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So the presidential transition continues. The cabinet is shaping up in a more centrist, more hawkish, and above all more establishment outline than proper liberals are entirely comfortable seeing. It’s a strategy that speaks well for promises to reach across the great schisms of today’s political landscape, but not so well for promises of change. A fair number of Clinton’s circle are appearing on short lists—Hillary Clinton herself for the Department of State. Obama has named Eric Holder his choice for attorney general, which is drawing some criticism. (What choice wouldn’t?)

It seems the problem is not with his career as a whole, but specifically with his last few days as Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton, when Clinton issued his infamous sweeping pardons. Asked to consider the legal justification for and obstacles to a pardon for Marc Rich—fugitive from indictments for tax evasion and illegal trade with Iran, “friend of Bill,” and all-around shady character—Holder replied with a tepid evaluation that Rich “meets the minimum standards” for a pardon. Holder did not comment on the moral justification for pardon. That was all the go-ahead Clinton needed.

Agreeing to pressure from your boss’s boss on a matter of presumed mercy might seem a small sin, especially since Holder has since expressed regret for signing off, however mildly, on the pardon. Clinton and others characterized the investigation and indictment of Rich as political hay-making, rather than a pursuit of justice, which is possible though it seems unlikely. The whole matter is likely moot, insofar as it affects Holder’s confirmation, since Republicans are unlikely to object very loudly to questionable pardons as Bush the lesser nears the end of his eight years presiding over decidedly indictable offenses and the possibility of a blanket pardon looms large.

But it’s precisely for that reason that Holder is an inappropriate choice for Attorney General. We’re about to see a whole lot of people pardoned for crimes committed with wink-and-nod approval from their boss’s boss, or even farther up the chain of command. Setting things right, repairing eight years of terrible damage to US reputation, and especially the reputation of the Justice Department, abroad and at home—in short, bringing desperately needed change to Washington—requires an Attorney General with a steel-bound commitment to right and the rule of law, not one willing to let things slide when convenient.

I read myself to sleep last night with some old Dungeons & Dragons modules. Middling old. Somewhere around the 2nd edition era, when Gygax had been persuaded to step down from the throne and let TSR pursue a business model grounded in business theory instead of egotism. That was important at the time, as RPG publishers warily eyed a decline in interest towards RPGs generally, when a shake-out seemed—and later proved to be—inevitable.

The era marked a real shift in tone for published adventures, from death traps of the “instant death, no save” variety, where advancement was merely an exercise in prolonging the inevitable, to fight sequences designed with the expectation that GMs wanted their players to survive so the campaign could continue. Even the tournament adventures, which once measured contestants by how far they got into a strictly linear dungeon before perishing, began to measure contestants by score, awarding points for a variety of small successes before emerging from the dungeon, still alive. The era also saw TSR trying some experimental techniques like narrative structure that didn’t involve arbitrary PC death and abilities without immediate combat applications. (Experimental for TSR, that is. Other publishers had been using them for years, and won many converts thereby. I mentioned something about a business model based on egotism, I believe…) And, thanks to the aforementioned decline in players, some of those experiments aimed specifically at complete novices, hoping to bring fresh blood to the hobby.

Dungeon module N4: Treasure Hunt was one of these. The basic premise was to give the players incomplete character sheets, which they would fill in as they progressed. The action begins with the PCs aboard a slaving vessel which washes ashore in a storm, killing all but one member of the crew and sparing the PCs a life of slavery, but forcing them to search the island for shelter and some means of escape. The PCs start as 0-level humans without any assigned professional adventuring class or moral alignment, and every time they behave in a way resonant with or contrary to a particular class or alignment, the GM ticks their running total upward or downward. Once a PC gains enough experience points to qualify as a proper 1st-level character, the GM would pause to observe, “Well, let’s see… you ambushed three goblins and showed no interest in the desecrated shrine. You also used a meat cleaver and were eager to plunder the library for valuables. I suggest you become a chaotic neutral rogue.” Or similar advice to reflect that PC’s choices. By the end of the adventure, all the PCs should earn enough experience and make enough choices to “graduate” in a similar fashion to 1st-level adventurer, after which they will presumably unanimously decide that living in constant danger is a swell lifestyle and decide to band together as mercenary heroes. (Hopefully, nobody dies at an inconvenient time and find himself forced to start over, but replacements are available as fellow slaves washed overboard while forced to row the galley.)

