It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Since we decided to stop attacking Fallujah, it’s turned into a theocracy. This should come as no surprise to anyone. I don’t think that crushing the city would have been productive either; you’d have gotten entirely different problems.
Maybe it’s worth allowing the city to become an independent state in order to minimize the risk of Sunni unrest. Mostly it shows how many unpalatable alternatives we have in Iraq.
Mike Grasso asked me what real-life Japanese pro wrestling (aka puroresu) was like. I can answer that question at more length than he probably imagined, and I’m gonna. Brace yourselves.
There are four distinct styles of Japanese pro wrestling at the moment. There’s a lot of crossover and blending of styles, but at the end of the day the four basic styles remain distinct. The first and oldest is strong style, which is the most like US pro wrestling. Second and third, in no particular order, are puroresu and garbage wrestling. Lucharesu is a cruiserweight style, heavily influenced both by Mexican lucha libre and Canadian technical wrestling. Garbage wrestling is the stuff with lightbulbs and thumbtacks and explosions and fire. Finally, and newest to the scene, there’s shoot wrestling; it’s a reaction to the popularity of mixed martial arts (such as the UFC).
Strong style is more or less the mainstream of Japanese wrestling. Up until the 1970s, Japanese wrestling was not noticably different from US wrestling. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW, then one of the two biggest wrestling promotions in Japan) deliberately moved away from the cartoonish aspects of US wrestling. They made the conscious decision to eliminate false finishes, run-ins, and other gimmicks; they figured they’d attract more fans if they simulated a real sporting event better. It was a huge success. The desire for verisimilitude also resulted in higher impact moves; 80s and 90s AJPW was known for the number of times you’d see someone dropped on their head. Compare this to Memphis wrestling, in which the piledriver was “outlawed” in order to make the emotional impact of the move that much stronger.
Lucharesu really didn’t get going until the late 1980s, although the seeds of the style were sown years earlier. You can trace lucharesu to a classic series of matches between Tiger Mask I and Dynamite Kid. Some will remember Dynamite as half of the British Bulldogs; he was a British-born wrestler who trained in Calgary under the legendary Stu Hart. The Hart family and trainees have always been known for their devotion to technical wrestling; Tiger Mask I was fascinated by lucha libre. The fusion of these influences is lucharesu.
It’s a very quick style, wrestled mostly by wrestlers under 200 pounds. The smaller wrestlers are more agile and able to do more aerial moves than the bigger strong style wrestlers. Lucharesu ranges from the purest forms of the style, found in promotions like Michinoku Pro, to stuff more like the original Tiger Mask/Dynamite Kid series (and more akin to strong style), found in New Japan Pro Wrestling. Either way it’s fast-paced exciting stuff. Matt and Jeff Hardy were strongly influenced by lucharesu. Ultimo Dragon, currently wrestling in the WWE, is one of the best lucharesu guys ever — although he’s a shadow of his former self.
Garbage wrestling is what most people think of when they think of Japanese pro wrestling. I’m not a huge fan of the stuff; a garbage match has to be very good before I want to watch it. It’s essentially strong style with dangerous objects serving as the high impact moves. Instead of getting the crowd into a match by throwing a suplex, garbage wrestlers set themselves on fire and jump from balconies. It’s a valid style but I blame it for way too many idiot backyard wrestlers by way of Mick Foley. It got hot in the late 1980s, and has been up and down ever since. The style is too hard on wrestlers for a garbage wrestler to have a really long career.
Finally, and most recently, we’ve got the fusion of mixed martial arts and pro wrestling. Over the years there have been a number of promotions in Japan which purport to put on “real” martial arts matches. (No, nobody pretends that pro wrestling is real anymore except in the context of a show.) Some of them really do, such as Pride. Some of them don’t. Mixed martial arts is way more popular in Japan than it is over here, and several wrestling promotions are making good money staging either real or faked matches between pro wrestlers and mixed martial arts stars.
