would thwart the ship from unloading. After a second failure to unload, the ship will likely now return to China.

Speaking of Zimbabwe, Mark Irvine, a friend over at the PCR blog, found a great quote in a NY Times story by Barry Bearak about his imprisonment for doing election coverage in Zimbabwe:

I was being charged with the crime of “committing journalism.” One of my captors, Detective Inspector Dani Rangwani, described the offense to me as something despicable, almost hissing the words: “You’ve been gathering, processing and disseminating the news.”

I tend to agree with the analysis of Jack, also at the Democratic Piece. A democratic transition is likely in progress. That was my feeling once I heard about the major electoral losses being suffered in [parliament]. If that kind of news is getting out, it’s probably already mostly over. Question is just how the end game plays out. Mugabe is an amazingly inept leader, inflation is presently at wheel barrel of money levels. He’s basically just in power because he was an anti-colonial revolutionary leader (once again, thanks George Washington for only serving two terms, much obliged). Some of that lot proved good people, many of them were greatly corrupted by power. However, happily, it’s a generation that’s literally dying off. As it leaves, the countries in question can begin to recover from another terrible legacy of colonialism.

[Updates: Jack fixes my clarification noting, sensibly, that there’s a transition in progress but it won’t necessarily be democratic. See comments. Makes sense to me.]

Clinton challenges Obama to Lincoln-Douglass style unmoderated debate

Via Ezra Klein:

I understand the Obama campaign’s decision to refuse more media-driven debates before the North Carolina primaries. The last one was an unenlightening debacle, and a distraction from the issues of the race.
But now the Clinton campaign is challenging Obama to unmediated,
Lincoln-Douglas style debates. I’d certainly watch. And though it’s
easy to forget, Obama and Clinton actually look great when talking
about real issues in a serious way.

From the challenge (also included in Ezra’s piece):

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the famous Lincoln-Douglas
debates, a series of public debates across Illinois where two
candidates put their ideas, their visions, and their values before the
American people. I have no doubt that Senator Obama, who hails from
that great state, understands how valuable and vital these national
conversations were to the heart of America. We can surely meet the
standard our forbearers did. Our final two primary candidates to date
have had three fewer debates than Lincoln and Douglas held in single
state over 60 days in 1858.

I’m ready for this primary to be over, but still, well played Senator. This could be pretty awesome. I say go for it. While we often talk about the importance of uniting against the Republicans there’s also times to unite against another common foe: media hackery.

Controversies [relavant] to my blog roll.

I do keep Pandagon on my blogroll and Amanda Marcotte (who along with Pam Spaulding is the main blogger on the site) has gotten in a couple big fights lately that tie into larger issues with women of color and feminism. In the latest one, she’s taken some hard hits from people I respect so I figured it was worth posting on. More after the cut/

Neat theology post by Douthat

Ross Douthat has a neat post on whether natural selection undermines some concepts of Christianity.

The idea that evolution-by-natural-selection somehow disproves religion in general, or theism more specifically, is basically preposterous. The idea that the mechanism of natural selection, in which the development of man requires millions of years of strife and suffering and death in the animal kingdom, poses a specific challenge to Christian beliefs about the nature of God is more plausible, and warrants a more serious response than the "hey, evolution is too compatible with a belief in designer God" rejoinder that some Christian apologists, D’Souza included, often employ.

Specifically he thinks it challenges the idea of "the fall" and offers three retorts: 1) animals don’t matter, 2) sin affected animals on a fall prior to human’s (apparently C.S. Lewis’s favored belief), 3) the fall ran both backwards and forward in time.

I personally am not attached to the concept of the fall and only tend to like the story in a subversive freedom isn’t free way, but nice to see actual logical engagement. As with most everything else, I don’t tend to find concepts that interesting unless they’re falsifiable and Douthat has rather different views than I do but may be similarly inclined on that point.

Anyways, several commenters also point out that through natural selection and other means the idea of a omnipotent+benevolent god is both falsifiable and fairly obviously untrue. I’m willing to write-off silly paradoxes but even then it’d be possible to design a universe with both freedom and much less suffering than in our present one. On the other hand my main problem with a lot of liberal theology is that it just tends to take all the falsifiable statements away which often just leaves mush behind, nice friendly mush to be sure, but still mush.

Anyways, I’m going to continue to mostly avoid theology on this blog, but I reserve the right to occasionally comment on articles or posts I like.

Best way to top off a prolonged stretch of writing? Saving the universe

So after a long hard slog this week at work I finished up at a reasonable hour today and went home and beat Mass Effect.

I was quite pleased with the final sequence and ending. One structural problem I’ll note though is that as your journal makes clear, most of the game is a race against time. So I always felt weird gallivanting around on sub-quests and only did them in systems I was visiting for plot reasons anyway. That said, this is a common RPG problem.

In the end, I’m highly satisfied with the game. Mechanic wise, the ending was much more fun than the ending of Bioshock because you could gun down a mix of grunts and mid-bosses you’d come to respect.

One disappointment, I’d heard that you could use reputation to actually purchase stuff (like dialog options or something). Turns out that doesn’t seem to be true. Might let you buy skill in the dialog abilities, but the relationship wasn’t really made clear and I think it’d be a bit more fun if it had an impact more often than when you leveled. Also, they consistently highlight the charm/intimidate option, which takes much of the tactics out of dialog trees.

That said, I was still content with many of the paragon/renegade choices. A fair number of them involve dog kicking, but you can also just be a renegade by being greedy or insubordinate, which is cool. Similarly, the hacking mini-game was not as cool as Bioshock’s. It was basically Simon. That said, it was much faster than Bioshock’s and thus at times less annoying. There may be a balance achievable here.

