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Saw a lovely game this morning: Chronotron. The premise is that your robotic alter-ego’s time machine is broken; without skip chips, you can only make short-range jumps. So you have to collect all the lost skip chips to travel time freely—that is, you have to fetch the doohickey from each level and bring it back to the starting point in order to progress to the next level. The clever gimmick that drives the game is that you can use your time machine to replay a level while your past selves retrace your earlier steps.

So, to give you a very basic example: the chip is sealed behind a heavy door, where you can’t reach it. An obvious switch opens the door…but as long as you’re holding the switch down, you can’t go get the chip. The solution is to go hold down the switch for a while, holding the door open, then return to your time machine. On returning to the level, your new beta-self can walk to the door while your alpha-self goes and holds the switch, just like you did earlier. The door swings open, your beta-self gets the chip and returns to the time machine. After a while, your alpha-self, bored with standing on the switch, returns to the time machine, just like you did. A screen is complete when the skip chip and all your incarnations return to the time machine.

The time travel replay isn’t perfect; it’s entirely possible to engineer events to contradict earlier ones. For example, your alpha-self might wait twenty seconds, then go and pick up a crate. If you then drop the crate and return to the time machine, your beta-self can rush in, snatch the crate, and carry it off, so that your alpha-self finds no crate to pick up when he arrives where the crate was. Instead, he stands helplessly, pushing the space bar to lift and drop a crate that doesn’t exist before returning to the time machine. I can see that recording and replaying this kind of instruction list, independent of objects, is much easier than recording the entire sequence of events would be, but requiring the player to avoid such paradoxes would be more satisfying. Instead, the game only recognizes a paradox if you screw things up to the point where a past self fails to get to the time machine when he’s supposed to, at which point a warning message pops up and you’re forced to replay the level.

It’s possible to screw things up—and rest assured, you will do so—to the point where the level is insoluble, but the penalty is mild: you can restart the level, or you may choose to rewind only to the start of your last incarnation, a welcome time-saver.

I’m only a little way in: the seventh level out of forty, and I can already see how this is going to go. Soon, the levels will contain switches that affect multiple obstacles at once, and so need to be activated and deactivated at the appropriate times, instead of merely activated once to provide access. Soon thereafter, active elements will require timing your incarnations and their switches, instead of merely doing everything in the right sequence. When enough elements must be activated, it will become fiendishly difficult to estimate the necessary delays. And then, my past selves will start sabotaging my current self by doing things at the wrong time.

Fans of Doctor Who and similar time-travel adventures might enjoy grappling with the threat of time paradoxes themselves, but there’s a more obvious market in fans of the brilliant if frustrating game Lemmings, which required you to herd the suicidally oblivious lemmings by assigning them to build staircases and dig tunnels, hoping to create a safe path to the exit point before too many of them marched into various deathtraps. Chronotron is very similar, except that in Chronotron, if those stupid robots drifting around on auto-pilot ruin your plans, you have no one to blame but yourself. After all, they’re only doing exactly what you told them to—in fact, what you yourself did not two minutes earlier.

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, I commented on the breaking investigation of Scott Bloch at the Office of Special Counsel, who far from pursuing his duty to protect federal whistle-blowers, used his office to expose and squelch them. We might hope to see actual justice come from this were it not for the presidential power of pardon.

The US Constitution provides that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment” (Article II, Section 2). I have no particular objection to this provision, nor to its use, as such, but it is prone to gross abuse, as it was when Ford pardoned Nixon, disgraced in the Watergate scandal and likely to face criminal charges:

“Now, therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from July (January) 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”

Note that the pardon does not mention any particular illegal act. The pardon excuses “all offenses.” Not just Watergate, but the infamous “enemies list” and the illegal harassment of political liabilities that came with it, war crimes, illegal taping of conversations in the Oval Office. I doubt Nixon sold vital national secrets wholesale to the Russians, or that he strangled three dozen pregnant women in the Oval Office during his term, but if he did, he’s covered. The pardon excuses “all offenses.” Note, too, that the pardon precedes conviction. While everyone knows Nixon was complicit in the Watergate coverup, he is not legally responsible—nor can he be, in a nation that presumes innocence until guilt is proven. Without the possibility of conviction, even the investigation is effectively closed, and with it the possibility of catching an expanding ring of corrupt officials.

