Wikipedia – Nintendo Microsite

After the release of Tears of the Kingdom, I was afraid that we would never see a new game in the style of the 2D Zelda game. Yet, I have been proven wrong when this game was announced. To be very honest, I didn’t have very high hopes for this game. Especially since this game was announced this summer and released in late September. I felt that this game going to be a game to fill a gap while the developers are working on a much larger game. Now, the game is released, and I have played through a fair chunk of it. So, what is my opinion on this game? Well, that’s what I’m going to tell you in this first impressions article, while I all invite you to leave a comment of your thoughts and/or opinions in the comment section down below.

Renewing the Echoes

After a short introduction where you play as Link, the main story of this game is introduced. There are all consuming interdimensional rifts appearing all over Hyrule, and it’s eating various people in the kingdom.

Link gets eaten by one of those rifts while freeing Zelda and when Zelda tells her father, the king, about these rifts… A new rift appears and replaces the king with an evil clone of himself. Zelda gets thrown in the dungeon and there she meets a fairy named Tri. This fairy gives Zelda a special staff where she can summon objects into the world using echoes. With those echoes, she escapes the dungeon and sets out on an adventure to save Hyrule from doom before the land is fully consumed by the rifts.

Something I always love about the Zelda games is that there is a different core mechanic at the base of the game. In this game, we get two things. We got the rifts to another dark world, but we also got the magical staff, which we can use to summon various echoes into the world. These echoes mean you can tackle this game in various different ways. But I’ll talk more about that later in this article.

In terms of story, this game is hitting all the same beats as your typical Legend of Zelda game. It might be disappointing, to some, that in this game there is no voice acting anymore apart from the grunts and various emotional noises. Personally, I think it adds to the charm of this game. That’s because the characters in this game are way more expressive. While the story isn’t going to leave you at the edge of your seat of “what’s going to happen next”, it’s still well quite enjoyable, and the more expressive characters add quite a lot to the charm and atmosphere of the game.

Something I really like is how in this game, you are free to explore the world at your own peace. This game isn’t limiting you to go in a certain order. While this game isn’t fully open world like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, it’s somewhere in between. You can tackle parts in a different order. Like the first two major dungeons can be done out of order. Each area is its self-contained puzzle, and everything you need can be found in that general area.

In my introduction of this article, I said that I was afraid that was afraid that this game would be a short one where you were able to beat it in a few hours. That it was going to be a game that’s supposed to hold players over for the “next big 3D Zelda title”. To my surprise, this game is rather lengthy for a 2,5D Zelda game. It clocks in at 25 hours of casual playtime, which is, to my knowledge, one of the longest 2,5D Zelda games.

Climbing with beds

Something I find myself doing quite a lot while playing this game was climbing the area with beds. I summoned various beds stacked on top of each other to climb a wall. Since, I wanted to know if the developers hid a secret on that cliff face.

The exploration of this version of Hyrule is a blast to do. While you visit a lot of familiar places and meet your usual suspects like the Zora and the Gerudo, it’s a treat seeing them again. The only thing I missed a bit is showing the impact of the rifts. Something that this game only tells through dialogue was how things got impacted by the rifts. I wish it was shown a bit more visually. Like different animations of the characters before and after. But maybe, Tears of the Kingdom set the bar a bit too high for those expectations where each major area had a certain curse.

In terms of gameplay, this game really leans into the echoes mechanic. It also remembers that Zelda is a princess and didn’t really have combat training. So, you have to use summoned enemies to your advantage to let them fight for you. Now, you do have a sword, but you can only use it when your power meter has charge. I always reserved that for the dungeon bosses or when the situation got pretty dicey. Since recharging that meter is either done with potions or by defeating monsters from the rift world. These enemies aren’t exactly common in the overworld, and the energy bar drains fast.

In general, this game hits the same general gameplay beats as all other Zelda games. You go from dungeon to dungeon, learning a new technique or skill, defeating the boos and moving forward to another dungeon. There are also side quests in this game, that give you a nice reward. In this game, you also have a nice system to keep track of these side quests, like in Tears of the Kingdom. Something they also brought over from that game is the cooking system to a degree.

That’s something I personally feel mixed about. Maybe it’s me, but I feel the ingredients are quite rare to come by and there is no real way to farm certain ingredients like in Breath of the Wild. I have to admit that it adds a certain charm to this game, but I feel it’s a bit under implemented here. Like when you first meet the potion creators Deku shrubs, they talk about recipes… And I had a hard time finding any.

Like in Tears of the Kingdom, you can also eat most of the ingredients without cooking them. While I personally dislike the fact you have to do two clicks to consume an item, I do understand why they did it. To avoid you consuming them too much. Yet, this is a change from the two previous games and I honestly really feel it’s a set backwards. A fine solution would be to give the player an option to switch between both systems.

Grezzo playset

This game was co-developed by Grezzo. Their previous original Zelda game was Tri Force Heroes. But, this game looks very similar in graphical style to the remake of Link’s Awakening on the Nintendo Switch from late 2019.

This game looks like a plastic toy set and it looks amazing. While I was playing this game, I felt amazed at how expressive they were able to make everything without breaking the illusion that this is a toy set brought to live by our imagination. I don’t have a lot of complaints about the visuals and animations. And most of my complaints aren’t that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

Just like, I don’t have any complaints about the music and sound design of this game. If you take the music and sound design in a vacuum, you would say that it sounds just like very other Zelda game. It sounds like a remix of the familiar melodies we all know and love from the Zelda games. But, this isn’t a problem, since it sells the illusion that you are a child playing with a sort of Playmobil toy set of Hyrule and trying to recreate the sound effects and music of the game.

In terms of controls, this game plays like a dream. I rarely had problems with the controls and something I really like is the fact that with one press of a stick, you can see a view from on top when you feel the camera is blocking something. Now, there is one thing that I do have some things to criticize about. And that’s about the jumping.

It’s pretty difficult sometimes to judge how high Zelda can jump. I had moments in combat where I wasn’t aware I could jump on a higher ledge until I saw an enemy jumping backwards on that ledge. I also got tripped up several times with how far Zelda can jump. Her jump is shorter than I think, and the amount of times I jumped into a pit misjudging the jump is quite a lot. Something that would have helped is something a small landing shadow when Zelda was coming down. Then again, that must have been a nightmare to implement… So, maybe I should keep her shorter jump just better in mind.

Now, something else. Something I really like is how this game has two difficulty modes. I’m playing through this game on the normal difficulty setting and I have to say, I’m happy that I did. This game can lure you into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t say that this game is hard, but it isn’t a cakewalk either. You really need to keep your wits about you and think fast sometimes.

Being aware of what’s around you is also quite important since this game loves to hide things in little side area’s and using the map system is a must. I love how you can put pins and such on the map. Yet, I have to admit that I still keep notes in my phone like: “treasure in Gerudo dungeon, need to check later”.

The more I play through this game, the more I realize that the critiques I can make about this game are more on the minor side. Like how it feels like a waste of time when you are scrolling through a long list of echoes when you just want to find one. An easy solution would be to give the player an ability to favorite certain echoes. But then again, the sort function in the quick menu has “most used”, “recently learned” … So, it’s kinda that.

Now, you have two save slots in this game. So, you can play through this game and let a friend or a sibling play through a different slot. Now, this game also autosaves for you frequently, in case you forget to save. The game also keeps like several autosaves in case you want to return to an earlier point.

Something I really like is how this game also has a quick travel system. The system works similarly like an owl statue in Majora’s Mask or a water vane in Link Between Worlds. It makes it easy when you feel stumped by a puzzle and want to return later. The fast travel locations are very fairly placed all over the land.

While I went quite critical in this game, the more I played it, the more it won me over. This game is a new 2,5D Zelda adventure game I hope we were going to see again. The last new, non remake 2,5D Zelda game was released almost 11 years ago. And, I’m so happy to see a return to this style. I’d love to see a this style also making an appearance very so often since it’s clear there are still various unique ways to explore Hyrule and tell a story about the Hyrule legend without going fully 3D.