On the themes, in Mass Effect humanity is a rising power. By and large other races use us and treat us fairly shabbily, although weaker races get a bit resentful because our power still accords us some respect. Many of the choices involve whether you’re out for humanity or see humanity as party of a larger group of organic creatures. One thing the game could really use is some sort of running tally of humanities fortunes. There’s a lot of plot clues as to the impacts of your actions, but I’m thinking something more quantitative. That’d make the cost of some noble choices much more clear.

Greg is exhuasted blogging

Turns out I’m not as young as I used to be. Managed to take too much caffeine last night so a part-nighter became an all-nighter but without the productivity benefits of an all-nighter.

Anyways, here’s a cute post from Stephen Totilo:

I was recently IMing with my good friend Justin McElroy of Joystiq.com fame. It turns out that Justin and I share a similar lament. We believe that one of the most exciting parts of a super-hero’s life — the moment he or she needs to duck away from civilian friends and make the costume change into a hero — is woefully underrepresented in video games.

In fact, in some super-hero games, it’s not present at all.

Is there a level in a Superman game in which I have to figure out how to discreetly get Clark Kent out of the Perry White’s office so that I can rescue the crashing airplane that only my super-hearing can detect?

The risk with that sort of thing is that it gets implemented as a one level gimmick with a weak control scheme. To do it right, you’d have to combine it with a game where you actually regularly played as the "normal" persona. I’m thinking it might work best in a Superman or Spiderman game where the character actually does some investigating as a reporter/photographer. Maybe that can let them scout areas where going in a superhero would lead to instant combat. Batman doesn’t do that much investigation as Bruce Wayne and really you can only do so many "Gotham’s finest gather" levels.

On a vaguely related note, many are asking why the Democratic super-delegates are taking so dang long to get their act together and commit. My theory? Every time two supers meet for the first time they have to have a fight. That slows things down a lot.

Bad politicians, bad!

There are many stupid political policy panders out there. As an example Yglesias notes complaints about the price of gas when ultimately dealing with environmental problems will require higher prices. Far more troubling, as Jason Zengerle is pandering on issues like whether vaccines are linked to autism:

Actually, as the WaPo’s Michael Dobbs points out, the science isn’t inconclusive: numerous studies have found no link between vaccines and autism. But there are plenty of people who don’t let the science get in the way of their suspicions. Having two out of the three presidential remaining presidential candidates fan those suspicions--McCain has made comments similar to Obama’s--doesn’t help matters.

P.S. Which is all the more reason to get behind this ScienceDebate2008 idea.

That sort of thing is a real gaffe and the candidates should be called on it. Ezra Klein notes that Clinton has done it too, although hers was a lower key written response if I’m reading this right.

Quick trip update

Still on vacation.  Anyways, a bit more detail.  I've been staying in St. George, Utah.  The saint in question is not the dragon slayer but apparently a Mormon settler that found that potatoes can help prevent scurvy.  Interesting if true.

Saturday we hit Zion National Park and today Bryce Canyon.  Zion really feels huge, lots of big edifices on both sides.  Bryce is more spread out and has 'hoodoos' which are not just a voodoo related term but also covers neat rock pinnacles.  Of the two we had more fun at Bryce, but I'd recommend both.

I've taken lots of pictures, but I'll put them up when I have some down time.

Early Mass-Effect commentary

Got the game for my birthday a couple weeks ago and have played through a good bit of it now.  I'm generally quite happy with it, particularly the universe and the plotting, but there are some noteable problems.

Let's cover the bad first this time.

• There is no real learning curve and many key game concepts are only introduced if you check the manual.
• The game doesn't really handle melee that smoothly.  This is particularly troubling as when you sabotage an enemies weapon they have a fairly rational impulse to run up and smack you around.  This is particularly ugly when you're taking cover.  I don't think melee necessarily needs to be good in this game, but they should have tweaked the AI so it hides while its guns are recharging rather than storms you.
• I didn't think the equipment system was as horrible as many people thought, but it still could easily be a lot better.
• There's no way to check your journal in galaxy map mode, which means you have to do some switching back and forth to figure out where to go for side-quests.
• The controls on your vehicle are a bit wonky.  I think the problem is that it mixes wheeled vehicle stearing with thumbstick controls relative to your camera angle.  I could be wrong, but I think it would work a lot better if you had absolute thumbstick control as the vehicle often ends up moving in ways I don't want it to.

Now the good.

• The world is rather well realized and has a lot of interesting characters.  Basing it off actual earth pays dividends because a lot of the NPCs feel much more real.
• The alien races are fun and have some depth, if not an amazing amount of it.
• Some of the settings are really pretty.
• The key plotlines often seems inspired by other good sci-fi, but they're a bit genre saavy about it and put in good twists.
• I'm generally happy with the cover system once I figured out that cover is fairly sticky and you don't have to keep moving to stay in it.  I've had friends that had problems with it, not sure if they threw in an AI upgrade or something between when they played it and when I did.
• The core mechanics are pretty simple and pretty fun.  I particularly like how they handled healing.  Only real kludge are grenades.

So I'm on vacation so I'll stop here, but later on I may throw in how I'd fix some of the problems.

Off to Southern Utah

Doing some geography sightseeing with family. Posting will thus be rather limited for the next few days and may simply not happen. In exchange, I’ll be sure to post my pictures when I get back. For now, here’s one from the general area.

Image by James Gordon used under a creative common license

More Mechanics=Worse game?

[Pre-scheduled post while I’m off on a trip.]

Via N’Gai Croal, an argument from John Rose of Gamasutra: Fewer Mechanics, Better Game.