Employed this way, presidential pardon ceases to be an expression of mercy, and instead becomes a blanket license to break the law. “Not saying my good friend Special Prosecutor John Smith did anything wrong, but if he did, he’s still not liable, neither in person nor in his execution of office. Also, you can’t use the threat of prosecution to get him to spill the beans on anything I did wrong—not that I did, of course—or to seize any correspondence he may have that just happens to mention me—not that there is any. But you aren’t allowed to investigate, regardless.”

Nixon’s pardon marked a sea change in the power of presidential pardon. Before Nixon, pardons were given primarily to a president’s detractors: Washington pardoned the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, angry at his agricultural tax; Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers; Harding pardoned labor leader Eugene Debs; and Truman commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment for Oscar Collazo, who attempted to kill Truman. After Nixon, we began to see an expanding list of increasingly brazen pardons for close friends and political supporters: Reagan pardoned George Steinbrenner, a major campaign contributor; Bush the elder pardoned officials complicit in the Iran-Contra Affair, including pardoning Weinberger before a trial; Clinton pardoned his Whitewater business partner, his Secretary of HUD of lying to the FBI, Democratic Congressman Dan Rostenkowski of laundering money through the post office, and his own brother of drug charges.

Such pardons tend to come at the end of the presidential administration, when the president can take little heat for pardons offered for corrupt motivations. Indeed, it seems likely that Clinton has set a precedent for the technique in his widely criticized pardons and commutations delivered on his final day in office. There is no reason to expect Bush the lesser to be any more circumspect in his behavior. He has proven willing to stand behind his supporters indefinitely, and in the face of well-documented cause for condemnation. He has also proven eager to place the presidency above the law, and even above the Constitution, in his claims that executive privilege extends not only to presidential behavior, but to the entire executive branch of government. Already he has commuted Scooter Libby’s sentence, in part to repay loyalty and in part to prevent any further investigation. We can expect to see blanket pardons for Bush’s personal network on his departure from office that will put Clinton’s sleazy little list to shame. Granted, Bush’s gratitude is largely limited to those who can serve Bush himself in the future—nobody seems willing to give Gonzales a job despite taking a bullet for the president—but simply hushing investigation should be motive enough for our scion of entitlement.

I’m not a big fan of Constitutional amendment; too often it’s a method of placing an unconstitutional law above objection, and, being unconstitutional, amendment proposals are often pretty objectionable, too: proposed marriage amendment, a flag-burning amendment, a prayer-in-schools amendment. But curbing the abuse of a constitutional power is entirely appropriate for an amendment. Sharper legal minds than mine will need to work out the details and close loopholes, but at a minimum, the power of presidential pardon should be limited in two critical ways. One: presidential pardon should apply only to specific crimes, and not to criminal behavior generally. Two: presidential pardon should apply only to crimes for which a conviction has already been secured.

If anyone digs in his heels on the grounds that law should err on the side of compassion, argue it this way: our legal system presumes innocence. It is impossible to pardon anyone for a crime which the law does not recognize he has committed. A presidential pardon implies guilt, even as it denies legal liability. And for the law-and-order types, pardons should be anathema in the first place.

Posted by at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Exciting things are happening in Washington, where the game of “legal immunity musical chairs” is in full swing. That’s the process by which it’s decided who takes the fall for those sins of the presidency which can’t be hidden. And since this presidency has so many visible sins to account for, this term’s game promises to be particularly lively.