The idea was to allow newbies to create characters without needing to read any rules at all—the rulebooks could be intimidating to potential customers outside the nerd market—or even needing a basic familiarity with the warrior-wizard-priest-thief class system. That was a good idea, and the attempt was interesting, but poorly executed.

The adventure doesn’t lend itself equally to exploring a variety of classes. It provides many opportunities to behave like a fighter or a thief: killing monsters with whatever weapons are at hand, or sneaking around and ambushing the goblin and orc pirates that infest the island. Opportunities to behave like a cleric are slimmer, essentially limited to one scene where the PCs bed down for the night in a desecrated temple. A goddess appears and gives them some advice; if any PC is particularly fawning or, on his own initiative, tries to clean up some of the damage the pirates have done, that counts as priest-like activity. And mages? Forget it. There’s one lousy spellbook in the ship’s hold at the beginning of the adventure; if PCs think to loot the ship, and they find the spellbook, and someone sets aside hours to study it while everyone else is busy, you know, surviving, and the player who studies it decides that casting his one spell is all he wants to do, because almost any other adventurous activity counts as an inclination to a different class.

The imbalance of opportunities to explore different classes is magnified by player ignorance. Remember: the adventure is designed to introduce the game to players who know next to nothing about it. A player familiar with class stereotypes, who also wanted to play a particular class, might deliberately pursue those avenues, but newbies who might want to play a particular class won’t know what those stereotypes are, and don’t have that option. Fighters and thieves do what ordinary people can do, only they do it better; clerics and mages use abilities to which an ordinary person has no access. So, when the players confront a pair of zombies in the adventure’s climax, a player who knows that clerics can turn undead with a flourish of holy righteousness might try that, and might even succeed, earning points toward becoming a cleric. The idea wouldn’t even occur to a newbie. Nor would a newbie realize that strapping on some armor scavenged from a recently-butchered pirate gang disqualifies him for wizard status, should he want to become a wizard, or that using a spear is some how an un-priestly act. The natural choices for ordinary people surviving a shipwreck play directly to some classes, and not at all to others.

Such failures of the adventure to work as intended—to allow players to select a class to play through natural inclination—highlight some of the weaknesses of the D&D system: arbitrary rules (like mages wearing no armor, or priests using only blunt weapons), highly compartmentalized class stereotypes (warriors are not spiritually inclined), and highly compartmentalized class abilities (warriors cannot be stealthy). A skill-based system like GURPS or CoC would handle the scenario much more smoothly: if you sneak, you learn stealth; if you fight, you learn weapon skills; if you do both, you learn both, albeit less quickly than you might learn a single skill by pursuing it alone—there is no systemic obstacle to mixing and matching skills. There’s also the oddity of advancement through experience, that experience being measured solely in terms of killing and looting. In this scenario, the “right” decision usually means engaging in unnecessary risks to win fights and gain access to more loot, rather than concentrating on the real goal of escaping the island alive—an unnatural artifact of TSR’s intellectual blinders, as well as a clumsy system.