Apart from a few small complaints you read in this article, I honestly don’t have any major complaints about this game. This is a game I’m going to finish for sure, since I’m enjoying my time with this title quite a lot. If you are into the series, I highly recommend this title to you. If you enjoy exploration and playing with unique mechanics, I also think this game is for you. This game is totally worth it’s price tag and it pleasantly surprised me.

And with that said, I have said everything I wanted to say about this game for now. I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another one, but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

Lover of Men is an upcoming documentary film directed by Shaun Peterson and written by Grace Leeson which explores the age-old question: was Abe Lincoln gay? Specifically, the movie examines Lincoln's relationship with four different men, with whom Lincoln shared clothes, sleeping arrangements, and deep emotional connections:

• David Derickson, Lincoln's Civil War-era bodyguard often stayed in his tent and wore his clothes
• Joshua Speed, Lincoln's former roommate and close friend, whose many correspondences were described by one historian as having a "streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets";
• Billy Greene, another roommate from Lincoln's 20s who factually slept in the same bed with him and whose thighs Lincoln once described in writing as "as perfect as a human being could be";
• and Elmer Ellsworth, an army officer and close friend of Lincoln.

— Read the rest

The post Documentary highlights the men that Abraham Lincoln slept with appeared first on Boing Boing.

This 1953 U.S. Navy training film discusses the mechanisms used by the fire control computers. Yes, mechanical computers calculating fire control for big-ass guns—though 70 years ago, men were still needed to move the dials. [via Hacker News]

The ship's location, direction, speed, and the enemy ship's location, direction, and speed—in a matter of seconds so that the ship's guns may fire accurately and effectively.

— Read the rest

The post 1953 U.S. Navy training film about fire control computers appeared first on Boing Boing.

Calculating Empires is a "a genealogy of technology and power since 1500" — a beautiful and interactive monochrome chart you can zoom in and out of to trace the connections between all such things in the modern age. I immediately crash zoomed in and found myself face-to-face with a Debord quote: "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. — Read the rest

The post Calculating Empires: an huge online chart of tech history appeared first on Boing Boing.

8/20/1866: President Andrew Johnson proclaims an "end to insurrection in the United States."

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 20, 1866 appeared first on Reason.com.

8/19/1937: Justice Hugo Black takes the oath.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 19, 1937 appeared first on Reason.com.

8/18/1920: The Nineteenth Amendment is ratified.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 18, 1920 appeared first on Reason.com.

American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, by Michael Willrich, Basic Books, 480 pages, $35

The lawmaking and policing powers of late 19th and early 20th century America did not think anarchist agitators deserved the protective penumbra of our Constitution. After Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 from czarist Russia, she became a dynamic and hugely popular traveling lecturer on anarchism and other rebellious causes, such as draft resistance and contraception. Consequently, she was arrested a lot—and in 1919, along with hundreds of other accused anarchists, she was deported to what was now Bolshevik Russia. (Goldman's version of anarchism was not the free market kind; she wanted to eliminate private property as well as the state.)

Many anarchists saw a bright side to these legal fights: an opportunity to preach their beliefs in a courtroom setting, where the press often amplified their message. The anarchists sentenced to death in the notorious 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing case spent three days in court laying out their beliefs; in one of their own trials, Goldman and her sometime consort and lifelong comrade, Alexander Berkman, settled for five hours of speaking their anarchist minds.

Berkman did more than lecture against the state and capitalism; in 1892 he decided to try to kill a murderously strikebreaking Carnegie Steel factory manager, Henry Frick. (While he shot and stabbed Frick, he failed to kill him.) This did not help public opinion of their cause. Neither did the fact that Leon Czolgosz, the 1901 assassin of President William McKinley, was a self-proclaimed anarchist who claimed that Goldman's rhetoric had "set me on fire."

In American Anarchy, the Brandeis historian Michael Willrich argues that those legal battles surrounding anarchism in America forged two distinct and opposing elements of modern American policing and law.

On one hand, the anarchists' enemies, from New York City cops to military intelligence to the departments of Labor and Justice, built a wider and more intrusive system of political surveillance and repression to quell and expel the anarchists. These systems' techniques—often relying on frequently unreliable, nativist, and paranoid citizen snoops and snitches—might seem quaint in the post–Edward Snowden age. They also seem especially brutal, given the cops of that era's habit of giving "the third degree" (that is, terrible beatings) to seditious radicals, and to people the officers merely assumed were seditious radicals. Many prosecutions hinged on the accuracy, or not, of some cop's written notes on what a suspect had allegedly said in public.

This repressive apparatus, Willrich writes, was "cobbled…together by putting public power in the hands of private civilian operatives, harnessing local police to national purposes, and drawing upon surveillance technologies developed both in the U.S.-ruled Philippines and in the internal immigrant 'colonies' of New York." The result was "an inefficient and stunningly violent operation that foiled few actual plots, put thousands of people on trial for speaking out against capitalism or the war….and showed an almost total disregard for…constitutional liberties."

And that planted the seeds of these battles' second great effect: Ironically, they ultimately made First Amendment doctrine more respectful of free expression. After the crackdown on the anarchists died down, and past the Cold War repressions under the Smith Act, it became more difficult to imagine anyone could go to jail in America solely for saying or writing a political heresy. Even when people are targeted for their speech, propriety requires that a more substantial charge be added. (The modern inheritor of the mantle of "enemy for whom constitutional protections can be ignored" is the drug seller and user, though different amendments are implicated.)

Three prosecutions during the World War I–era crackdown on political dissidents under the Espionage Act ended up before the Supreme Court. Free expression lost every time. But in Abrams v. United States, based on a 1918 expansion of the Espionage Act known as the Sedition Act, a dissent signed by two justices established an attitude toward the First Amendment's reach that became standard over the course of the 20th century.

In August 1918, the Army Corps of Intelligence Police had arrested a group of Russian immigrants in New York for distributing allegedly seditious pamphlets. The defendants insisted that the literature—many copies of which were tossed out windows for passersby on the street—was not meant to impede the ongoing U.S. war efforts against Germany, that being the basis for many of the charges. The literature was rather opposed to U.S. interference in revolutionary Russia, with whom we were not at constitutionally declared war.

The Abrams defendants were represented by Goldman's lawyer, Harry Weinberger. His role in Willrich's narrative is as central as hers and Berkman's. (Willrich argues that the war on anarchists essentially created the modern figure of the civil liberties lawyer.) The Supreme Court upheld the convictions, 7–2. But a dissent authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (who had written the earlier, bad decisions in the Espionage Act cases) laid out a First Amendment vision that more strictly limits when government could constitutionally punish expression: only if said expression represents a "present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about."

After reading the dissent, a future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to Weinberger that "we are going to put it to some use all right." Civil libertarians in and out of the judiciary have been doing so ever since, in ways that have expanded Americans' expressive rights.

***

Things got predictably worse for civil liberties and for anarchists as the war went on. The 1918 Immigration Act, as Willrich sums it up, "authorized the secretary of labor to deport any person identified as a noncitizen and an anarchist." Even your individual beliefs could be elided, since "being a member of an organization that advocated 'anarchistic' ideas was now sufficient cause for deportation." Having built your life here productively for decades and having a family was not enough to save you from being grabbed and shipped out, if a government official thought you didn't believe the state should exist. (In 1903, during the post-Czolgosz wave of anti-anarchist action, Congress passed an immigration law that barred entry to anarchists, though it was difficult to enforce and in its first seven years caught a mere 10 anarchists among millions of immigrants entering.)

The story of the anarchist crackdown is, for good reasons, often used as a crackerjack historical example of the anti-liberty madness that even the supposed land of the free can descend to. This wave of anarchist repression was indeed destructive to many people and organizations—the Industrial Workers of the World, for example, were nearly annihilated by mass raids and arrests.

But the aftermath of these authoritarian spasms suggests we should give at least half a cheer for the Constitution. The rights it lays out were sorely dishonored, but at least they could be called upon eventually.