Players must feel as though their possible actions form a cohesive whole. They must think that they sufficiently understand the system of their game world. Therefore we must make our systems strong enough to be understandable. The inclusion of too many game mechanics is the surest way to dilute this strength and rob players of their valuable insight...

I argue that a few well-developed game mechanics in a strong play aesthetic will always be more enjoyable. Players ultimately want to learn and triumph over a system. But the inclusion of too many mechanics only serves to de-systemize the game...

When applied to game mechanics, this fact supports the inclusion of only strong ones. Any mechanic that is underutilized by most players is a waste of developer and player time. It’s well known that if players aren’t confident with a game mechanic, they simply won’t use it. They demand a set of influences that they understand. Bad designers will often force players to use mechanics in order to justify their existence, but this robs the developer of its resources and the player of his fun.

Okay, I’m with him so far. On the whole we probably err on the side of too many mechanics. A mechanic should be fairly strong or left out. That said, I do make an exception for flavor mechanics. Things like customizing character appearance, getting stuff for the player’s house, optional mini-games can add to the fun. That said, they shouldn’t be mistaken for core mechanics. However, Rose also makes an argument I vehemently disagree with.

A recent trend in games is the ability of players to "play their own way." It’s a design choice that includes more mechanics than any particular player will explore in a single playthrough. While superficially this seems like the Holy Grail of game design, the idea merely passes on the entertainment responsibility to the player. These games include a myriad of mechanics in the hope that the player will find some to suit him.

BioShock is an example a great game whose giant mechanic set only weakens its play aesthetic. While the title’s story and environment have set the bar for many games to come, there’s just too much to do. In many a difficult situation players are left to decide between their guns, plasmid powers, hacking, stealth, and the use of one-shot items.

I’d say the problem in Bioshock is more one of resource management. It was greater for me than for most players because I intentionally kept my Big Daddy kill count down and thus reduced the amount of powers I could buy. That said, aside from your wrench, everything burns either ammo or energy. This can easily force players into having to use mechanics they don’t like because they don’t have the resources to use the ones they do. I’d agree that in that case, the systematic nature of the game is undermined. Similarly, some of the mechanics, like stealth, were pretty dang weak. If dropping that would have greatly improved another mechanic, I guess I’d take it.

All that said, Bioshock isn’t the epitome of multi-path gaming, for that, one must turn to Dues Ex, and indeed one of a commenter does. That game was known for letting you play with powers, stealth, or guns and doing a lot of things pretty dang well. Did it do too much? Sure, but multi-path was not the source of that problem.

What Rose misses is the possibility for a game to have multiple systems. He favorably sites Team Fortress 2 being multiplayer only but doesn’t mention that the play style will vary greatly dependent on which character type you have. That said, I think there’s a fair argument for cutting down unnecessary features within each character type and will probably do a post on this vis-a-vie Mass Effect later this week.

In a small scale game, like a Portal, having a single path is appropriate. The world needs more small scale non-casual games. But as the scale rises, one of the features you can add is new, tight, systems of mechanics within your larger system. Not everyone will enjoy every sub-system, but it means that some players will enjoy their favorite gameplay style a heck of a lot more.

Does free will exists? Meh

Amanda Marcotte has up a post shooting down the idea of free will. I tend to disagree but although I enjoyed her argument. Mainly I just wanted to drop a quick post on how much I enjoy the Pandagon comment threads. They raise all the points I’d want to make and a few I haven’t thought of.

Anyways, my main response is that free will at this point is a bundle of concepts, some useful, some outdated. I think the general shape of this bundle is actually pretty well determined: are we a blank state? are we controlled by our environment? can we control our own fate? is there a soul or a mini-me making decisions? is human behavior deterministic or random? To which I say meh. Some of these are interesting, some are not. Bundling them together just makes it harder to discuss it nowadays without getting into centuries old arguments with no real grounding in science. This bundle can work out alright theologically or dramatically but outside of those contexts it obscures more than it reveals.

So I’m laying down my arms in this fight. This bundle is not worth fighting for or fighting over. As one of the commentators put it, "free will" isn’t falsifiable.

I’d say the same thing is true when talking about whether religion is a good thing or a bad thing. I think that tends to be the wrong unit of analysis. Better to focus on concepts that show up in some religions as well as some secular movements, such as "those who do not share my doctrine deserve punishment." I think it’s safe to say that said idea has caused much more harm than good and that it’s possible to get along fine without it. There’s a reason things legal codes tend to be based on actions and not beliefs. That said, I’m not looking to punish people who hold such a doctrine.

School House Rock didn't cover this

Marty Lederman reads a Washington Post article and learns that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) managed to add an earmark to the text of a bill after both houses of Congress had voted for itbut before it was signed.

Meredith Kenny, Rep. Young’s spokeswoman, explained further that "the lawmaker always intended for the earmark to designate money to the interchange project, not generic highway improvements. So committee aides altered the bill to reflect that after the House and Senate had approved it. ’There was an error in the bill and so it was corrected,’ she said."

"There was an error in the bill" -- the error being that the earmark reflected Congress’s presumed intent rather than Rep. Young’s -- "and so it was corrected."...

(Local planning officials in Florida had no desire to build the [earmarked] interchange, and "were outraged to learn after the highway bill became law that they were required to spend $10 million on a project they did not want." It appears the only one who did want the interchange was developer Daniel Aronoff, whose land would increase substantially in value by virtue of the I-75 interchange. Coincidentally, Aronoff hosted a fundraiser in 2005 that garnered about $40,000 for Rep. Young’s re-election campaign.)

The Senate is calling for a Justice Department investigation. Lederman asks some good follow-ups.