While Treasure Hunt is a technical failure, I nonetheless applaud the attempt. The impulse to grow the gamer base was a good one, and the general willingness to try something new could have done wonders for the D&D line, although in the end it fell back into its dungeon-crawl rut. In the long run, that proved all right for TSR; a lot of gamers are entirely happy reliving the D&D experience specifically, and have little interest in exploring other rules systems, other genres, other character archetypes, and, as the player base has continued to shrink, the hack-and-slash fantasy genre remained the top seller. The genre has been reinforced by products like World of Warcraft, cementing the D&D notion of fantasy adventure as the notion fantasy adventure, complete with class-and-level advancement and crazy rules like “Priests don’t use swords,” as natural a law as gravity. As a result, the D&D line has been successful largely by becoming even more like itself; as the D&D version of fantasy becomes increasingly universal, players become less sensitive to its oddities and frustrations. Still, I would have liked to see what D&D might have grown into had it stuck to its attempts at innovation, rather than reverting to self-imitation.

Eileene had a medical check-up today, to see how her diabetes treatment is going. Quite well, I’m pleased to report. All the pertinent values are much closer to normal than they were when the treatment began three months ago, with the exception of her glycerin levels. The endocrinologist confidently declared this meant Eileene was eating too many eggs, which is probably correct—she’s been eating a lot of eggs lately. But, despite eggs’ bad reputation for cholesterol, Eileene’s cholesterol levels are fine, or at least improving.

The connection between eggs and health got me thinking about the disconnect between the medical community (and with it, the larger scientific community) and the ordinary consumer. The general concern over cholesterol, and the unfair condemnation of eggs along with it, erupted when I was a kid. It was grounded in the discovery of a strong correlation between cholesterol levels and heart disease.

Science could not immediately go any farther than that. It could, and did, begin pursuing a lot of obvious and important questions growing out of that discovery, like whether cholesterol caused heart attacks and what other circumstances might contribute to or counteract the correlation. In time, with properly controlled experiments, medical researchers learned more. For example, they found that different types of cholesterol may or may not contribute significantly to heart disease, and learned to distinguish between HDLs (good cholesterol) and HDLs (good cholesterol). They learned that white bread and similar processed starches and sugars are worse for your cholesterol-related health than eggs. For that matter, cholesterol may not be much of a threat to your health for the cholesterol, specifically—Eileene’s cholesterol is fine, or at least improving; it’s her glycerin level the doctor objected to.

But the general public didn’t care about evaluating the important follow-up questions. It simply equated cholesterol with heart disease, and, since eggs contain cholesterol, decided that eggs are a health risk. End of story.

You see that kind of behavior a lot around miracle diets: grapefruit contain trace amounts of some enzyme that might aid digestion of sugars, and voila! The grapefruit-45 diet, and the placebo pills that came with it. Zinc plays a part in your immune system, so voila! Zinc pills that never did a thing for my cold, but merely made my aunt feel better about helping treat it.

People may feel the painstaking nature of scientific discovery is too slow to deal with the problems of the moment, and they may be right. But it’s the only way science works, and the only way it enjoys any authority at all. A scientific experiment never really confirms any general rule; rather, it confirms or rejects a specific phenomenon, and often the only way to discover which phenomenon holds true is to weed out all the wrong ones one by one. The moment you try to side-step that process, it all falls apart.

There’s a lesson there for creationists, or for presidents cherry-picking their intelligence reports.

Republicans may have taken a beating in 2008, and to a lesser extent in 2006, and we may hope to see them learn an important lesson—or several important lessons—about the economic ideology of the right. But they seem in no hurry to do so.

Witness the memo circulated among Senate Republicans, as reported by the LA Times, on Wednesday, December 10, concerning the proposed bailout for the auto industry:

Today at noon, Senators Ensign, Shelby, Coburn and DeMint will hold a press conference in the Senate Radio/TV Gallery. They would appreciate our support through messaging and attending the press conference, if possible. The message they want us to deliver is:

1. This is the democrats [sic] first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.
2. This rush to judgment is the same thing that happened with the TARP. Members did not have an opportunity to read or digest the legislation and therefore could not understand the consequences of it. We should not rush to pass this because Detroit says the sky is falling.