After World War I ended, President Woodrow Wilson commuted sentences for more than 125 Espionage Act prisoners. One assistant secretary of labor—Louis Post, who actually respected the Constitution—canceled 1,140 deportation orders, nearly three-quarters of the cases he was able to review when briefly in command of the process. The notorious 1919 and 1920 Palmer Raids sent 500 accused radicals to Ellis Island for deportation, but as public opinion and the grinding of the courts turned against the mania, only 23 of them were actually deported. And in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a general amnesty to the remaining World War I–era political prisoners.

Contrast that with Russia, where many of the anarchists were deported. The Bolshevik state murdered many of them, including two of the Abrams defendants.

Willrich's richly detailed study is especially relevant today, as that expansive sense of First Amendment rights that Willrich traces back to Holmes' Abrams dissent is under fresh fire from legal academics who see the amendment as a barrier to progressive change, from young Americans who think certain possibly hurtful things ought not be legally spoken, and from a culture that in general seems increasingly and angrily eager to shut opponents up. This valuable book shows one big reason why an expansive reading of the First Amendment is important: Without it, human beings have been beaten by cops and exiled from their home, just for saying or writing things the authorities don't like.

Goldman, for one, thought America was better than that. She once told a huge crowd in New York City that when people like her denounced war and conscription, they did this not because "we are foreigners and don't care." They had come here "looking to America as the promised land," and they grappled with the country's errors "precisely because we love America."

The post When Attacks on Anarchists Accidentally Improved Free Speech Law appeared first on Reason.com.

8/17/1988: Republican party nominates George H.W. Bush for President. He would appoint David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 17, 1988 appeared first on Reason.com.

Everybody has several games that mean quite a lot to them. For me, one of these games is Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. I not only grew up with this game, but I also have a lot of memories of this game. Outside of that, I also met some amazing friends through the community behind this game. I even did several speedruns of this game, and I’m an active member of the community. Now, color me surprised that 25 years after the release of this game, we got new fan-made content for this game. Not just fan made content in the style of fan patches to solve bugs with the game, a whole new level and promises of a level editor to create even more new custom content. This blew me off my socks and in today’s article I want to talk about it. So strap in and let’s get ready to play new content for one of the best Indiana Jones games ever made.

The new level – SED

There is a speedrunning discord server for this game. Well, it was a speedrunning discord server but for a few years now, this server has grown into a server of people who appreciate this game. If you want to join this discord, here is an invite link. When the server started to grow, several modders joined our server. One of these modders is going under the name of Urgon (currently) and what we didn’t know is that he was decompiling the whole game. Not only that, he was creating a level editor based upon an existing level editor.

This existing level editor is for Star Wars Jedi Knight & Mysteries of the Sith. Those games used an engine that formed the basis for the Jones3D engine. While he was developing that editor, he tested his skills by creating a new level. So, basically, parts of this new level are tests of the new level editor and what you can do with it.

Now, information about this new level and the download link can be found at this GitHub repository. If you want to download the actual level, you have to go to this page and click the green button named “Code”. In that dropdown, you can choose “download zip”. You’ll need that later if you want to install/play this custom level. Now, if you read the pre-mod or the installation instructions for this level, you might feel overwhelmed if you aren’t very technically inclined. That’s why two community members wrote two special tools to aid you in preparing your game.

You might ask yourself, like Klamath did in at the end of our stream of this custom level, why are there two tools for basically the same? Well, let me tell you the history about it. When I wanted to play the custom level, I had a bit of trouble myself while figuring out the tutorial. I also found that the required steps were quite a lot to do. So, I decided to start writing a PowerShell script that did all the steps. I announced that in the Indy3D discord that I was writing this. When I almost completed my tool, the_Kovic dropped his version of the tool.

Personally, I didn’t want to throw my work out the window and continued finishing my GUI version. When I finished, I didn’t convert my tool to an EXE and left it just as a script file you could run using a command line or a code editor. The next day, Kovic released a GUI version of his tool and I gave some feedback on his tool. In the days after that, I created an EXE version of my tool and we both kept adding features in our tool. He wrote his tool in C#, which is a bit friendlier to create an EXE. If I didn’t release my first version as a script only and converted it to an EXE, I think it might have been less overwhelming for people.

That said, Kovic thanked me for creating my tool since like he said on our stream: “It put my butt into gear to create a tool and write a GUI, which I normally don’t write“. On top of that, our tools aren’t meant to compete with each other. I can’t write C# and Kovic can’t write PowerShell. And it would be a shame to just delete work because somebody else was quicker or made their tool more user-friendly first. The result now is that we both have two very strong tools with a very similar, maybe even completely the same, feature set.

Outside a different choice of coding language, the biggest differences between both our tools are under the hood. In Kovic’s tool, you get more files than in my tool when you download the tool. And that’s because to prepare your game for custom levels, you need to extract several files in the resource folder. The tool used for extraction has a bug where instead of extracting the folders of the archive into the resource folder, it extracts them into separate folders, like if you would extract a zip file. Kovic packs a modified version of this extraction tool so that part of the process goes a bit faster. In my version, the tool just downloads the latest official versions of the tool and prepare the game that way.

In the end, both our tools give you the same end result. They prepare your game to install custom levels and play them. If you want to try out the_kovic’s tool, you can find the latest version on this releases page. If you want to try our my tool, you can find it on this releases page. Feedback to our tools is always welcome! If you find an issue or if you have an idea, feel free to hit us up, and we will look into it.

Earlier I talked about a stream of the level we did. Klamath, the_Kovic and me did a live stream where we played through this level. Now, I have to emphasize that release of this level is an impressive technical achievement. Creating a level for a 3D game isn’t easy and requires a lot of work. It’s even more impressive when you know that not everything is documented about the engine, and you have to decompile a lot of it. In the next part of this article, I’m going to talk about the level itself and critique it.

If you don’t want spoilers, I’d advise you to skip that section for now and come back later. Now, I want to say that I start reviewing the level in a moment, but this feedback is mostly meant for people who want to make new custom content. What did this new level do right and wrong if you look at it as a player who doesn’t know the technical background of this level? This isn’t meant to break down the amazing work the modders did to make this work.

Reviewing the new level

Editorial note: this review will spoil quite a lot. If you don’t want to get spoiled, you have to skip this section of the article. This isn’t a walkthrough of the level either. Some sections are skipped, I’m only going to talk about the sections I want to talk about.

The new level takes place 25 years after the ending of the original game. Indy returns to his Canyonlands dig site. You are set loose at the tent where Sophia picked Indy up with a helicopter to start the Infernal Machine adventure.

In terms of new content, there isn’t a lot new to see. Some ladders are missing and some parts of the level are blocked off. Also, all treasures are missing that you would usually find in the level.

Before I continue, I want to mention that some parts of this level are made quite difficult on purpose. The developer wanted to give us the feeling we were young kids again, playing this game for the first time, and have us figure out the new puzzles by ourselves. Yet, finding a correct balance between difficulty and unfair is a very fine line to thread. Personally, I think that in some sections, the developer crossed the line into unfair level design.

When running on the top section, you notice that there are some new voice lines. These voice lines are made possible with a voice cloning AI tool that was trained on lines from Doug Lee, the original voice actor for this game. The new voice lines sound amazing, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think that Doug Lee came back to record the new lines. In most cases, these voice lines really fit Indy’s personality and fit right into the game.

We come to our first snag when we want to go to the new content. I can understand not seeing the shovel and being confused, since it’s hanging at the jeep on top. And you know what’s even more confusing, the other side of the jeep model has a shovel in its texture! Anyhow, when you pick up the shovel and dig up the Infernal Machine part, it’s clear that you need to break a wall. Here comes one of the worst parts of this level. The location of this cracked wall is insanely well hidden. It’s in one of the last places you’d look, and several of the first players ran around for hours upon hours in Canyonlands before it was found. And when it was found, it made us annoyed.

It’s a clear example of how players who are used to the level, overlooking the obvious. The wall you need to break has an actual cracked wall texture, but it’s behind something you can’t see through. I think it would have been fine if the location, where it is at, had a bigger ledge so you’d notice it somewhat instead of just having to go on a wild goose chase.

Now, we enter the new area. We come to a big open space where the next set of puzzles are. The first puzzle is actually a jumping puzzle. Now, I highly advise you to not play this level if you haven’t played through most of Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Not that there are spoilers, but because some of the jumps in this level are straight up difficult and not what you really expect from this game. Kovic calls it “Kaizo Jones” for a good reason.

