This is how voter fraud occurs: captured on video

This is one of the most important videos you could watch this entire election season. A West Virgina polling station allowd a citizen journalist to film the malfunctioning nature of the system that was producing erratic results in a computerized voting machine. An attempt to vote straight Democratic results in... A vote for John McCain. This is supposedly due to lack of calibration on the voting machine... So you're telling me that the iPhone is more accurate a device than your voting booth? You know, I'm one of those crazy people who believe the 2004 election was stolen to some degree. But I'm also one of those crazy people who thought that unregulated free market capitalism would someday lead to a crash, which I thought was just some upper middle class intellectual thing I believed in but would never come to pass. Well, pardon me for saying "fuck me". Be careful what you wish for.

Given polling and the latest news, some complacency has set in amongst voters, and this complacency usually hits the youngest the most. Make no mistake - even if Obama is tipped to win in sheer stastitics right now, the number of you who vote for him, the greater the turnout and local congressional and Senate races that can be overturned, will enable them to gain political capital to sweep through the necessary changes we deseperately require. Even if you're a California voter or a NY voter, getting down to vote for Obama does provide a clear rejection of the failed policies of the last eight years.

Get out the vote. Get out the vote so you can say 20 years from now that you took part in this historically fundamental election. That you'll be able to tell your children someday about the one small thing you could do in the year 2008 when America had become driven by fear and had lost its standing in the world and polarized. Hell, I even ask you do it if you're a McCain supporter. All of my time traveling the world has taught me many things, and one is paramount - a vote in America in terms of foreign policy is a vote that effects lives around the globe for better or worse.

Most incredible moment in the election thus far

I don't think there's much more you can add about the implosion of the McCain campaign - one need only just read news headlines. In recent days his campaign has taken a turn towards something far more worrying, as his rallies have become flashpoints for mob mentality with people yelling out "terrorist" and so on when Obama's name is invoked. Only this morning McCain's flacks were defending the stoking of this inflammatory rhetoric (which admittedly seems to mostly be done by Sarah Palin). In a hilarious bit of politicking this morning a McCain spokesperson somehow indicated it was Obama's fault this was happening.



McCain yesterday:


UPDATE: just as I was about to post this, news from Alaska that the state investigation has found that yes indeed Sarah Palin abused her power as Governor of Alaska in violation of law.

Well today we get McCain actually taking the microphone from attendants at his rally and explaining to them that no, Obama is not something to be afraid of as they have been sort of insinuating all week. He even says he's a decent man. It's an incredible moment of political theater. He earns a response of harsh boos and light applause. Finally the McCain that impressed people in 2000, the decent man who called George Bush out to his face on his slanderous campaigning, pulls back on the complete abyss of his candidacy. And it won't help him either way. It's such a strange defining moment for his entire erratic campaign, forced to play political hardball in a world that so desperately right now needs to reject what has gone before.

It's utterly stunning to me - I have to go off the deep end into personal opinion here entirely of my own so forgive me Giant Roboters - it seems that this election offers a subconscious referendum on race in America, because at this point just on sheer political point scoring and his lead in the polls being what it is the only way Obama can fail to earn the presidency now is if people in the booth cast their vote in ignorance perpetuated by innuendo and rumor that's meant to scare people about Obama. That's why the possibility of his loss is so potentially heartbreaking.

An Obama loss would be definitive proof that America does vote with its fears not its hopes. And here in this moment, McCain seems to have realized that despite all else, even to him and the damage it would do his campaign, he cannot further allow ignorance to reign in this campaign or let his supporters become consumed by a frightened, hateful pack mentality that wants to paint Obama as a foreign Other. Maybe he did it to salvage himself politically, but this single act is infuriating his hardcore base, the ones who think Sarah Palin is intelligent.

If the generation McCain is a part of - and I think from all accounts as a measure of a man he's not a kind, measured person, even by his own admission at times, one who had as I wrote here earlier displays some ignorant attitudes about racism - can recognize that those politics just aren't worth the cost in the world we're in today, then there is hope. It means that the politics of old can be transcended. Obama's high road - even at the loss of his own passionate rhetoric - is the road we must take for the rest of the election, hopefully. And today his opponent realized it, too.

I mean, look, today the Washington Post reports that American Capitalism may be finished. You know your annoying progressive friends who ride bicycles and have horn rimmed glasses who have been claiming with their grad school decrees that capitalism is a flawed system eventually doomed to failure, which has always seemed like an intellectual posture easy to say from the confines of upper middle class academia? Well we are literally in the week where those people may have just been right all along. That's how fucked up things are.

For breaking political videos you should always check the indispensible Talkingpointsmemo.com.

Katamari WTF? Nobi Nobi Boy

Katamari Damacy was a stunning bit of originality in the years dominated by the transition in gaming from two dimensions to three. It was designed by apathetic, game abhorring, playground designing and sculpture trained Keita Takahashi - who has developed a cult following. It's taken rather seriously by hardcore game lunatics, despite it being wonderfully immature. LittleBigPlanet in all its glory owes a debt to a certain sense to the game in that it somehow reconnects you to a childish sense of play - what Wii games are supposed to do but I find often don't.