The sooner you can have press releases and documents like this in the hands of members and the press, the better. Please contact me if you need additional information. Again, the hardest thing for the democrats to do is get 60 votes. If we hold the Republicans, we can beat this.

Set aside the question of whether the proposed bailout is a good idea, and whether you agree with it. I don’t care for the idea, myself. Set aside, also, the sound argument expressed in the second point of the memo. A hasty decision certainly is likely to be poor, as was the hasty decision involved in handing $750 billion to Hank Paulson, no strings attached, to fight the financial crisis as his whims might carry him, or, indeed, as were many hasty Congressional decisions of the past eight years, many of which enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Senators Ensign, Shelby, Coburn, and DeMint.

Rather, consider the first point of the memo, placed before the issue of sound judgment: that the proposed bailout should be fought to prevent any gains by organized labor. Blocking a bailout may be wise on several counts, but the memo wishes to pursue it primarily as a union-busting move, an attack on the working class—or rather, a defense against those who would support it. The memo does not evaluate the bailout on its own merits, but on how much its passage might aid the Democrats politically. Grateful auto workers might look to Democrats as their champions, and continue to vote for the Dems in future elections.

This attitude towards endorsing or rejecting hugely important, even vital, legislation strictly on the question of how it might strengthen or weaken the party is nothing new in politics (of either US party, or of any nation), but it deserves particular attention today because it stands out as a defining quality of the Republican party roughly since the ascension of Reagan in 1980, part and parcel with the growing movement toward party discipline and ideological purity. We saw a politicization of vital government functions throughout the Bush administration: the use of retired generals to push war in Iraq, evaluations of DoJ prosecutors according to how much damage they had done to either party in their pursuit of the law, the use of FEMA to aid red districts while writing off blue ones. The memo above, however, bears the closest resemblance to Newt Gingrich’s determination to defeat a health care plan generated by Hillary Clinton back when Bill was in the White House.

A similar memo circulated among House Republicans, urging them to defeat the plan because its passage would win votes for Democrats. It would, too. People wanted a comprehensive health care plan, and Republican refusal to produce one under Reagan or Bush the elder would look bad if the Democrats produced one. One could argue whether the Clinton plan which emerged was a good one or a bad one, and whether Clinton presented it persuasively to the public, but the salient point here is: the memo urging its defeat circulated a year before the details of the plan were decided. Whether the plan would, upon release, prove to be a good one was immaterial to the Republican leadership; all that mattered was destroying a political enemy, and to hell with serving the public.

We’re seeing that same attitude today, as we’ve seen it since 1980, and it’s doing terrible damage to our government, and to our country. Perhaps it will work. Certainly it worked very well for Republicans between 1980 and 2004, a generation of running the nation…into the ground. Or our Republican leaders may learn from the 2006 and 2008 elections and clean up their act.

But they won’t learn any lessons about governance, or about neocon financial theory, unless the public learns a few lessons first. Lessons about class warfare, and how divisive politics are used to serve the ends of the wealthy few.

For reasons I can’t even remember now, I went back to look at the GM of the Rings online strip. It took me a while to warm up to it—probably because my heart is a shriveled little prune of misanthropy and disgust—but once I did, it was abso-freaking-lutely hilarious. Going back to relive it, I can’t imagine what took me so long. Some of the best lines are in the earliest entries: “Did I mention…the Nazgul???” or “That’s a very specific level of tired.” Maybe it’s because Shamus’s phenomenal screen-capture fu, the mystical art by which he snatches really, really choice frames from the movie to illustrate the strip, took a while to reach their potential.

