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e were quick to get involved we ended up working down at an elementary school in east la working to clean the place up weeding and resoiling a garden that had been completely overgrown with weeds it was a couple of hours of not tremendously difficult work that really needed to be done and will hopefully make a school in an area that really needs it a better place for education and we get a day in disneyland what i found interesting about the experience though was the conversation i had with a woman who got out of a car loaded down with bumper stickers you know the kinds i mean they say things like coexist and war is unkind to children and other living things and like your rights thank a liberal she carried her self righteousness with her like a cloak and it trailed behind her when she walked her first words to me while we were waiting on the line for our assignments were oh you must be here to get the free day in disneyland not that it was any of her business but i decided to be nice and admit that yes that s why we were there her response typical all these people couldn t be bothered to come out to help others without some giant corporation figuring out a way to make money off of it someone on line pointed out that disney was hardly making money off of their charity since they would be giving away the tickets she pointed out that by getting people into the park they ensured that they would be spending money on food drinks parking souvenirs and all sorts of other things so disney was hardly being completely altruistic i realized that that this is the kind of galactically stupid misunderstanding of human nature that leads hard core leftists to misunderstand the nature of capitalism and embrace idiotic ideas like socialism they somehow believe in something that never has and never will exist the completely selfless act the utterly other directed person the bottom line is this the exchange of commodities isn t just a facet of life it is life there is nothing that anyone ever does with another person that doesn t have some element of self interest behind it the secret to a healthy society is respect for that enlightened self interest the heart of capitalism is the win win it s the exchange of value for value why shouldn t that work in a charitable situation why is it so bad for some people to do good by doing well disney gets people to the park when the economy is down a bunch of people get a day of fun for free and a school in east la gets the help that it needs is our motivation somehow less pure than the woman who so looked down on us perhaps but i would also point out that prior to disney s involvement the school was struggling to find volunteers to do what needed to be done judging by the effect of my day of service if disney gets a few more buck in their coffers for it i d say that was money well spent and i plan on enjoying my day in disneyland with my kids with a clear conscience comments 2 comments tags charity disney give a day get a day liberals categories kids politics and a happy 2010 to you all 31 12 2009 so this is it the last few moments of the last crappy year of let s be honest a truly crappy decade it s 10 years that started with the world trade center coming down and ended with an america seemingly so dispirited that it can t muster up the will to even fix the holes in manhattan left by the collapse of the towers this was not the future i think any of us envisioned when we last stood watching a ball come down on the 20th century ten years ago wondering if human civilization was about to end thanks to the y2k bug it turns out we might have been right just wrong in how long it was going to take and yet and maybe this is just the glow of my christmas hangover and the wonderful week i just spent with my family enjoying each other talking ultimately loving one another is what it s all about and why in the end i have faith in the future i don t believe america s as finished as a lot of people think and i don t think humanity s quite the lost cause we seem to be in our worst moments if i ve learned anything as a gamer it s that there s always one more quarter you can pump in the machine and maybe this time we ll get it right rescue the princess and beat the big boss and win the game tomorrow the real future begins what s say we make it a good one a little less blade runner and a little more tomorrowland would be nice happy new year to all left right and center comments leave a comment tags 00 s 2000s 2001 2010 a space odyssey blade runner happy new year new year s wishes the decade tomorrow land world trade center categories gaming news an agnostic jew s annual christmas miracle 25 12 2009 if there s one thing i miss since leaving gamespy it s what i referred to as my annual christmas miracle all year long game journalists are inundated with pr tchtotchkes and free games and i was certainly no exception that meant by the end of the year i had a desk filled with dozens and dozens of games mostly pc titles but quite a few console ones as well along with about a hundred t shirts key rings stuffed animals tote bags and all the bits of detritus that game companies send out with copies of their games in the hopes of getting some coverage throughout the year i would take my own stuff and collect bits of pr junk from other editors and put it all in a pile until the week just before the christmas break then at a specific moment i would send around an e mail to the entire company welcoming everybody to come down to my desk and just grab whatever they wanted from the enormous pile of stuff i had collected throughout the year it was wondrous and loud given the annual stampede of feet to my desk initially i did it cynically just for myself i liked seeing everybody rush around and leave with a bunch of ridiculous bits of junk that would end up collecting dust in their cubicles then one year i hit on the idea of selling all that junk for a suggested donation of a dollar or more for a charity that really meant something to me and i discovered something more how good it feels to to do good and how good it feels to watch other people be good the first year i did it i found myself stunned not at the dollars that flowed in for useless pieces of plastic but at the fives and tens and twenties for pc games i had given one and two star reviews to i nearly cried when one person dropped a pair of twenties in my basket for a copy of shadowrun for the xbox360 shadowrun sucked this person wasn t buying a video game they were connecting with me and others in the office we had found the embers of goodness in our hearts and fanned them at least briefly into a flame it became my annual christmas miracle the one time of the year when i m happy and uncynical for about 24 48 hours considering that i m an agnostic jew i love christmas more than is probably seemly for someone of my cultural background considering that i m also a cynical angry bear of a person you d think i d recoil at the obvious plastic phony commercialism of the season yet i don t cynics don t become cynics because they don t care they become cynics because they re frustrated idealists and there s something about christmas that breaks through the seventy five layers of calcified rage that s built up around my heart and makes me happy for at least a 24 hour period it s not the faithful aspects of the holiday either there s no danger of my becoming a christian it s the very plasticky