Despite protestations he'd never work in games again, here's a trailer from the Tokyo Games Show for his new upcoming game Nobi Nobi Boy, and you really ought to judge for yourself. At least his eclectic sense in music hasn't changed.



Illustration drawn by Takahashi courtesy Indiecadewho have an interview with Takahashi here.

And for amazing Katamari goodness check out these T shirts from Panic designs which I found by bumping into the guy who makes them outside the GR store on Sawtelle one day.

And for old time's sake, the mind altering opening to Katamari Damacy.

I've got an extra LittleBigPlanet beta key for one of you

Somehow I got an extra key sent to me for the beta test of LittleBigPlanet. Whoever is first to drop a comment naming their favorite game thus far of 2008 gets it. I didn't get much time with the game yesterday but it is an absolute killer app for the Playstation 3. I've never seen my girlfriend so utterly immediately absorbed into a game and playing together is wonderful, fusing memories of playing old school platformers with one of the greatest most original bits of gaming art direction ever seen - it has a wonderful handmade aesthetic as if it were clobbered together from bits of imagination.

But the real trick with LittleBigPlanet is so paradigm shifting it's hard to explain if you don't experience it - the ability to immediately drop into cardboard and yarn constructions made around the world by other players of the game. In only a few weeks amateur construction gurus have made incredible things. What LittleBigPlanet does is streamline the discovery process, in effect making user generated content something that's easy and intuitive, so much so a child could - again the art direction fuses with this because it feels like something you make as an 8 year old with paper maiche and cardboard in your backyard. Imagine if the original Super Mario Bros had featured a dreamlike system for designing your own levels that could instantly be shared around the world and you could run through those levels with anyone who came to visit.

I'm thinking the game is an absolute precedent setting triumph.

LittleBigPlanet: if Michel Gondry and Rube Goldberg made a videogame

LittleBigPlanet is one of the most awaited games of the year, a Playstation 3 exclusive that looks on the surface like a simple Mario style jumping game with a brilliantly realized handmade aesthetic. But the game also affords players the chance to create their own worlds using simple intuitive physics tools and creator driven content so that one can make a playground of your dreams ad then share online with others. More to come on this incredible game, but right now if you hop over to this USAToday link you can get an access key to the beta test that will let you try it out some weeks before release. I'm sure I'll be writing more about this game as only a few minutes with it convinced me its one of the greatest games in years... But hop to it now to get that beta key!

John McCain: asshole

An article from 2000 has resurfaced in recent days and it's amazing that in an election where the commentary fixates so much upon race this hasn't been brought up again. In the year 2000, John McCain was using the word "gook" and refused to apologize for its usage until due political pressure forced a bland apology. It would be impossible in my estimation to go any lower than he has, becoming a candidate who in utter desperation has started campaigning for the presidency as if he were auditioning for Jackass, but for me this is the final piece of evidence in which I see him not so much as someone who inherently disagrees with me on how to govern, but rather evidence of a spiteful, shitty, racist human being.

Here's the original SFGate article. And here's reportage from The Nation that sourced the quote. And here's his pithy apology.

So the respect the media affords to the war hero who was a a worse pilot than George W Bush is supposed to be some sort of shield that allows him to hold onto hatred for his captors - as was written at the time in The Nation Roger Simon, writing in U.S. News, cited the incident and added: "John McCain says 'gooks,' and who's going to tell him not to?" While I cannot conceive of what kind of experience and hatred being a prisoner of war can create in a person, the fact that he saw it in racial terms and again changed his position when it became politically inconvenient means that his views of race speak to a fundamental flaw in his character that disqualifies him to be president, and if any of your Asian American friends are thinking of voting for this guy then by all means share these links with them.

Had McCain been captured by Germans what would he have said? The fact that I have been reading about the upcoming election every single day for the past year and this has not come up again despite daily browsing of news sources both independent, mainstream, and even extremist on both sides means that the politics of race when it comes to Asian Americans continues to be invisible. Which is usually because, in my opinion, we let it be that way. Well this time you can at least cast a vote about it.

UPDATE: here's a McCain rally from today, in which I think the veil is beginning to lift. This is the kind of campaign we're going to be seeing for thirty days.



As for Obama, who lived in Indonesia and Hawaii and has a sister with a surname of Ng someone in the mix, here's a heartwarming story that's been unearthed to cheer you up, where he helps a total stranger at an airport who was stranded twenty years ago when he was a broke ass college graduate.

Return of the Mack

I've been reading Paul Krugman's blog on the NY Times in some quixotic attempt to decipher the financial crisis that threatens to send us all into Dust Bowl world once again. Despite my occasional misgivings about Krugman right now couldn't be a better time for his blog. And best of all you get the occasional gem you wouldn't ever have stumbled upon yourself. Like the fact that the reigning champ of prison currency is mackerel. According to the Wall Street Times, mackerel has become the de facto economic standard for prisoners given that smokes are now prohibited. Given our nation's lopsided prisoner population, that's a lot of people getting a taste for a fish I learned to eat in Ireland with breakfast. That's right, for all you Brits and Irish folk, kippers be the badass way to trade in stir.

Poster Boy makes New York alright

Subway billboard mashup artist Poster Boy gets profiled in New York Magazine right here. Even better, check out his Flickr page with his work right here.