I don’t think I truly want to know the answer to this question, but here goes: How is it, exactly, that an aide to a congressman can, quite literally and physically, "correct" a bill in between the time it is approved by the House and the Senate and the time it is enrolled and sent to the President? Can anyone just walk right into whatever congressional office it is that handles the bill, ask for the official copy of the text, take out a red pen, and start "correcting"? (Imagine David Addington with such an opportunity! Who needs signing statements?)

I tend to think earmark complaints are overblown. Discretionary spending is a small part of the overall non-defense budget. That said, this sort of thing may be a key factor undermining the strength of Congress versus the executive branch. So, in falsifiable terms, more explicitly directed money from Congress (including defense spending) would lead to fewer vetoes, fewer overrides of vetos, fewer investigations of the executive branch, and more support for Presidential proposals, like treaties.

However, I’m not really sure how much is fixable. For that I’ll need to find some with some comparative government expertise in legislatures.

Labor protections? Jeez, you'd almost think China was going communist on us

Ariana Eunjung Cha wrote up the impact of the new labor in China a couple days back in the post. Is it a good law? Well the title is "New Law Gives Chinese Workers Power, Gives Businesses Nightmares" which, given the present situation in China, basically means unalloyed good thing.

Wei Hoqiang used to work in a toy factory that forced him to sign a contract it did not let him read. It paid him 30 cents an hour, made him work 100 days without a day off, and kept him in a room that was
ice cold in winter and suffocating in summer. He said he knew he was being taken advantage of, but he was so afraid of his boss’s ire that he stayed for two years...

Armed with a landmark new labor contract law that went into effect Jan. 1, employees like Wei are turning the tables on employers in China.

The law -- designed to combat forced labor, withholding of pay, unwarranted dismissals and other abuses -- represents a major victory for Chinese workers who for decades have complained of companies that would stop at nothing to wring out profits. It has prompted legions of workers in recent months to become bolder about quitting and about staging strikes to demand improvements in work conditions and wages...

It has added to the rising cost of doing business in China -- contributing to an exodus of what is estimated to be thousands of factories from places like the Pearl River Delta in southern China, for 20 years synonymous with cheap and abundant labor and the engine behind China’s rapid growth...

Not all of these companies are leaving the country, however. Many say they are moving to less developed parts of China that offer tax breaks and other incentives to offset the increasing costs associated with the new labor law.

Well worth reading the whole thing. Anyways, while the article does compare the worker-business trade-offs I think it makes quite clear that in the places where it’s really coming into force, the situation is still roughly full employment. That isn’t a coincidence, you can probably bet that in the less developed parts of China mentioned above, one of the incentives will be spotty enforcement of the law. The PRC may have a strong central government, but it has fairly weak regulatory regimes and lots of corruption.

Anyways, from the sound of it, the sketchy businesses are finding new people to exploit and the prosperous regions are maturing into economies with more legal safeguards. This will probably be a good thing for everyone involved, the less developed areas will probably initially welcome some of those sketchy jobs.

There probably won’t be that many implications for U.S. companies operating in China. From what I’ve heard, we already tend to be at the top end of employers. What are the implications for U.S. importers? Harder to say, there’s a lot of poor Chinese people out there, although businesses operating in the interior will probably have to rely on less developed infrastructure.

How ethnic cleansing happens

Spencer Ackerman, over at his new blog Attackerman, comments on a Washington Post article by Walter Pincus that I also noticed this morning. In short the article said that the Iraqi government isn’t doing much for Iraq’s 2 million refugees but that sectarian militia’s are helping them resettle.

How are they helping them resettle? By putting them in the houses abandoned by refugees from rival sectarian groups. That’s ethnic cleansing for you, or I suppose sectarian cleansing. To be clear, I’m not using ethnic cleansing as a euphemism for genocide, I don’t think what’s happening is quite so one-sided or has the enormity to qualify.

Here’s Ackerman’s take on the subject:

One of the things that struck me as impressive on the part of David Petraeus and (yes) Ray Odierno was their understanding that you’d support a militia, too, if it was the only thing standing between you and an opposite-sect death squad — or even an out-of-control traffic roundabout. It’s just that there’s a difference between understanding the problem and having the capacity to solve it. It turns out that if you judged just by someone’s track record on delivering security and services to the desperate, the best-qualified reconstruction czar in Iraq would be Moqtada Sadr. And he’s, you know, thugged out.

The Refugee International study found that, with many displaced Iraqis living in poverty, the movement of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has become Iraq’s “largest ‘humanitarian’ organization.” It said that Sadr’s group ” ‘resettles’ displaced Iraqis free of charge in homes that belonged to Sunnis.” It said Sunni militias “play a similar role with displaced and needy Sunnis.”

I tend to think the next PM of Iraq will be Sadr or Sadr’s man, although obviously the situation is still volatile enough that I won’t say that with a high degree of certainty.

The deeper problem here is that doing it right, by reintegrating refugees into their former neighborhoods is much harder than just putting them in homes stolen from other refugees. Similarly just keeping people in refugee camps for ages is also destabilizing. The Iraqi government has mostly handled the problem by exporting it to neighbors, but the neighbors are getting tired of refugees and are starting to send them back. Regardless, ethnic cleansing is not a consequence of withdrawal, it’s something that’s happening anyways.

RE-5 Round 2 pro-N'Gai Croal link round-up

N’Gai Croal, among other links, passed on a new set of arguments on the RE-5 thing:

• EGO...trip: ...while allies stand beside us against the zombie hordes dissenters

As another N’Gai defender I’ll try to add some value by giving a little more detail on those arguments. That said, I don’t want to fully wade into this again until I’ve played RE-4:

• I thought Bus’s post was particularly good in calling out the ugly arguments while at the same time noting that there’s room for reasonable disagreement.
• Savetherobot notes that as with the Olympics games can’t really be totally divorced from politics.