Anyway, the humor of the strip lies in the retelling of The Lord of the Rings, specifically the Peter Jackson film version, as though it were a role-playing campaign, played out by people who were familiar with D&D, but not with LotR. (A peculiar conceit, to be sure, since D&D drew more heavily on LotR than upon any other fantasy material, but never mind.) Like a lot of RPG humor—c.f., Knights of the Dinner Table—the group represents the lowest common denominator of RPGs: a bunch of hack-and-slash fiends with no interest in story, roleplaying, or indeed anything but loot and slaughter, squaring off against a power-mad GM convinced the players are allowed to follow his predetermined plot as an indulgence. Anyone who’s played any RPG past the stage of rank neophyte will understand the satire.

Which is odd, because not every RPG player has actually been exposed to such base levels of power-gaming. I know I haven’t. I’m not saying such players don’t exist; I can recall a couple players I met at cons who deserve to be thoroughly mocked for their bloodthirstiness, and even one adolescent who slyly shared his secret of cheating at dice rolling. But I’ve never dealt with an entire group of them. Nor have I met players who openly acknowledge deliberate attempts to sabotage their GM’s hard work. (But then, apart from my own very earliest attempts at GMing, I’ve never seen a GM treat his players with such railroading contempt to trigger such a rebellion, either.) Nor have I seen such player-GM hostility sustained for so long; such a toxic combination must implode pretty quickly. (Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it??)

The people who inhabit the GM of the Rings strip are just as much exaggerations as the racist, sexist, ageist, and other –ist and –phobic stereotypes that populate off-color humor: recognizable though unreal. But, unlike the –ist and –phobic jokes, these don’t seem to cause anyone offense. Maybe it’s because nerds aren’t thought to be born that way, an idea that might be challenged as attention continues to be directed at autism and related conditions, and so nerd jokes aren’t taken to mock people who can’t help being that way. Or maybe the nerds are enjoying a good, narcissistic laugh: “Ha ha, yeah, we sure can be stupid that way. Don’t touch my dice.” But I think it’s a matter of ease with which the nerd hierarchy makes nerd humor inherently about the other: like drivers, who always think they drive at the proper speed and everyone else is too fast or too slow, nerds tend to admit they are nerds, but not the really hard-core nerds like those other guys. The line between normal and screwed-up nerd always lies just below one’s self. And the players of GM of the Rings lie below that line, as well.

Eileene shared some disturbing news with me this morning: a fatal accident a few blocks from our house, where a driver hit two pedestrians.

How this could happen is easy to see: Valley Road is a major local thoroughfare, which is not much of a problem in itself. But this fact makes drivers wishing to enter Valley careless, especially drivers wishing to turn right onto Valley get so wrapped up in watching for a break in traffic approaching from the left that they stop paying attention to traffic from the right, sometimes for a minute or more. That’s plenty of time for a car a little outside its lane, or a bus, or a pedestrian to approach from what seemed like a great distance when the driver first stopped watching his right, and when the opening in traffic from the left finally arrives, drivers often lunge heedlessly onto Valley, with no idea what might surround them on the other three sides.

When the days are short, as they are now, and the sun sinks behind the rise to our immediate west at 4:00 or so, the danger rises significantly. Dark winter coats and clothes don’t help. Peripheral vision becomes nearly worthless; I’ve failed to capture the attention of such drivers even by shouting and waving as I seek to enter the crosswalk.

And I do shout and wave. I occasionally walk that route, maybe a couple of times a month, as it stretches between our house and a nearby university, and even in the space of a few hundred walks, was hit by a car once. Just a bump, nothing serious, but an unintended impact nevertheless. Since then, I’ve watched drivers carefully, and signaled my presence. One guy nearly hit me again just a week ago, as I returned from the graduate applications office.

Yep. I’ll be attending classes starting this spring, which means I’m going to be walking that route frequently, throughout the winter season with its short days. That’s what makes the news so disturbing.

Bush-hating blogs are snickering at the “Speech Topper” memo directed towards cabinet and other high officials that “offers a guide for discussing Bush's eight-year tenure during their public speeches,” a list of how the White House would like the last eight years viewed. That there should be such a memo, coordinating talking points and trying to put the most positive spin possible on presidential performance isn’t remarkable; indeed, it’s pretty well standard operating procedure for any presidency that wants to guide the national conversation. What makes the memo so entertaining are the gaping holes and awesome silences between the highlights.