A couple of promotions, like the now defunct BattlArts, put on shoot-style matches but didn’t pretend that they were real. In my eyes, this is the apothesis of the style — you aren’t hampered by the need to con the fans, and you can take advantage of the benefits that scripting storylines gives you. It’s a win/win.
This essay totally ignores women’s pro wrestling in Japan, or joshi puroresu. The styles are more or less the same, as far as I know, but I don’t watch enough of it to talk about the subtle differences.
Good places to learn more:
Zombie Smackdown. In stores next week. I wrote the Japan chapter. This makes it perfect for everyone who ever wanted to roleplay zombies and wrestlers in conjunction.
Current Gmail users have a couple of invites to the beta to give away. This has resulted in many offers of firstborn. In order to organize these offers, a clever person invented gmail swap, where people can post offers and the lucky few with gmail invites can pick the cream of the crop.
For the record, this one is the cream of the crop. But only if you’re an Asheron’s Call player who’s easily amused.
This is probably the final post on the draft rumors.
First, I looked a little deeper into the way Congress.org works. The original draft rumor was a Soapbox Alert, not an Action Alert. Action Alerts are associated with the organization that produced them; Soapbox Alerts have no attribution.
Turns out anyone can post a Soapbox Alert. Anyone at all. There’s no way to tell who posted it and there seems to be no filter before a Soapbox Alert hits the site. I.e., there is no more accountability behind the original rumor than there would be from a message board posting on some random message board.
Second, how do I know IDI owns Congress.org? I did a whois on the domain to look up the owner of record. Survey says:
Registrant Name: Issue Dynamics Inc.
Registrant Organization: Issue Dynamics Inc.
Registrant Street1: 919 18th Street, NW 10th Floor
Registrant City: Washington
Registrant State/Province: DC
Registrant Postal Code: 20006
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Email: deutsch@IDI.NET
This matches the registration info for idi.net, although they used a different domain registrar for that one. But it’s clearly the same people using the same nameservers, etc.
I’d like to return, at this time, to President Bush’s UN address of September 12th, 2002.
The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
He also gave a speech at Naval Station Mayport on February 13th, 2003.
The decision is this for the United Nations: When you say something does it mean anything? You’ve got to decide, if you lay down a resolution, does it mean anything? The United Nations Security Council can now decide whether or not it has the resolve to enforce it’s resolutions.
I’m optimistic that the U.N. Security Council will rise to its responsibilities, and this time ensure enforcement of what it told Saddam Hussein he must do. See, I believe when it’s all said and done, free nations will not allow the United Nations to fade into history as an ineffective, irrelevant debating society. (Applause.) I’m optimistic that free nations will show backbone and courage in the face of true threats to peace and freedom.
The message of 2002 and 2003 was quite clear. If the UN refused to authorize war against Iraq, it would become irrelevant.
Yesterday, Bush gave another speech.
The United Nations Special Envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is now consulting with a broad spectrum of Iraqis to determine the composition of this interim government. The special envoy intends to put forward the names of interim government officials this week. In addition to a president, two vice presidents, and a prime minister, 26 Iraqi ministers will oversee government departments, from health to justice to defense. This new government will be advised by a national council, which will be chosen in July by Iraqis representing their country’s diversity. This interim government will exercise full sovereignty until national elections are held. America fully supports Mr. Brahimi’s efforts, and I have instructed the Coalition Provisional Authority to assist him in every way possible.
The United Nations has, apparently, remained fairly relevant despite refusing to support Bush’s war.
Nuadha says I should mashup Planet of the Apes. I have no fear of the damn dirty apes! We all know the basic plot, right? Statues of Liberty are optional.
Start your engines for this, our fortieth mashup.
So in the previous post, I debunked the draft rumor going around. I figured I’d do a little more poking and find out who was running Congress.org, the origin of the rumor. They do pretty shoddy research, whoever they are.