Here’s my post from back in August again. I completely agree with N’Gai, although our arguments are slightly different. He focuses a bit more on cinematic elements while I focus more on how past zombie and Blackhawk Down games and films tried to avoid being problematic.

Finally, in a worthwhile new strain Shawn Elliot over at 1-Up provided some detail on the Call of Duty 4 comparisons. That game also apparently didn’t have any civilians.

This is one reason why we find no NPCs in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s middle-eastern cities, even as the game’s missions lead players through the very homes and workplaces of vanished people. And should Infinity Ward have decided to populate its levels with anyone other than armed militants it would have faced the challenge of preventing players from shooting innocents -- a circumstance undoubtedly closer to life, but one that would have risked depicting American and British soldiers as war criminals, as well as forcing players to restart missions after each incident of indiscriminate fire. The trade-off, of course, is that COD 4’s unnamed Saudi Arabia is inhabited exclusively by angry Arab gunmen.

That said, based on the Yahtzee review of game the game does address the problematic nature of the situation brilliantly by other means. Specifically it shifts between the perspective of American troops and British special ops guys and critiques both. Maybe RE-5 will to. I’m told RE-4 did make the peasants pre-infection sympathetic and to inject some pathos into their death.

However, we’re talking about trailers. So for comparison sake here’s a trailer for Call of Duty 4, the whole thing has a complex vibe and offers a mix of urban warfare and plot machinations. We don’t actually see many of the bad guys in the warfare bits but we do see their weapon fire so it seems like it also doesn’t have much in the way of shooting down mobs armed with a few melee and thrown weapons. So my guess is that N’Gai didn’t complain about CoD 4 because the situations are dramatically different. CoD 4 actually addresses the context they chose.

[Quick clarification, Shawn Elliot wasn’t saying that N’Gai needed to talk about Call of Duty 4. In this case, I’m responding to other people who were. Elliot was just doing a quick explanation as to why games choose not to include civies. I’m just trying to expand on the comparison a bit.]

More Endorsements

On the issue of Time’s most influential person web poll, I think I’m going to have to go with Stephen Colbert based on this:

If this video convinces you to back Stephen vs. his nemesis Korean pop singer Rain, vote here.

I would also vote for the Black Drum fish, but I don’t think it was nominated.

Why the good ones are always taken

Interesting Slate article that applies game theory to dating. Specifically the issue of a shortage of eligible bachelors:

The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn’t there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?

Actually, no—and here’s why. Consider the classic version of the marriage proposal: A woman makes it known that she is open to a proposal, the man proposes, and the woman chooses to say yes or no... A woman chooses to receive the question and chooses again once the question is asked.

At this point I’ve probably lost some of you, so let me elaborate a bit more. The idea of women being choosers is not inconsistent with the idea of classical marriage being patriarchal. Women had to choose carefully because they would be economically dependent on the man and the structure of society meant that once married he’d have considerable power over her. The one point in the process women could really apply their power was in the choosing and classical setups reflect this. So hopefully I’ve convinced you, why would this lead to an eligible bachelor glut?

You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so. In game-theory terms, you would call the first group "strong bidders" and the second
"weak bidders." Your first thought might be that the "strong bidders"—women who (whether because of looks, social ability, or any other reason) are conventionally deemed more of a catch—would consistently win this kind of auction.

But this is not true. In fact, game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by "weak" bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the "strong" bidders will hold out for a really great deal. You can find a technical discussion of this here...

The pool of appealing men shrinks as many are married off and taken out of the game, leaving a disproportionate number of men who are notably imperfect (perhaps they are short, socially awkward, underemployed). And at the same time, you get a pool of women weighted toward the attractive, desirable "strong bidders."

This makes sense to me. That said, I think this will be a diminishing problem as we move from a classical division of labor model of marriage to a cooperative one. Under the division of labor model, there’s much more of a common pool of desirable picks. Under a cooperative one, the quality of the pairing and not just the groom becomes much more important.

At the same time, the breakdown in patriarcal norms mean that women are in a much better position to choose not to choose. They can get economic prosperity and sex without having to marry. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t advantages in long-term monogamous relationships, but it does mean that there are better alternatives to settling. This in turn should increase the quality of the male meat market. You’re less likely to get paired off by just because of the supply-demand imbalance. Instead men will have to work more to improve their attractiveness, sociability, and employment status, or more niche bonuses. So I expect in another generation or two, the eligible bachelor problem will be largely greatly diminished in the developed world.

MTV Multiplayer series on Black Professionals in Games

I’ve seen a few entries in the series and I think they’re pretty good. There’s a good discussion with Tomb Raider Senior Producer Morgan Gray who didn’t think being black really hurt or helped his career but was annoyed at the lack of diversity in black characters in games. N’Gai Croal, a game journalist over at Newseek, had similar comments including a tangential observation that DDR should really teach you moves you can take to the dance floor. I was also fairly amused by the interview with Brian Jackson, creative design director who is working on a game called Black College Football Experience which apparently has battle of the band mini-games at half time. I don’t do sports game, but it made for a fun read.

Most recently, they posted an interview with N’Gai Croal on the whole Resident Evil 5 controversy . Croal’s first rection was “Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game.” Interestingly enough Morgan Gray didn’t have a problem with it. Anyhow, I’m with Croal. I did a post on this back on a personal journal in August. I intend to update that post, but not until I’ve at least played RE4 which was when the Resident Evil series really made the switch from normal zombies to expressive baddies. I’m not going to get a Wii anytime soon, so maybe I’m just going to have to play the original RE4 and go off that.