The most recent chair to be tugged from the dwindling ring is a free pass on abuses in the OSC. The Office of Special Counsel is charged with protecting federal whistle-blowers from government retaliation for their whistle-blowing, and especially from getting fired for exposing abuses. I dimly remember the scandal when Scott Bloch took over the office in 2004 and immediately began dismissing out of hand complaints against Republican-appointed officials, and, when his own department began blowing whistles on such behavior, creating a new field office in Detroit where complainers could be assigned to undesirable posts. Or fired, if they preferred.

The FBI just raided Bloch’s office and home, seizing computer and paper records. No official statement of the charges the warrants pursue is yet available, but the smart money is on violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using their offices for partisan political goals, because two of Bloch’s deputies, also under investigation for Hatch Act violations, were subjected to warranted search and seizure at the same time. Perhaps the move was motivated by Bloch’s decision to have a “virus” purged from his computer, which, by a startling coincidence, had apparently infected his two deputies’ computers as well, without touching the rest of the department—the FBI calculated it had more to lose than to gain by waiting for evidence to mount.

I await further developments with delight, especially since the OSC itself is investigating the White House, and especially Karl Rove, for improper firing of federal prosecutors and the use of federal offices in Republican political events. I hope that unleashing the FBI on the OSC is not simply a convenient way for the White House to stop investigation into its own misdeeds.

Posted by at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend, we attended a wool festival in the general vicinity of Washington, D.C. Because I can no longer travel for hours on end without a pit stop, we pulled into one of those highway rest stops along the way. It offered the usual selection of grossly overpriced fast food--$2.69 for a single, plain hot dog—and emergency entertainment in the form of magazines and paperbacks. I suspect the newsstand owner was a bit of a prude; even Maxim was considered too racy to go without a plastic sheath, and the paperbacks were heavily dominated by religious reading.

Rest stop paperbacks are already pretty low-grade in general; when even Danielle Steele is culled to make room for “Heavenly Humor—inspiring humor from women writers” you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Just before I turned away, I spotted the puzzle offering: Christian word-find. Word-finds occupy the lowest rung of the puzzle ladder: they require no particular reasoning, knowledge, or creativity, just patience. Any damn fool can, given time, find all the words, possibly moving his lips as he spells to himself. These word-finds qualified as “Christian” because the words in every puzzle were taken directly from biblical verse, including words like “of,” “to,” and “the.” (It must have taken some work to avoid including two instances of two-letter words.)

Or rather, I thought word-finds were the bottom of the barrel. A few seconds later, I spotted “Biblical Sudoku.” Now, pause a minute before reading on to try to guess how Sudoku puzzles could qualify as biblical, since they consist of nothing but a 9x9 grid to be filled with the numbers one to nine in such a way that no numeral is repeated in row, column, or 3x3 sub-grid. The numbers from one to nine are hardly exclusively biblical material, so I confess I was stumped.

Looking inside the book, I had a second surprise: the grids were all empty. This confused me for a moment, since an empty grid gives you nowhere to start the process of filling in the rest of the squares. In fact, it doesn’t even require a unique solution; any of the frajillions of Sudoku puzzles ever printed could legally fill an empty grid. My confusion lasted only a moment, however, because on the facing page were the answers. Not printed directly, but concealed in biblical references: for every square was a “hint,” telling you were to find the answer: How many months should fields lie fallow before planting oats (Leviticus 13:6)? Or something in that vein.

Effectively, there was no Sudoku at all to biblical Sudoku; the characteristic grid played no part in the puzzle, which could as easily have been eighty-one unrelated blanks at the end of the “clues.” All the logic, the whole purpose of a Sudoku puzzle, was removed and replaced by that ancient puzzle challenge known as “looking up the answers.” Small children would find their intelligence insulted by such a puzzle.