There are some small platforms and not having the look key working is going to be a pain in this section. Since, there are some moments where you need to be able to free look and not being able to see beneath or above you will make things a lot more tricky. After you finished these jumps, you might start to notice that the developer of this custom level added some details. Like, the rope bridges are gently moving in the wind. This is something that isn’t present in the original game. It’s a new “COG” script that makes that possible.

These cog scripts are a blessing for custom content. Since, this game isn’t hardcoded at all, so if you learn how to write these cog scripts, you can basically write new mechanics as well. It’s insane what possibilities there are going to be in the future for this game. I hope there is going to be good documentation so that custom level creaters know what’s possible and what’s impossible with the level editor.

While you are exploring this area, you notice that it’s huge. This also explains why it takes quite a while to load this level. Currently, modders are looking into why it’s running so slow. Since, we don’t really know if it’s the level size or something else slowing down the loading of this level.

So, after jumping around the central column, you’ll arive at the shed. Here you notice you can actually enter the shed from the top. Kovic explains it quite well during the stream. If you want to hear some technical explanations on how this level works, I’d advice you to watch our stream. Since there is a lot of interesting development talk in there. Later, Kovic and myself had a contest in trying to quote voice lines from the main game. We got close to 200. Kovic won that because I said a line he already said.

After you picked up everything from this shed and climbed outside, you experience another new mechanic of this game. It’s a mechanic that gets backported from Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb. The fact you can use your whip to go over a zipline.

After you returned and struggled with getting across the other bridge, you will encounter other parts of this level. Here you’ll encounter two voice lines that straight up lie to you. The first voice line is that you need more force, explosives to break a rock that’s blocking your way forwards. Here is the issue with that, you get an explosive barrel later. You need to find an extremely hidden swim tunnel in the water. It’s not the only hidden thing in the water, so investigate behind and underneath rocks quite well. Since, these puzzles in this water border in the unfair territory. What makes that explosive voice line even more evil is that there is a box of TNT in the shed earlier. But what’s the second voice line that lies to you?

Well, that is after you made your way past said boulder. You find a minecart and interacting with it, Indy says that it will run with gasoline. And there is still gasoline left in the shed. Sadly, you can’t pick it up anymore. Now, this is a red haring, you don’t need this minecart at all.

By now, you have learned that this level likes to break the rules of how the main game is designed. You’ll have to think outside of the box sometimes to beat this level. But, for some jumps, you need to use your knowledge of what’s possible and impossible to progress. This makes it quite tricky sometimes to progress. And this brings me to a conclusion we also said on stream. I think that the issue is that people expected a more tame level than what we actually got and that might turn some people off. But, I’m so glad that the quick save system exists in this game. So, abuse the quick save system and make multiple saves since you’ll need them if you aren’t a veteran player of this game.

Anyhow, let’s get back into the flow of the level. After we completed the lever puzzle, we go back towards to the huge open area and take the lift to a new location. What follows is a totally new area where it’s a good thing if you saved up on health packs and you have a great sense of direction.

So, the short minecart ridge comes to an end. It doesn’t take long before you find yourself into a watermaze. This watermaze is unfair in my honest opinion. Klamath had a tricky time solving it and he had to use almost every health pack to get through it. Without Kovic pointing out the right tunnel, I think it would have made the stream quite a bit longer. There was supposed to be a minecart section instead of this swimming maze, but the developer had a hard time making the minecart section to work and he gave up and made this swimming maze.

Now, I’m all fine with this swimming maze, but the map glitches out at certain parts. I have a mediocre sense of direction and I wanted to rely on the map. The map doesn’t always render the tunnels correctly. You sometimes swim off the map or “in nothingness”. Sadly, I have to draw my own map. I wish I still had it, since it would make for a nice screenshot here… But I threw it out but me and my clumsiness… I knocked over my waterbottle over it.

After the swimming maze, we get a new section of “Kaizo Jones”. Where we get some extremely tricky platforming. Here is where you need to use the look key again and be sure you are playing in 4:3. If you are playing in another resolution like 16:9 or 16:10, this will also be one of the moments where you don’t see all the information.

The block puzzle that follows, feels right out of Tomb Raider. The initial reviews of this game called out this game as a Tomb Raider clone. While, this game does the formula a whole lot differently. We even talked about that during the stream. In terms of theming, Infernal Machine is a lot better. Tomb Raider feels like obstacle courses. But that’s thanks to a different engine and control style. If you want to hear the whole discussion, you can watch the stream from this point. Excuse Kovic’s internet being spotty while he was replying.

After the block puzzle, a new path opens in the swim maze. Then, some platforming comes. Something I love is how there is even a troll hidden inside the platforming. It caught me off guard and made me smile. This platforming section was also love to do. It felt like a real test on how well I know the game. This platforming section feels a lot better put together and feel less cryptic on where you need to go next. You really start to notice that the developer was getting more used to the level editor and made better puzzles. The moment of having to use the whip to swing over the gap while the platform underneath you was breaking was amazing.

After that, we get into the finale of this level. We jump into a portal and we land in a playable area which is shown at the end of Shambala, the 4th level in the original game. That area that’s shown to you after you have beaten the Ice Guardian. The path that takes you to Palawan Lagoon. It was possible to explore that using cheats and modified saves, but now it’s in a level for real. Exploring the little house at the end brings us to something you totally don’t expect this custom level to do. You’ll find a parchment inside with a riddle and at the end you notice something in red saying: “MAT -> ZIP”.

There is some meta gaming now going on. You’ll need to make a hard save and exit your game. You’ll need to go to your resource folder & then open the MAT folder. In there you’ll need to rename “SED.MAT” to “SED.ZIP”. You’ll also need to enter the password for the zip, since you get a new cog script to continue the level, which you need to place in your cog folder. In there, there is another surprise. But, that’s something I’m not going to spoil. But, be sure that Kovic is playing with that surprise and maybe I’m going to dig into it. PS, the next paragraph is in white with the right spelling of the password:

Marcus

The way the level ends is bittersweet. If you solve the final puzzle, something special happens and you can beat the level. You could argue that the ending of this level is “lazy” or “creative”… But, it’s an amazing way to wrap up the story in one level with a nice bow.

At the start of the custom level, I felt that it was quite rough around the edges and it had some moments that felt badly designed. In terms of game design that is. If you look at it visually and level flow wise, I personally think that this level would fit right into the original game as a final challenge. But, the further you go into the level, the more you start to notice that the developer of this level is getting used to the tools and the editor and more polished puzzles and area’s are coming through. You notice the journey of the developer and see it becoming better and better.

I want to give a big congrats to everybody who was involved in releasing this custom level. It’s a blast to play and I can’t wait to see more custom levels. The stream I did with this level was one of the best streams ever and it was also quite a lot of fun to write the tool to help people play this custom level. I’m curious what you think about this custom level and/or the content of this article. Feel free to drop something in the comment section down below.

And with that, I have said everything I wanted to say about this for now. I want to thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to welcome you back in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.

When I was a kid, I briefly had a friend who built the first computer I ever saw. I long ago forgot the friend's name, but I remember the name he gave the computer: Laurie (after Laurie Partridge, natch). It had one simple Star Trek game that somehow involved acquiring and shooting photon torpedoes. — Read the rest

The post 10 PRINT "NOSTALGIA", 20 GOTO 10 – Wired reminisces about BASIC appeared first on Boing Boing.