My original post is after the cut. I’ve trimmed to remove some a survey and a few friend’s names. There was also some good back and forth in comments, but I’m not going to repost that sort of thing without permission.

Cole and Drezner

Great in depth Iraq discussion in a bloggingheads between Juan Cole and Daniel Drezner. A few interesting points, mostly from Cole:

• Withdrawal is basically a decolonization situation in Iraq.
• Aside from U.S. presence in Iraq, U.S. and Iran both want a stable Shi’a led Iraq.
• The Iranians work with all the Shi’a factions and a few of the Kurdish ones dating back to their anti-Saddam alliance.
• It’s difficult to base in Kurdistan because if things got hot between Kurdistan and Turkey, we lose our main access point via Turkey.
• We need a plan for Iraqis who worked with the U.S. According to Dan Drezner, Sen. Clinton has talked about that, good for her. Juan Cole said we may be talking about 300k people in need of asylum.

Superman vs. Green Lantern vs. Batman in IR Theory

Ezra Klein promotes the big blue Boy Scout as a foreign policy model:

Yet the internationalist vision was more deeply interwoven into our cultural fabric than we often realize. Superman and Captain America were superheroes of an odd sort: tremendously powerful beings whose primary struggle was often to follow the self-imposed rules and strictures that lent their power a moral legitimacy. Neither allowed themselves to kill, and both sought to work within the law. Given their strength, either could have sought world domination, and even if they didn’t, they could have been viewed with deep suspicion and even hatred by those who were convinced that they one day would seek world domination. It was only by following ostentatiously strict moral codes that they could legitimize their power and thus exist cooperatively with a world that had every right to fear them. Indeed, soon enough, both were forming communities of like-minded super beings (The Justice League for Superman, the Avengers for Captain America) and generally operating much like, well, the nation that birthed them. As Spiderman -- a later hero who, like so many heroes, bought into the idea that rules and restraint separated the good guys from the bad guys -- liked to say, "with great power comes great responsibility."

First, quick anecdote. There was moment in a class I took on intervention where the teacher, utterly ignorant of comicdom said roughly "with great power" and was rather surprised when the the class all had the same way to end the phrase.

He contrasts that model to Jack Bauer who is constantly breaking the rules. However, the other obvious contrast is the Green Lantern doctrine coined by Matthew Yglesias (who has a new book out called Heads in the Sand; I’ve pre-ordered the book and will review it soon). Green Lanterns are sort of a set of Space Cops empowered by a bunch of old blue aliens to police the world. Green Lanterns have the technology to create anything they can imagine are chosen for their honesty, will, and lack of fear. It works has the heroic version of the neo-con ideology, there’s no torture and the Guardians aren’t interested in the galaxy’s resources, they just want to intervene to do good.

Spencer Ackerman then points to an old Weekly Standard piece that effective argues he sees as a brief for the U.S. as Batman although the author in the standard doesn’t use that term. However, Ackerman has his superheroes a bit mixed up I think. Batman’s really a bit of an isolationist. He does globe-trotting and universe-trotting but always comes back to focus on Gotham. In the original run of the Outsiders Batman first quits the Justice League and then quits the coalition of the willing that he formed. And why does he quit the team? Because they want to go off and liberate Soviet-occupied Afghanistan Markovia when he wants to focus on Gotham. Batman kind-of does torture, although he’s even less likely to kill than Superman. So he does play by rules, they’re just rules he’s made up.

All-in-all, I agree with Klein. Superman is the model we want to go with. After all, People for the American Way are a liberal think tank.

RIP Charlton Heston

Stephen Hunter at the Post is the obvious choice to write an Appreciation piece for Heston and it’s quite good:

He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big Technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two. ...

Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star’s trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried had only one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land -- like Moses.

Anyways, the one thing I hadn’t known about Heston was that he had been an "early celebrity marcher" for civil rights. I certainly disagree with his stance on gun control, but I think as Hunter argues that he certainly did seem like a true believer. I had thought that Michael Moore’s harassment of him in Bowling for Colombine was rather untoward. By that point in his life you could definitely see the effects of Alzheimer’s. I have no strong reservations about going after real bad guys past their prime, like Pinochet, but no way is Heston in that category. And Hunter is probably right about dying just short of his goal. From what I’ve read, the Supreme Court is highly likely to come down on behalf of an individual right of gunowner-ship. The question is how strict a standard regulators must meet to limit that right.

Anyways, in other Post news, Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer for his article where Joshua Bell played violin before commuters that largely ignored him. I enjoyed the piece and it was fun to debate, although I’d think his piece on the Great Zucchini was even better. His chat is still well worth reading although I haven’t been that excited by his experiment with the Gene Pool. I don’t read forums in general though. I tend only to be excited by well modded comment threads and/or those where the host dives into discussions. Congrats!

Are you a neurotic gamer?

Via Stephen Totilo the new editor of Kotaku asks "Are you a neurotic gamer?"

Are you OCD about keeping your hard drives clean of game data for titles you haven’t played in 3 months? Do you have one gamesave, and one gamesave only? Have you actually obeyed traffic lights in any driving game? Do you walk your character around a world or city and talk to people, even if you’ve heard the conversations a thousand times and just want to get to the next mission, because it seems, well ... right?