No big dramatic reveal here, alas. Congress.org is owned by a company by the name of Issue Dynamics Inc.. They’re a political consulting company that focuses on liberal causes; they’re big on grassroots, which explains why they’re running Congress.org. It’s presumably an effective means of encouraging people to generate letters to Congressmen.
They also do a lot of what they call “relationship management.” This translates into introducing companies to activist groups who have a common interest. Here’s a case study illustrating how they work. Here’s another, with a less positive spin. It’s a clever piece of work: IDI raises money from corporations, and gives it to activist groups with a good image, who then run ads with the money. It’s money laundering for lobbyists.
IDI says that groups like the Grey Panthers (in the second example) are only doing what they’d do anyhow if they had the money to do it. This is a reasonable defense, if you think that money never convinces anyone to do something they wouldn’t normally do. Hm.
Disinfopedia has a list of clients up; it includes both progressive organizations and big businesses.
None of this connection shows up on the Congress.org website, by the by. The trail there leads to a website called Capitol Advantage, which boasts:
No other company has delivered more messages to Congress. When your organization needs to step up and influence legislation or public opinion, we’re the only ally you’ll ever need.
I’m not sure that connection’s much better. It makes it pretty obvious that Congress.org, rather than being a benign public service web site, is a tool for making Capitol Advantage money. In the Congress.org FAQ, I noticed that the Congress.org “Action Alerts” are generated by web sites that subscribe to Capitol Advantage’s Capwiz service. And hey! The draft rumor was in fact… just another Action Alert!
So that explains where that came from. It was just someone paying some money to put a bogus story on an important-looking web site.
[Update 2: the original article wasn’t ever removed. A bit of software I use killed the link; the one I have up now works.]
Now Warren Ellis is getting sucked in by the draft hysteria. Time to grind out a counter-meme.
First off, the two bills in question are H.R. 163 and S. 89. The record shows that S. 89 was introduced on 1/7/2003 and was referred to the Committee on Armed Services the same day. H.R. 163 was also introduced on 1/7/2003 and was referred to the Subcommittee on Total Force on 2/3/2003. There has been absolutely no action on either bill since they were referred to committee.
H.R 163 was introduced by Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), and S. 89 was introduced by Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC). Neither of these men support Bush. It seems unlikely, to say the least, that they would be working with Bush to institute a stealth draft scheduled for just after the presidential elections.
We also have the public statements of some supporters of the bill to use in reaching our conclusions. Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), a co-sponsor of H.R. 163, made his reasons for co-sponsoring public.
It is my understanding that out of the 435 Members of this House and the 100 members of the Senate, only one — only one — has a child in active military service. Who are we to know the pain of war when we ourselves will not directly bear the brunt of that action? It won’t be us mourning the loss of a child or loved one. Maybe some of you in this Congress would think twice about voting for war in Iraq if you knew your child may be sent to fight in the streets of Baghdad?
If our nation is to go to war, it is only right that all Americans share in the sacrifice of war. It is time we truly comprehended the consequences. I urge my colleagues to support a universal draft which I believe will make votes for war much more real for many of my colleagues.
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), another co-sponsor, expressed similar sentiments. Finally, you can read the CNN article run at the time the bills were introduced. It is perfectly clear that Rangel’s intent was to remind everyone that rich kids don’t tend to serve in the military.
This hubbub has done nothing to prevent the draft, because there is no threat. However, it has driven a ton of traffic to Congress.org, a website featuring both Google ads and a banner ad at the top.
Next post: who is Congress.org?
Sadly, this time it’s a guy on the left abusing the definition of terrorist. Putting this in perspective: the KKK is closer to being a terrorist organization than the NEA, but nobody went to court to get the NEA legally defined as a terrorist group.
The particularly vexing aspect of this case is the numbing effect it’ll have. The next time a real domestic terrorist is accused of terrorism, there will be plenty of people who’ll say “Oh, sure, like that KKK guy the professor wanted to muzzle.” Boy who cried wolf.