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the New York Times stood up for Section 230 and called out the politicians who were lying about it, like Rep. Gosar who had previously been sued for blocking constituents on social media, while we tried to put an end to the myth that big tech was censoring conservatives (and that platforms legally had to be neutral) and looked closer at Josh Hawley’s latest bill that would make him product manager for the internet. And, as expected, Nick Sandmann’s lawsuit against the Washington Post was quickly dismissed.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, Michael Hayden had a moment of accidental honesty and admitted that Ed Snowden was a whistleblower, while the EFF was asking the court to declare that the NSA’s “internet backbone” collections were unconstitutional, and Keith Alexander was going around asking for $1 million a month for his cybersecurity services. The recording industry was going after Ford and General Motors for cars with built-in CD rippers, City of London police were pulling some ridiculous shenanigans to “fight piracy”, and Prenda received another appeals court smackdown. Also, a podcasting patent troll was trying to run away from a lawsuit after realizing podcasting didn’t make much money.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, an earlier patent troll was stepping up to claim it owned pretty much all podcasting. The Associated Press was trying to get out of having to talk any more about its plans for news DRM, Hollywood was still calling for more movie DRM, and Barnes & Noble was defending its practice of putting DRM on public domain ebooks. A new ruling in Europe said that an 11-word snippet could be copyright infringement, a publisher was nervous about letting an author quote a single sentence, and we saw what might be the first defamation lawsuit over a tweet.

8/5/1974: Shortly after the Supreme Court decided United States v. Nixon, President Nixon released the "smoking gun" tape recorded in the Oval office.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 5, 1974 appeared first on Reason.com.

8/4/1961: President Barack Obama's birthday. He would appoint two Justices to the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 4, 1961 appeared first on Reason.com.

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the New York Times stood up for Section 230 and called out the politicians who were lying about it, like Rep. Gosar who had previously been sued for blocking constituents on social media, while we tried to put an end to the myth that big tech was censoring conservatives (and that platforms legally had to be neutral) and looked closer at Josh Hawley’s latest bill that would make him product manager for the internet. And, as expected, Nick Sandmann’s lawsuit against the Washington Post was quickly dismissed.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, Michael Hayden had a moment of accidental honesty and admitted that Ed Snowden was a whistleblower, while the EFF was asking the court to declare that the NSA’s “internet backbone” collections were unconstitutional, and Keith Alexander was going around asking for $1 million a month for his cybersecurity services. The recording industry was going after Ford and General Motors for cars with built-in CD rippers, City of London police were pulling some ridiculous shenanigans to “fight piracy”, and Prenda received another appeals court smackdown. Also, a podcasting patent troll was trying to run away from a lawsuit after realizing podcasting didn’t make much money.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, an earlier patent troll was stepping up to claim it owned pretty much all podcasting. The Associated Press was trying to get out of having to talk any more about its plans for news DRM, Hollywood was still calling for more movie DRM, and Barnes & Noble was defending its practice of putting DRM on public domain ebooks. A new ruling in Europe said that an 11-word snippet could be copyright infringement, a publisher was nervous about letting an author quote a single sentence, and we saw what might be the first defamation lawsuit over a tweet.

8/3/1994: Justice Stephen Breyer takes oath.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 3, 1994 appeared first on Reason.com.

8/2/1923: President Calvin Coolidge's Inauguration. He would appoint Justice Harlan Fiske Stone to the Supreme Court.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 2, 1923 appeared first on Reason.com.

Percival Everett has breathed fierce life into one of American literature's iconic characters in James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave.

James' conceit is that Jim is secretly literate and can speak with perfect diction. Twain's "painstakingly" studied "Missouri negro" dialect is a put-on that Jim and other slaves use to deflect white anger and suspicion. Everett is a sly writer, and he loves to employ this code-switching and the fictions of race for subversive comic effect.

But language is all-powerful in James. Early in Jim's journey, a slave steals a pencil for him—a hangable offense—so that Jim can "write himself into being."

"I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world," James, as he renames himself, writes, "a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written."

James' revolt against a society that defines him as property extends to the metaphysical. In his fever dreams he debates Voltaire and John Locke. He in fact writes himself out of Huckleberry Finn's unserious final act to pursue an ending that better fits his outrage and newfound agency.

Finn's key moment is when Huck declares he'll help Jim even if it means going to hell, but Everett reminds us that Jim is already there. James tells another man he was "born in hell. Sold before my mother could hold me." James is not a gauzy moral fable or boy's adventure, but a man's flight through the inferno of America's racial past that is by turns darkly funny and terrifying.

The post Review: <i>James</i> Retells <i>Huckleberry Finn</i> From Jim's Perspective appeared first on Reason.com.

8/1/1942: Military commissions conclude for eight nazi saboteurs. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of these trials in Ex Parte Quirin.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: August 1, 1942 appeared first on Reason.com.

Senate hearings, a post office ban, the resignation of the director of the National Bureau of Standards, and his reinstatement after more than 400 scientists threatened to resign. Who knew a little box of salt could stir up such drama?

What was AD-X2?

It all started in 1947 when a bulldozer operator with a 6th grade education, Jess M. Ritchie, teamed up with UC Berkeley chemistry professor Merle Randall to promote AD-X2, an additive to extend the life of lead-acid batteries. The problem of these rechargeable batteries’ dwindling capacity was well known. If AD-X2 worked as advertised, millions of car owners would save money.

Jess M. Ritchie demonstrates his AD-X2 battery additive before the Senate Select Committee on Small Business.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

A basic lead-acid battery has two electrodes, one of lead and the other of lead dioxide, immersed in dilute sulfuric acid. When power is drawn from the battery, the chemical reaction splits the acid molecules, and lead sulfate is deposited in the solution. When the battery is charged, the chemical process reverses, returning the electrodes to their original state—almost. Each time the cell is discharged, the lead sulfate “hardens” and less of it can dissolve in the sulfuric acid. Over time, it flakes off, and the battery loses capacity until it’s dead.

By the 1930s, so many companies had come up with battery additives that the U.S. National Bureau of Standards stepped in. Its lab tests revealed that most were variations of salt mixtures, such as sodium and magnesium sulfates. Although the additives might help the battery charge faster, they didn’t extend battery life. In May 1931, NBS (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) summarized its findings in Letter Circular No. 302: “No case has been found in which this fundamental reaction is materially altered by the use of these battery compounds and solutions.”

Of course, innovation never stops. Entrepreneurs kept bringing new battery additives to market, and the NBS kept testing them and finding them ineffective.

Do battery additives work?

After World War II, the National Better Business Bureau decided to update its own publication on battery additives, “Battery Compounds and Solutions.” The publication included a March 1949 letter from NBS director Edward Condon, reiterating the NBS position on additives. Prior to heading NBS, Condon, a physicist, had been associate director of research at Westinghouse Electric in Pittsburgh and a consultant to the National Defense Research Committee. He helped set up MIT’s Radiation Laboratory, and he was also briefly part of the Manhattan Project. Needless to say, Condon was familiar with standard practices for research and testing.

Meanwhile, Ritchie claimed that AD-X2’s secret formula set it apart from the hundreds of other additives on the market. He convinced his senator, William Knowland, a Republican from Oakland, Calif., to write to NBS and request that AD-X2 be tested. NBS declined, not out of any prejudice or ill will, but because it tested products only at the request of other government agencies. The bureau also had a longstanding policy of not naming the brands it tested and not allowing its findings to be used in advertisements.

AD-X2 consisted mainly of Epsom salt and Glauber’s salt.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

Ritchie cried foul, claiming that NBS was keeping new businesses from entering the marketplace. Merle Randall launched an aggressive correspondence with Condon and George W. Vinal, chief of NBS’s electrochemistry section, extolling AD-X2 and the testimonials of many users. In its responses, NBS patiently pointed out the difference between anecdotal evidence and rigorous lab testing.

Enter the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC had received a complaint from the National Better Business Bureau, which suspected that Pioneers, Inc.—Randall and Ritchie’s distribution company—was making false advertising claims. On 22 March 1950, the FTC formally asked NBS to test AD-X2.

By then, NBS had already extensively tested the additive. A chemical analysis revealed that it was 46.6 percent magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt) and 49.2 percent sodium sulfate (Glauber’s salt, a horse laxative) with the remainder being water of hydration (water that’s been chemically treated to form a hydrate). That is, AD-X2 was similar in composition to every other additive on the market. But, because of its policy of not disclosing which brands it tests, NBS didn’t immediately announce what it had learned.

The David and Goliath of battery additives

NBS then did something unusual: It agreed to ignore its own policy and let the National Better Business Bureau include the results of its AD-X2 tests in a public statement, which was published in August 1950. The NBBB allowed Pioneers to include a dissenting comment: “These tests were not run in accordance with our specification and therefore did not indicate the value to be derived from our product.”