cheesiness of it it s the tinsel and rankin bass characters and the charlie brown christmas specials themselves that touch me they remind me that we re all ridiculous and lonely and sad and pathetic and ultimately glorious because of not despite our inherent silliness and that the only time we re worth anything at all is when we reach out and touch the heart of another human being yet those moments are enough to redeem humanity for all the awfulness we do to each other on a daily basis our goodness can dwarf that of the mythical angels and christmas speaks to that for me i wish we would do it more often and not just this time of year but the fact that we do it at all is what keeps me a cynic and not a nihilist we can be the kind of people we dream of being sometimes we are and that s what keeps hope alive for me i ve said before that my relationship with god got a lot better once i realized he wasn t real i m a writer and a storyteller so i see the inherent power and danger of the calcified mythology that becomes organized religion stripped of the mummery and institutional corruption of religion our figures of worship join characters like sherlock holmes and mr spock and santa claus and ebeneezer scrooge and the grinch figures worthy of emulation because of not despite their unreality they speak to the best aspects of ourselves and tell us we can be this way even if seems rather unlikely most of the time the nihilist will laugh at that the way they laugh at any indication of some kind of order in the universe they ll tell us all the things that are precious in the world are just illusions that love is just our genes pushing us to reproduce that society is just a shared illusions foisted by the powerful on the powerless that a nation is just a line on a map that the truths we hold to be self evident are merely consensual hallucinations we cling to in order to stay sane in a universe of chaos that s ultimately indifferent to our fate my response to that is to quote puddleglum the marsh wiggle s restatement of pascal s wager from c s lewis the silver chair one word ma am he said coming back from the fire limping because of the pain one word all you ve been saying is quite right i shouldn t wonder i m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face i can on it so i won t deny any of what you said but there s one thing more to be said even so suppose we have only dreamed or made up all those things trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and aslan himself suppose we have then all i can say is that in that case the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world well it strikes me as a pretty poor one and that s a funny thing when you come to think of it we re just babies playing a game if you re right but four babies playing a game can make a play world which licks your real world hollow that s why i m going to stand by the play world i m on aslan s side even if there isn t any aslan to lead it i m going to live as like a narnian as i can even if there isn t any narnia c s lewis the silver chair harper collins publishers 1953 pp 181 182 the beauty of this is that puddleglum s not real either but he became a hero of mine in that one moment lewis of course was writing this as a christian apologist s response to the idea of atheism but the context works for almost anything we cling to in order to stay sane i may love my family because my genes tell me to do so in order to propagate themselves but i still love my family i may cling to an american ideal that the real united states often fails to live up to but i must believe a nation is better for having such ideals than not bothering with them at all and i may be a fool to believe an over commercialized holiday blown up every year by retailers because the health of our economy depends on it really can speak to the best in ourselves but you know what i ll happily accept that moniker i ll believe in christmas and santa and rudolph and coca cola and maybe even a little bit about the fictional kid in the barn in bethlehem because it makes my world better and it inspires me to make others lives a little bit better too maybe my theology s a little messed up but that makes me no different than the six billion other screwed up persnickety ultimately wondrous souls i share this planet with merry christmas happy chanukah joyous festivus and greetings for whatever other silly sappy hallmarky traditions you cling to to beat back the dark cold night be happy and help others to be happy too comments leave a comment tags c s lewis chanukah chronicles of narnia chrtistmas gamespy geek culture miracle politically incorrect puddleglum the marsh wiggle the silver chair xbox 360 yule log categories gaming news simearth global warming and the great east anglia geek betrayal 1 12 2009 so unless you re living under a rock or are only getting your news from the mainstream media you may already be familiar with climategate if you haven t in a nutshell a bunch of e mails stolen or possibly leaked from the university at east anglia in the uk reveal a major pattern of lying obfuscation and data fudging that casts a huge shadow over the entire theory of anthropogenic global warming this is not a small scandal either east anglia casts a disproportionate shadow over climate research and their findings make up a huge chunk of the data on which the work the un s ipcc and other climate scientists relied on to come to the conclusion that global warming is a huge threat that needs trillions of dollars and a complete realignment of the world s economic and political systems to address or maybe not now i m not a climate scientist or a statistician or even a computer scientist that will immediately bring out cries from global warming s true believers that i am therefore not qualified to comment on this issue and should therefore shut up this completely ignores the fact that most of those doing the yelling are also not scientists and are no more qualified to comment on this than i am there is however one area in which i believe i am an expert in geeks and geek culture and it was my knowledge of geeks that started sending up red flags on this issue a number of years ago one of the first red flags came when i first heard the phrase computer models offered as proof that agw was happening my first thought at the time was that i hoped that the climate model that these scientists were using was better than simearth one of the forgotten sim games created by will wright and maxis back in the 90s the game modeled the earth and the evolution of life based on james havelock s gaia theory and allowed the player model various climactic and geological developments to build whatever sort of earth one wanted as it turns out the leaked emails reveal that the programs these scientists were using may actually have been worse predictors than simearth according to the leaked e mails especially the harry_readme txt programmer comments file the code in these climate models was abominable it was so bad that these guys were essentially making stuff up as they went along to make the climate models do what they wanted them to do and sometimes to just make them work at all they really were playing simearth and a lot of grandstanding politicians glory seeking scientists and radical environmentalists looking for their emergency went along for the ride what really set me off on the climate models was everything i read ...
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