I know Christianity has produced some great thinkers. Medieval scholars, many of them from largely illiterate cultures, struggled to make sense of some very heady ideas, and nearly managed to do so, their efforts at logic foundering on experimental knowledge. Scholars of the Renaissance and the age of reason continued to praise Christian teaching even as they challenged its foundations. Sadly, such titans are not the norm. At the other, larger end of the scale lie the credulous and dim-witted, not much given to literacy or critical thinking, but eager to embrace any book as long as the word “Christian” is printed on the cover and the words aren’t too big. For them, and their desire for intellectual challenge, we have not-really-puzzles-at-all. It seems “Christian puzzles” aren’t profound questions like how a perfect god can co-exist with a manifestly imperfect world, or how free will can exist in the presence of an all-knowing, all-powerful deity. No, they’re just imitation puzzles for very stupid people.

Posted by at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The infamous DC madam, Deborah Jane Palfrey, is dead. The official word is that it looks like suicide, although they’ll be looking into it. Can’t afford to leap to any conclusions when dealing with someone possessing secrets so dangerous to so many of the rich and powerful, although I’m sure it will turn out to be suicide. Palfrey’s station in life has deteriorated considerably: public exposure, a prison sentence, her business dismantled, her reputation for keeping her clients’ anonymity ruined (whether or not it was her fault). Some accounts say she vowed to kill herself before going to prison, others that she declared no intent to kill herself and a suspicion that others would have her done in. Reports of either kind of claim might be true; if both are, it suggest a disturbed mind. And some people commit suicide even without something to be depressed about. As deliciously Ludlum-esque as a murder arranged by some powerful Washington insider to tie off one last loose end would be, it doesn’t seem very likely, if only because bringing the name back into the news is more dangerous than letting it sink into dim memory. Grand, showy conspiracies like that don’t happen.

But smaller, equally ugly conspiracies do. What Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil,” referring to the dry, clerkish way the Jews were marked for mass murder by Nazi leaders, settles like heavy dust wherever power operates, and where good, vigorous sweepings are quietly disposed of. I’m very interested in what is about to happen to Palfrey’s list of clients. She may have kept that list private, out of a misplaced sense of honor or decency, a belief that exposing the Johns wouldn’t be proper. Or she may have fully intended to stick to her claim to “bring every last one of [the records] in if necessary” for her legal defense. But whoever inherits that figurative “little black book” may not feel bound by the same code of honor at all.

Whoever gets that list might consider it a golden opportunity for some very, very cautious blackmail. Or maybe, if it goes to a colleague, it could become a chance to round up business for her own swanky house of ill repute. But it might go to a relative, someone who, rightly or wrongly, feels just a bit of resentment towards some very heavy hitters who slipped into the background and left Palfrey to her fate, and decides to publish the list in revenge. It’s even conceivable that the inheritor might publicize the list out of simple civic devotion, letting us see how the men we’ve elected are serving. Or it could disappear into some dusty file as “evidence,” if all the copies can be tracked down.

Evidence of nothing in particular, just…“evidence.” The material equivalent of a “person of interest,” only more liable to disappear down the rabbit hole.

Palfrey’s name will be all over the headlines for a day or two. If something particularly shady comes up, the story may linger a bit longer. It will remain indefinitely, like the smell of a rodent dead in some inaccessible corner, on conspiracy theory blogs. Don’t watch for her name; she’s dead and gone. Watch for news on what happened to the list of clients’ names.

Posted by at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

He was well past his prime, he knew. The few stray wisps of hair combed from ear to opposite temple could not conceal the passage of ages. But he could still show some get-up-and-go, as he had in taking over the little sandwich shop, pursuing the American dream of entrepreneurial success.

Winning new customers was important. The sandwich shop lay just far enough off the main drag to lack visibility, so drop-ins were rare. Despite a sudden collapse of competition within the last year—when two blocks of more visible shops, including five food joints were closed down to pursue some new real estate project—customers remained scarce, which was part of the reason he was now at the counter, in place of the previous manager. So it was important that everything was right: the counter clean, the tables tidy, the menu accurate. Can’t impress the customers if everything isn’t perfect.