Far from being cowed by the NBBB’s statement, Ritchie was energized, and his story was taken up by the mainstream media. Newsweek’s coverage pitted an up-from-your-bootstraps David against an overreaching governmental Goliath. Trade publications, such as Western Construction News and Batteryman, also published flattering stories about Pioneers. AD-X2 sales soared.

Then, in January 1951, NBS released its updated pamphlet on battery additives, Circular 504. Once again, tests by the NBS found no difference in performance between batteries treated with additives and the untreated control group. The Government Printing Office sold the circular for 15 cents, and it was one of NBS’s most popular publications. AD-X2 sales plummeted.

Ritchie needed a new arena in which to challenge NBS. He turned to politics. He called on all of his distributors to write to their senators. Between July and December 1951, 28 U.S. senators and one U.S. representative wrote to NBS on behalf of Pioneers.

Condon was losing his ability to effectively represent the Bureau. Although the Senate had confirmed Condon’s nomination as director without opposition in 1945, he was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for several years. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover suspected Condon to be a Soviet spy. (To be fair, Hoover suspected the same of many people.) Condon was repeatedly cleared and had the public backing of many prominent scientists.

But Condon felt the investigations were becoming too much of a distraction, and so he resigned on 10 August 1951. Allen V. Astin became acting director, and then permanent director the following year. And he inherited the AD-X2 mess.

Astin had been with NBS since 1930. Originally working in the electronics division, he developed radio telemetry techniques, and he designed instruments to study dielectric materials and measurements. During World War II, he shifted to military R&D, most notably development of the proximity fuse, which detonates an explosive device as it approaches a target. I don’t think that work prepared him for the political bombs that Ritchie and his supporters kept lobbing at him.

Mr. Ritchie almost goes to Washington

On 6 September 1951, another government agency entered the fray. C.C. Garner, chief inspector of the U.S. Post Office Department, wrote to Astin requesting yet another test of AD-X2. NBS dutifully submitted a report that the additive had “no beneficial effects on the performance of lead acid batteries.” The post office then charged Pioneers with mail fraud, and Ritchie was ordered to appear at a hearing in Washington, D.C., on 6 April 1952. More tests were ordered, and the hearing was delayed for months.

Back in March 1950, Ritchie had lost his biggest champion when Merle Randall died. In preparation for the hearing, Ritchie hired another scientist: Keith J. Laidler, an assistant professor of chemistry at the Catholic University of America. Laidler wrote a critique of Circular 504, questioning NBS’s objectivity and testing protocols.

Ritchie also got Harold Weber, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, to agree to test AD-X2 and to work as an unpaid consultant to the Senate Select Committee on Small Business.

Life was about to get more complicated for Astin and NBS.

Why did the NBS Director resign?

Trying to put an end to the Pioneers affair, Astin agreed in the spring of 1952 that NBS would conduct a public test of AD-X2 according to terms set by Ritchie. Once again, the bureau concluded that the battery additive had no beneficial effect.

However, NBS deviated slightly from the agreed-upon parameters for the test. Although the bureau had a good scientific reason for the minor change, Ritchie had a predictably overblown reaction—NBS cheated!

Then, on 18 December 1952, the Senate Select Committee on Small Business—for which Ritchie’s ally Harold Weber was consulting—issued a press release summarizing the results from the MIT tests: AD-X2 worked! The results “demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that this material is in fact valuable, and give complete support to the claims of the manufacturer.” NBS was “simply psychologically incapable of giving Battery AD-X2 a fair trial.”

The National Bureau of Standards’ regular tests of battery additives found that the products did not work as claimed.National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

But the press release distorted the MIT results.The MIT tests had focused on diluted solutions and slow charging rates, not the normal use conditions for automobiles, and even then AD-X2’s impact was marginal. Once NBS scientists got their hands on the report, they identified the flaws in the testing.

How did the AD-X2 controversy end?

The post office finally got around to holding its mail fraud hearing in the fall of 1952. Ritchie failed to attend in person and didn’t realize his reports would not be read into the record without him, which meant the hearing was decidedly one-sided in favor of NBS. On 27 February 1953, the Post Office Department issued a mail fraud alert. All of Pioneers’ mail would be stopped and returned to sender stamped “fraudulent.” If this charge stuck, Ritchie’s business would crumble.

But something else happened during the fall of 1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower, running on a pro-business platform, was elected U.S. president in a landslide.

Ritchie found a sympathetic ear in Eisenhower’s newly appointed Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, who acted decisively. The mail fraud alert had been issued on a Friday. Over the weekend, Weeks had a letter hand-delivered to Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, another Eisenhower appointee. By Monday, the fraud alert had been suspended.

What’s more, Weeks found that Astin was “not sufficiently objective” and lacked a “business point of view,” and so he asked for Astin’s resignation on 24 March 1953. Astin complied. Perhaps Weeks thought this would be a mundane dismissal, just one of the thousands of political appointments that change hands with every new administration. That was not the case.

More than 400 NBS scientists—over 10 percent of the bureau’s technical staff— threatened to resign in protest. The American Academy for the Advancement of Science also backed Astin and NBS. In an editorial published in Science, the AAAS called the battery additive controversy itself “minor.” “The important issue is the fact that the independence of the scientist in his findings has been challenged, that a gross injustice has been done, and that scientific work in the government has been placed in jeopardy,” the editorial stated.

National Bureau of Standards director Edward Condon [left] resigned in 1951 because investigations into his political beliefs were impeding his ability to represent the bureau. Incoming director Allen V. Astin [right] inherited the AD-X2 controversy, which eventually led to Astin’s dismissal and then his reinstatement after a large-scale protest by NBS researchers and others. National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections

Clearly, AD-X2’s effectiveness was no longer the central issue. The controversy was a stand-in for a larger debate concerning the role of government in supporting small business, the use of science in making policy decisions, and the independence of researchers. Over the previous few years, highly respected scientists, including Edward Condon and J. Robert Oppenheimer, had been repeatedly investigated for their political beliefs. The request for Astin’s resignation was yet another government incursion into scientific freedom.

Weeks, realizing his mistake, temporarily reinstated Astin on 17 April 1953, the day the resignation was supposed to take effect. He also asked the National Academy of Sciences to test AD-X2 in both the lab and the field. By the time the academy’s report came out in October 1953, Weeks had permanently reinstated Astin. The report, unsurprisingly, concluded that NBS was correct: AD-X2 had no merit. Science had won.

NIST makes a movie

On 9 December 2023, NIST released the 20-minute docudrama The AD-X2 Controversy. The film won the Best True Story Narrative and Best of Festival at the 2023 NewsFest Film Festival. I recommend taking the time to watch it.

The AD-X2 Controversy www.youtube.com

Many of the actors are NIST staff and scientists, and they really get into their roles. Much of the dialogue comes verbatim from primary sources, including congressional hearings and contemporary newspaper accounts.

Despite being an in-house production, NIST’s film has a Hollywood connection. The film features brief interviews with actors John and Sean Astin (of Lord of The Rings and Stranger Things fame)—NBS director Astin’s son and grandson.

The AD-X2 controversy is just as relevant today as it was 70 years ago. Scientific research, business interests, and politics remain deeply entangled. If the public is to have faith in science, it must have faith in the integrity of scientists and the scientific method. I have no objection to science being challenged—that’s how science moves forward—but we have to make sure that neither profit nor politics is tipping the scales.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2024 print issue as “The AD-X2 Affair.”

References

I first heard about AD-X2 after my IEEE Spectrum editor sent me a notice about NIST’s short docudrama The AD-X2 Controversy, which you can, and should, stream online. NIST held a colloquium on 31 July 2018 with John Astin and his brother Alexander (Sandy), where they recalled what it was like to be college students when their father’s reputation was on the line. The agency has also compiled a wonderful list of resources, including many of the primary source government documents.

The AD-X2 controversy played out in the popular media, and I read dozens of articles following the almost daily twists and turns in the case in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Science.