I’ve had a few, although I’ve mostly shed them. I think a lot of neurosis crop up when you’re a kid that has a limited number of games but a fair amount of time. In those circumstances you can come up with all sorts of crazy ways to play. In Dark Forces I’d use the phase cheat code on a few levels to start from the end and fight my way through the beginning. Games with puzzles, particularly adventure games, can encourage OCD if you don’t refer to a walkthrough when you get really stuck. I think the worst are games, typically RPGs, where you can miss something an hour prior and as a result are denied a cool side-quest or item or something like that.

Mainly in any game with non-lethal attacks, I tend to be fairly diligent about using them rather than outright killing enemies. Although there are sometimes enemies I’ll make an exception for.

Anyways, readers are encouraged to comment on their neurosis or make fun of mine.

Only 5% of Indians are fluent in English

From a Washington Post article by Rama Lakshmi:

India has a reputation as a nation of fluent English speakers, but by many estimates, only 5 percent of the population merits that description. Now, a five-year-long economic boom has triggered a rush to bring the reality into line with the lore. Once the preserve of big-city elites, English is spreading to the hinterlands.

So it sounds like that number will be going up but is still quite a bit lower than is commonly perceived. India still has a comparative advantage in training new English speakers, but I’m guessing that the present English fluent population of about 55 million is largely already using their talents.

The Case for Partisanship

Matt Yglesias has a new column on his old issue:

But for voters, the boring new ways can be looked at in another way—they’re straightforward. Elections have a predictable and easy-to-understand relationship to government action. Electing a Democrat means, on the margin, more spending on the federal safety net and more government regulation, while electing a Republican produces policies more favorable to business interests. You don’t necessarily get everything you want (ask any liberal disappointed by the continued flow of funds for the Iraq War), but at least on domestic measures, things move predictably.

Another advantage he points out is that lobbyist have less power.  Anyways, the old situation with righty Dems and left Republicans was in many ways a holdover from the segregation days.   My personal favorite case was that Spiro Agnew was Governor of Maryland for a good reason, his Democratic opponent was George Mahoney, an outright segregationist.  And aside from clearer labels, stronger parties do weaken lobbyists, as Yglesias points out, there’s a reason Delay was able to bully K-Street into hiring more Republicans.

Anyhow, the trouble with stronger parties is that we only have two of them.  I strongly identify with the Democratic party, but that arrangement kinda sucks for people without a clear party preference.  I personally favor changes that would probably keep two big parties, if not necessarily the ones we have now, but also allow a bunch of smaller ones to actually meaningfully participate. 

I think more effective parties may deal with some voter dissatisfaction and help clean up one party states.  This will require some voting system changes, but aside from the dropping the Electoral College it doesn’t require fiddling with the constitution.  That said, parties are an area where the founders screwed up.  Trying to avoid having parties at all failed and meant that the system wasn’t designed to properly check them.

Should John Yoo lose tenure?

There’s some discussion of whether John Yoo should lose his tenure at Berkeley now that the torture memos he wrote are out. I’ll address those in greater detail later. Anyways, I’m not sure how I come down on the tenure thing. I was fairly sympathetic because I thought this was basically Berkeley’s fault. They gave him tenure after he was a known war criminal. But it actually sounds like he had been on Berkeley’s staff in 1999 and got tenure then.

So it does seem like he violated legal ethics after having gotten tenure, so maybe it’s fair to go after that. That said, it would seem easier to just disbar him. And, the main important thing is that he be arrested. And really, once he’s in prison, who really cares if he has tenure?

We're number 1!

Prevention magazine awarded my hometown of Silver Spring with the #1 spot on ratings of ten walking cities in Maryland list. I’m kinda puzzled why Takoma Park didn’t make the list. They do a good job as well. Could be that they have population requirements. Fun fact: Bethesda got the number two spot. At the bottom was Ellicott City (despite its acknowledge great core), ninth was Columbia.

Here’s Silver Spring’s blurb:

Experts cite countdown signals--allowing walkers to know how much time they have to cross busy streets--at crosswalks and a vibrant downtown with movies, dining, and shopping as part of the reason Silver Spring earned 3 out of 4 for walkability. This city has more mass transit users than anywhere else in the state; at 12.34%, its national rank is No. 8. A low number of cars per household also helps the city earn first place in Maryland.

Wikihistory

Via Brad Delong a pretty funny short about a time travelers forum:

At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl’s cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!

At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.

Read the rest.

Don't hate the game, hate the grind

I love Vs. Mode, a discussion between MTV News’ Stephen Totilo Vs. Level Up’s N’Gai Croal. The latest one is on Patapon and the final round just went up. In the spirit of Vs. Mode, I thought it was important to point out that Totilo’s defense of grinding confuses the inherent repetition of gameplay with a very specific and detestable phenomenon. I posted my retort in an ongoing comment thread there but figured I may as well put it up on my blog. (I really should have posted my comments on Totilo’s version of the entry, but I didn’t think of that at the time.)

Here’s where he goes on the attack against Croal’s complaints:

Except: it’s all subjective, isn’t it? Where is that line between fun repetition and grinding? Why don’t God of War games get accused of forcing a grind? Because they don’t? Oh, surely, they do. They require collecting orbs to get powers, some of which you need to advance. Does God of War get off because they just don’t do it forcefully enough that it’s bothersome?

The difference is straightforward. Pure grinding is requiring repetitive game play without offering new content. This might mean repeating the same missions to get more resources or having to backtrack through unchanged maps.

Totilo, cool guy that he is, actually replied to that comment.

Based on your definitions, is "Tetris" a grind? And if it is, is the grinding in it a problem? Why or why not?

That’s an insightful retort. The answer is that yup, beating Tetris requires lots of repetitive play without adding much in the way of new content. The difficulty differences involve speed and tougher starting positions but don’t substantially change the gameplay.