No mention of Iraq, for example. Nor of the faulty intelligence which led us there. Nor of the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Nor of the economic meltdown brought on by deregulation and artificially low interest rates, apart from claiming that Bush “responded with bold steps to prevent an economic meltdown”—which meltdown continues today. Nor of Guantanamo. Nor of the handling of national disasters. Nor the implementation of torture. Nor of attempts to politicize the DoJ. Nor of massive tax cuts aimed primarily at the wealthy. Nor of the massive debt they created. Nor of the conviction and pardon of White House staff for endangering a CIA agent in order to pursue vengeance on a political enemy. Nor of a vice president claiming to be free from laws concerning the executive branch. Nor of any of the issues and events which defined this presidency. The major issues and events which defined this presidency are such uniform disasters that the memo has to rummage around to find anything at all positive to say, and even then stretches the truth.

The signature achievements of the Bush administration, the bits they would really like to focus on:

Bush “kept America safe” following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Certainly he didn’t keep Americans safe—he needlessly endangers our soldiers daily in Iraq, and has turned the global sympathy in the wake of 9/11 into widespread contempt among our allies and hatred among our enemies, painting a big old “We’re the guys tramping around in your country, shooting the place up!” sign on our collective forehead. By tying our army down in a wild goose chase—and doing terrible harm to it in the process—Bush left us vulnerable to moves by other unfriendly nations. Russia, for example, felt free to voice considerably more hostility after watching us flounder in Iraq, and the other two members of the “axis of evil” saw fit to antagonize the US, safe in the knowledge that we couldn’t even handle what little we have on our plate now. Much of the debacle following hurricane Katrina was a product of mangling a once-effective FEMA to turn it into yet another anti-terrorism program under the new Department of Homeland Security. It’s hard to prove Bush did not keep America safe in the much more limited sense of preventing another terrorist attack, but it’s equally difficult to prove that he did. Like the claim of preventing an economic meltdown, the claim of keeping America safe is a pure hypothetical. We’ve been safe since 9/11 from imaginary attacks, much like we’ve launched a war to protect us from imaginary nuclear weapons. Well done there.

Bush lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts. Sorta. Lifted until now, when the economic meltdown the memo claims Bush to have taken bold steps to prevent has wiped out the gains made on credit since 2001, leaving us with nothing to show for all the debt—except, of course, the debt. The memo prefers not to mention either our current state or the multi-trillion dollar deficit.

Bush also helped curb the AIDS epidemic in Africa. While a good and noble thing, this is nothing like a priority for a US president. That such an item should be number three on the list speaks volumes.

To find campaign promises met, they have to dredge all the way back to the very earliest days of the presidency: the passage of the misnamed “No Child Left Behind” Act, which has not altered the performance of US students as measured against other nations’ to any statistically significant degree, but which has led to a lot of marginal students being dropped schools worried for their performance reviews. Since the act’s passage in early 2001, it seems, no campaign promises of any substance have been kept, at least none for which the White House wishes to be remembered.

“Above all” in the memo’s estimation, “George W. Bush promised to uphold the honor and the dignity of his office. And through all the challenges and trials of his time in office, that is a charge that our president has kept.” Claims of honor and dignity may sound strange indeed, when the Bush years ushered in no-bid contracts, government-sanctioned torture, and massive privacy invasions of our own citizens. But it makes sense if you remember that to uphold the honor and dignity of the presidency was another campaign promise: code for “I won’t be caught in an affair with an intern, like Clinton was.”

That’s it. The grand accomplishment, above all others, that the White House wants to be remembered for, after eight years in the most powerful office in the world: Bush didn’t get caught in an affair with an intern. Talk about lowering the bar.