I found Elio Passaglia’s A Unique Institution: The National Bureau of Standards 1950-1969 to be particularly helpful. The AD-X2 controversy is covered in detail in Chapter 2: Testing Can Be Troublesome.

A number of graduate theses have been written about AD-X2. One I consulted was Samuel Lawrence’s 1958 thesis “The Battery AD-X2 Controversy: A Study of Federal Regulation of Deceptive Business Practices.” Lawrence also published the 1962 book The Battery Additive Controversy.

You're correct about how developers getting promoted or moving to other studios can affect things, but it goes further than that. Honestly, it is because whole teams and individual team members change over time. People age and grow, life priorities shift and move. Becoming a parent, for example, radically shifts a person's priorities. Any of the game's major decision-makers becoming a parent can drastically alter the direction of the game. The longer a game or franchise runs, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the singularity of vision.

If we hire somebody completely new to take over, we lose that singularity of vision because the new leader will bring a new perspective. Even if we hire longtime fans of the game to work on it, the ascended fans' decisions will emphasize what they liked about the game and de-emphasize what they didn't. This can take a game in a direction that portions of the playerbase dislike - the players who don't share the same likes as the ascended fan. Think of what would happen to the Dark Souls franchise if the new leader was only a fan of the difficult boss fight aspect and chose not to spend those resources on the ambience and world building aspect of the game.

To some extent, yes - developers and influential stakeholders will move around as part of their careers or lives. Developers will grow and change over time, they'll take new jobs, retire, have kids, and their lives and priorities will change. New decisionmakers will join the team and will have different visions for the franchise than their predecessors. Beyond this, even player tastes will grow, change, and evolve over time as well. The old stuff that was super popular before won't cut it again if there isn't anything new to offer. If the directional changes meet the collective players' (both new and returning) tastes, the franchise will continue to see success. If they don't satisfy, the franchise will struggle.

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Recently, Katsuhiro Harada of Tekken fame posted a [lengthy tweet] where he talked about what happened to the Soul Calibur franchise, the team, and the less-visible effects of companies growth and change over time. Harada is a good guy and I very much appreciate his candor and willingness to talk to the public. His English tweets can be a little difficult to parse though, so I thought I would offer my interpretation of what he said, based on my own understanding of game dev, the industry overall, corporate politics, and economic trends.

The [initial comment] Harada responded to was “Soul Calibur needs a director as loyal as Harada. You can see this via the game mechanics that came and went in the Soul Calibur games”. Harada responded by pointing out that there are many games with great mechanics that didn’t survive the test of time. Game mechanics aren’t really what make or break a franchise like Soul Calibur or Tekken. A lot of great games and franchises were unable to make the transition from earning their keep one coin at a time in arcades to providing sufficient value to players to buy a high-priced game for home use.

Soul Calibur did not have this problem - Harada saw firsthand that they made a strong transition from arcade revenue to home consoles. Soul Calibur had a strong leader named Yotoriyama (who also worked before with Harada on Tekken, and Harada on Soul Calibur). The Soul and Tekken teams established a strong rivalry in the early days of the polygon game era. While the Tekken team were known as an argumentative bunch of renegades, the Soul team was highly regarded as elite, the best of the best at the time.

In Harada’s opinion, it is actually strong leadership and clarity of vision that maintain a franchise. Many franchises have died because key leaders have left for whatever reason. Yotoriyama was exactly the kind of director that the original tweet was talking about - the team was focused, driven, and producing great results. Tekken was the top earner in the arcades, but the Soul Calibur was outperforming Tekken on the home consoles. Unfortunately, the corporate landscape changed as the company grew and is what eventually and inadvertently killed Soul Calibur.

As companies grow, the focus of the top leadership shifts from “make great games” to “manage the organization efficiently”. This basically means that endgame game developer career paths eventually evolve away from “making great game content and features” into organization management positions. Greater emphasis was placed at the corporate level on broadening one’s skillset instead of mastery in a particular field. This also meant staying on a particular franchise for a long time was bad for each individual’s career. As member after member of the Project Soul team either left to broaden their skillset or was promoted out of developer roles into management, the core vision and direction of Project Soul weakened. Harada faced a similar situation with the Tekken team - he was promoted to being head of the Global Business Department, but it had little to do with game development. All of his reports were marketing people and not game devs.

Harada decided to go against orders and lead the Tekken team anyway, despite the orders from above, in large part because he believes that the fans of any game can only depend on a dev team that has the necessary drive and vision to deliver. Harada’s decision to go rogue was only really possible because the Tekken team was already full of renegades who weren’t willing to listen to the corporate management. This was the largest difference between the Soul and the Tekken teams. The Tekken team remained driven and focused on their core vision because they were unwilling to take orders from the corporate level, while the Soul team slowly had their drive and vision whittled away one team member at a time. Harada ended by saying he believes that there are still some who have the will to resurrect Project Soul, but they need uniting in order to make it happen.

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, we reiterated the all-important point that there is no legal distinction between a “platform” and a “publisher”, and explained why the freedom to decide what content to facilitate is essential to Section 230, while the Supreme Court signaled its recognition that social media sites don’t have to allow all speech. Genius picked a dumb fight with Google over song lyrics, which quickly got even dumber. And Congress was stirring up a moral panic about deepfakes, while Kim Kardashian got one such deepfake taken down with a copyright claim. Also, Prenda’s Paul Hansmeier was finally hit with a fine and prison time.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, more details emerged about how the US government had no idea to solve a problem like Ed Snowden, while congressmen were admitting that the NSA spied on Americans without a warrant. Techdirt received our first right to be forgotten request, and we breathed a sigh of relief (while also chuckling) as an appeals court ruled that having “dirt” in your domain name doesn’t remove safe harbor protections. Another copyright troll ran away upon details of its practices coming to light, and a new ruling repeated the forcible case that Sherlock Holmes had entered the public domain.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, Hulu was accused of being “anti-American” for providing free content, while Blu-Ray was allowing users to make copies with a lot of strings attached. A French court ordered a P2P news site to cover recent file sharing convictions, while the NY Times was correcting its false article about the Pirate Bay appeal but still getting it wrong. Also, the much-anticipated penalty in the Jammie Thomas case arrived, clocking in at an absurd $1.92 million that was quickly defended by a bunch of RIAA mouthpieces.

6/24/2013: Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin I is decided.

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6/23/1987: South Dakota v. Dole is decided.

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6/22/1992: R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul is decided.

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Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, by Kliph Nesteroff, Abrams, 312 pages, $30

The first paragraph of the book jacket lays it out: "There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny?"

There's a good point underneath the hyperbole. People tend to believe—and pundits, politicians, and activists tend to claim—that whatever issues trouble them are worse than ever. Why? Because these things are happening now. To us. Problems in the past weren't as urgent or significant because they happened to others, and anyway things turned out OK (or if they didn't, at least those problems are over).

So Kliph Nesteroff's Outrageous has a decent premise. Alas, it also has significant flaws.

The book's subtitle is A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars, and Nesteroff has some expertise—at least regarding the former. He previously wrote The Comedians, a lively and informative work that, admittedly, bit off more than it could chew, trying to cram the history of American comedy into a few hundred pages.

A history of public opposition to American entertainment is a more manageable subject, though still a big one. While Nesteroff starts with complaints about blackface and minstrel shows in the 1800s, most of the book deals with post–World War II controversies. And he has some fascinating stories to tell about the many attempts to cancel movies, music, TV shows, and just about anything that was new and different.

Some of these stories may be familiar. Many people know about the resistance All in the Family faced when it first aired in the 1970s, with its vulgarity and ethnic slurs; CBS stuck by it, and the sitcom went on to become one of the biggest TV shows ever. But how many people remember Bridget Loves Bernie, a sitcom that followed All in the Family for one season? Vaguely based on the 1920s Broadway blockbuster Abie's Irish Rose, it was a show about a marriage between a Jewish man and a Catholic woman. It received so much pushback—including bomb threats—that CBS canceled it, despite its high ratings.

Interesting though these tales are, the book's overall narrative is shaky. It tends to move from one anecdote to the next without sufficient transition. Outrageous often comes across as less a history of a phenomenon than a chronological data dump.