And yet these disposable menus he’d just had printed up weren’t perfect. The first section of entries, the hot sandwiches, were numbered, from one to twelve, just as they should be, with a tidy little period after each number. But the second section, the cold sandwiches, were not. Customers couldn’t simply walk up and ask, “Gimme a #27,” but would instead have to ask for a ham, salami, and provolone instead. Slow. Inefficient. It might put off customers who were in a hurry, and repeat business was vital. Quick service, that was the key.

Painstakingly, he pulled the first menu from the stack, and a felt-tip pen from beside the register. Bowing low over the menu, he began to number the entries by hand. One. Three. Period. One. Four. Period. One. Five. Period. One. Six. Period. His handwriting wasn’t so regular as a proper print job, but it would have to do. One. Seven. Period.

Someone was standing at the counter. The man could see it just in his peripheral vision. It nearly broke his concentration. One. Eight. Period. One. Nine. Pause. Touch up the nine—there, that’s better. Period. Two. A nice, even “O,” not too wide, not too short, but a proper oval…yes, that was good. Period. Start the next column. Two. One.

Whoever was standing at the counter began to drum his fingers. It was very irritating, very distracting. The old man pointedly decided not to look up. Maybe whoever it was would take the hint, and leave him to his task. It was very important to get everything just right. Customers want everything just right. Period. Two. Two. Period. Two.

“Hello?”

Whoever was standing at the counter spoke. It was very rude. This was almost as distracting as the finger drumming, but the old man managed to keep his head down. He could just detect a second person now, standing behind the first, waiting at the counter. He considered calling Vinnie from the back room to take care of the nuisance, but he hadn’t reached the end of the second column, and didn’t want to screw up his count. Three. Period. Two. Four. Period.

By the grace of God, whoever had been standing at the counter trying to get his attention gave up. He could hear whoever it was slip his jacket back on and pick up his bag. A moment later, the door swung open and shut again. The old man continued his counting. Detail is important. It’s vital to do everything you can to keep the customers coming back.

[Mostly true story. I was the distraction waiting at that counter, and, although I couldn’t swear to what he was thinking, it’s the most sensible explanation I could think of. I don’t know how the guy waiting behind me fared, but I wound up eating Chinese take-out instead.]

Posted by at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt recently offered a statement to the press. Medicare, he claims, is in trouble. This is hardly news; federal officials have warned of a looming crisis for a couple of decades. One might fairly say the crisis is already upon us, and has been for some time. Horror stories of people denied treatment because the budget isn’t there are already daily news. There is no budget because it was raided to fuel military adventures, and to cover income lost to tax cuts for the rich, on a promise to recover the loss when the inevitable economic boom tax cuts create arrived. (Remember the promised economic boom? We’re in it right now. Kinda hard to tell, I realize.)

But stating that Medicare is currently screwed up, largely if not entirely by the current administration, is what they call a “politically untenable” position. Instead, Leavitt characterizes Medicare as “drifting towards disaster,” but reassures us that “The disaster is not inevitable. If we act now, we can change the outcome.” Most people would consider that good reason to act now. Leavitt, however, doesn’t think so.

In his estimation, it is already too late for the Bush administration to do anything about it. (The subject of what the Bush administration should have been doing, but pointedly failed to do, about it during its many years at the wheel, shockingly, did not come up.) Not that failing to do his own job, the job at hand, prevents him from attacking the opposition for inactivity on a job they currently have no control over. Never too late to stick the knife in, or to pass the blame. Apparently serene about his own office’s neglect, Leavitt is nevertheless troubled: “It troubles me that this matter is not receiving more attention in the presidential candidates’ discussions. The next president will have to deal with this in significant part.” We’re ignoring the crisis, so you should ask some hard questions of those up-and-coming candidates you see so much in the news; it’s all their fault. Going to have been their fault. Whatever.

Knowing it is already too late to do anything must come as a great comfort to the administration generally, and to Leavitt in particular. It’s nice to have an excuse to ignore a responsibility you’ve already decided to abandon.

Posted by at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)