However, while I’m not a Tetris junky, it would certainly be foolish to deny that Tetris is a good game or to say that it needs new content. Grinding is really a problem in games that are advancement based. In those cases, grinding means that you are denied access to cool new abilities, stages, and/or plot unless you engage in a lot of highly repetitive battles.

In a game like Tetris, you aren’t playing for abilities, stages, or plot; you’re playing because you enjoy the core mechanic and to build your skill. That’s what replay value is. Sometimes if you play well enough you can unlock new content, but I don’t think that’s grinding either. If you were a skilled enough of a player, you could have unlocked that content on the first time through.

Totilo does offer two good suggests at decreasing the pain of repetition and thus increasing replay value.

1) encouraging short sessions, so that what would be maddening if played
eight hours straight is pleasant when spread across 365 days and

2) convincing the player, like a good exercise coach, that high-volume
repetition is healthy. The grind will make you a better person. Imagine!

In most cases, I think skill oriented gaming is the best way to go about point 2. Particularly if that skill as everyday life benefits.

How wrong was I about the Iraq war?

How wrong was I a little over five years ago?  Embarrassingly so, considering I had a frigging BA in Political Science. I’ve grabbed these from an old personal site, so I’m not linking it. In essence I backed the Tony Blair approach on Iraq. So based on what I said back then, if I’d been in the Congress I’d probably have unwisely voted for that accursed resolution.

The question here is can Bush be trusted? I’m willing to believe him on his intentions to rebuild Iraq but I don’t believe he’s willing to take substantial political risk to guarantee that it will succeed. Fortunately I believe there are still enough leaders left in America that it will not be allowed to fail...

Ultimately, I’m gonna sleep [fine] without Saddam Hussein or even a soft-autocrat in charge of Iraq. Let alone knowing that said leader won’t have access to weapons of mass destruction. It’ll also help that most U.S. troops are out of Saudi Arabia and thus all that much farther from Mecca. But most important, a rebuilt democratic Iraq will be a proving grounds for idealism in American policy. I have enough faith in current non-Bush leadership, liberal democracy, and America to think we’ll pass the test. Although if I’m wrong,or if Bush actually is just straight out evil, the price will be terrible. Here’s hoping I’m right...

Finally, I believe we’ll suceed [sic] in rebuilding Iraq if we have the will to do it. Although, as much as I knock the admin, at least they are being aggressively rhetorically pro-democratic. I just hope the misteps [sic] in regard to preparing for the next stage were mistakes and not indications of lack of concern...

In short my judgment on the biggest foreign policy decision of the past decade was terrible. I supported sending between hundreds of thousands and millions of Iraqis and 4,000 American troops to their death based on faith and not the analysis, available at the time, of the order of magnitude of the true cost. 

So in short, I fell for the classical Green Lantern line of thought. With sufficient will we’d be fine. I’d seen a lot of humanitarian interventions that went from okay to not so impressive. These interventions were typically mediocre at best, although the incompetence of the start of the Iraq occupation was still remarkable.

However, I will not avail myself of the incompetence defense. The Iraq war was a horrific mistake, one that could have been and indeed was foreseen by many people including some friends. After having realized this mistake, I have left the ranks of liberal hawks as have many others.

I’m sorry.  My form of penance is listening more to those that were right and trying to fix the problems the invasion caused.  My read for the past few years is that the best first step is withdrawal from Iraq.  What lessons have I learned?  I think Timothy Noah is right, it's probably a better use of your time to focus on why some people got it right than what people who got it wrong think now.

And something for the other comic fans too

Since my last post was really just for newspaper comic readers, here’s something for the rest of you comic fans.

Ragnell reviews Frank Miller’s Sin City and finds something she didn’t expect.

It rained last night.

A harsh rain. A violent rain. The wind was angry at the citizens of Oklahoma. Possibly over the ancient broken treaty. The Sooner state is cursed with blood and wind and rain and broken glass.

The Sirens went off, and I tried to ignore them. I’ve lived in Oklahoma. I don’t fear death. I’d have walked out and met the Finger of God himself if not for the damned cat. Without me, there would be no one to feed the cat. It was possible the cat wouldn’t surive if he didn’t get some shelter. I hated that fucking cat. But he was the only companion I had in this damned state, and the only living resident of this rotten world who didn’t mind spending time with me. So I holed up in the hallway closet with that stupid cat, a flashlight, and a box of books. I didn’t look at the books until I was sitting there with that damned cat, or else I wouldn’t have been caught dead with them.

It was the entire run of Sin City...

Shocking news for newspaper comic fans

Franscesco Marciuliano announces that this, the first week of April, will be his last writing Sally forth.

No doubt by now you’ve heard the rumors (after all, little can be kept a secret today with the Internet). But for those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to or prefer facts to speculation, this will be my last week writing Sally Forth. While strips I have previously penned will be running through May in dailies and June on Sundays, I will no longer be giving voice to Sally, Hilary and--most important of all--Ted, after this Friday.

It was a tough decision to make, leaving characters that have become not only friends but my family, knowing that I will no longer get to explore their world, embark on their adventures and enjoy growing old together (well, not literally in the Forths’ case). And I will forever be grateful to those who made the comic and the characters a part of their lives and especially to those who took the time to write to me (both in praise and in criticism). But as I have learned in the last few years one must not only accept change but often embrace it, for sometimes only by altering one’s path can one discover their true direction.

However, just because I’m saying a fond farewell to one strip does in no way mean I’m bidding adieu to the funny pages. In fact, one of the biggest reasons I’ll no longer be writing Sally Forth is because I’ll be concentrating on my newest comic outing--writing Mallard Fillmore!

Read the rest.