There are some lapses in the research too. For instance, Nesteroff claims Cole Porter wrote "Do It Again" (I assume he's referring to the George Gershwin tune) while attributing Porter's song "Love For Sale" to Irving Berlin. And he mistakenly asserts that David Letterman wrote an episode of the sitcom Good Times. (The episode in question features Jay Leno in a small role. Perhaps that's where the confusion arose.)

But the biggest problem is that Nesteroff has an ax to grind—one so large it ends up taking over the book and turning it into a screed.

It's true that any conservatives who claim that censorship today is worse than ever lack historical perspective. Still, that doesn't mean there's nothing worth complaining about, or that we should simply dismiss what they say. Nesteroff writes as though we should.

Nesteroff notes how the John Birch Society saw Communist conspiracies everywhere in the 1960s. Far from disappearing, he argues, their discredited philosophy has been rebranded; recent culture wars, funded by partisan foundations, have used fear tactics to fool people into supporting otherwise unpopular policies. (Funny, my Republican friends say the same thing about the left.)

According to Nesteroff (and the partisan experts he quotes), right-wing think tanks tell their talking heads in the media what to say, often gaining consensus through payment of large sums. (It's not clear what he believes the left is doing in the meantime. I guess they're just telling the truth and being ignored.) Further, under the guise of supporting free speech, right-wing plotters send "provocateurs to speak on college campuses for the purpose of incitement. When protests erupt, such objection is used as proof that the campus is opposed to free speech. Demonized in the body politic, funding is threatened—and legal action undertaken—until the campus is made hospitable to think tank interests."

Wow. A conspiracy theory almost worthy of the Birchers.

Let me suggest a different narrative. Nesteroff seems to believe the right has, if anything, gotten worse in recent decades. Worse or not, it's true that it has changed. But hasn't the left changed as well?

A few decades ago, many would say, the movement for greater civil liberties was spearheaded by the left. (Some of the most famous student protests of the '60s were centered around Berkeley's Free Speech Movement.) Courts responded with interpretations of the First Amendment guaranteeing greater freedom to express oneself. Outside the legal realm, much of the country—and much of the left—adopted a cultural ethos that it's a good thing people are allowed to say what's on their mind, even if some find it offensive or dangerous.

But over time, much of the left reversed its position, becoming suspicious of such freedom—at least for groups it opposes. Thus, the "provocateurs" Nesteroff warns of aren't just protested at colleges: They're disinvited, or shouted down, or physically attacked. Meanwhile, students are disciplined and professors fired for expressing views that, while not outside the larger social mainstream, are considered objectionable on campus.

What's more, this culture has spread into the world off campus. Newspaper editors are fired for running editorials that trouble their staff. Workers in large corporations fear that expressing unorthodox political opinions can get them cashiered. People are deplatformed on social media for questionable reasons. And, of course, there are the showbiz culture wars—the putative subject of Outrageous—where people feel they have to make public expressions of regret for something they said or did in the past, or risk not working again.

This isn't just based on anecdotes. A number of polls—for example, a recent College Pulse/Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression survey of undergraduates—show that today's young liberals are more willing than previous generations to shut down speech they find offensive. According to the American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey, conducted annually by researchers at North Dakota State University, about four out of five liberal or liberal-leaning students think it appropriate to snitch on a professor for stating fairly common (but "wrong") opinions on hot-button issues. It's one thing to debate or protest ideas you don't like. It's quite another to try to stop anyone from even hearing them.

When you don't listen to the other side…well, it's hard to put it better than John Stuart Mill: "He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that." Unfortunately, today's left seems to lean more toward Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell: "I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing."

So yes, there's good reason to be concerned about the cancellations and related issues that upset the right, even if repression was sometimes worse in the past. And if you wish to engage in serious debate, it's not enough to be satisfied with your own arguments. You've got to refute the other side, not brush them off as dishonest or evil or brainwashed.

Outrageous starts with a "Note to the Reader": "Please be aware that some of the material quoted within this book includes archaic terminology that might be considered wildly offensive by modern standards." I would hope that anyone reading this book, or any book dealing with history, already knows that people thought and spoke differently in the past. A better warning would state that Nesteroff's work may claim to be an objective look at cultural history but that lurking inside is a polemic.

Too bad. There's a lot of good material in Outrageous. With a slightly different presentation, it could have been a more useful addition to today's debate.

The post A Brief, Biased History of the Culture Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the FCC was remaining in denial about the lack of broadband competition, while we asked why all the antitrust attention was focused on Big Tech but not Big Telecom. Officials in Germany were pushing for encryption backdoors while Facebook was considering going ahead and undermining its own encryption regardless, and the EU Court of Justice was suggesting that maybe the entire internet should be censored and filtered. The targets of Devin Nunes’s cow lawsuits were fighting back, and some drama at YouTube once again demonstrated the impossibility of content moderation.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, a failed patent troll was hit with legal fees and the Supreme Court issued two more smackdowns of the CAFC, while Malibu Media was trying to get more ammo against its targets and the EU Court of Justice ruled that just viewing stuff online isn’t copyright infringement. The EFF argued in court that the NSA knowingly and illegally destroyed evidence, while the UK government was trying (and failing) to hide details of GCHQ fiber line taps, while courts in both countries were holding secret trials related to terrorism. Also, we hit the one year anniversary of the very first Snowden revelation, and noted that while much had changed since then, it wasn’t enough.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, the Supreme Court agreed to take on the Bilski case about whether software and business models could be patented. The RIAA’s voluntary program for ISPs was not exactly a hit, ASCAP was looking to get some of that sweet video game money, and JD Salinger infamously sued the author of an unauthorized sequel to Catcher in the Rye. Apple proved the EFF’s point about arbitrary app store rejections by rejecting the EFF’s RSS reader, and Creative Commons was still facing some problems due to the blurry line between commercial and non-commercial. Also, Barbara Streisand decided to publish an entire book about the Malibu home that she once rather famously wanted to keep secret.

6/10/1916: Justice Charles Evans Hughes resigns.

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Donald Trump was not the first celebrity presidential candidate who could reasonably be accused of insurrection against the United States. Many decades before Trump, another best-selling author and charismatic leader in a rowdy movement to upend dominant American political mores aimed for the U.S. presidency—Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers' minister of information and the author of Soul on Ice.

Unlike Trump, who this year overcame challenges from Colorado, Maine, and Illinois about his eligibility due to the Constitution's Insurrection Clause, Cleaver couldn't be caught up by the 14th Amendment, Section 3, since that explicitly only bars insurrectionists who had already been government officials. But Cleaver faced his own eligibility hurdles.

In 1968, as the first presidential nominee of the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP), formed mostly by antiwar radicals disenchanted with Lyndon Johnson's Democratic Party, Cleaver was below the constitutionally mandated age of 35 and would have been so still on Inauguration Day in 1969. At least three states did eliminate his name, if not his party, from the ballot for this reason.

Many states, however, allowed someone absolutely constitutionally disqualified to remain on their ballot; in Iowa, as reported in the Davenport Times-Democrat, the secretary of state "ruled that he must accept the certification in the absence of positive proof that Cleaver is not of eligible age."

While the various charges haunting Trump during his current campaign involve less violent crimes, Cleaver, four months before receiving the PFP nomination with 74 percent of the delegates' votes, engaged in a firefight with Oakland police that resulted in another Panther's death. He was thus campaigning while out on bail, pending trial for three counts of assault and attempted murder.

As the PFP's candidate, Cleaver certainly sounded like an insurrectionist, not that there was anything (constitutionally) wrong with that. In a campaign speech, as printed in a 1968 issue of the North American Review, Cleaver said: "What we need is a revolution in the white mother country and national liberation for the black colony. To achieve these ends we believe that political and military machinery that does not exist now and has never existed must be created."

The PFP, aligning with the Panthers, pushed Cleaver as its presidential hopeful with a dual agenda, as expressed by member Richard Yanowitz in an online memoir of PFP history: "immediate withdrawal from Vietnam and support for black liberation and self-determination."

During the PFP's inaugural California convention, Cleaver said that he regarded black members of the PFP as "misguided political freaks," but he eventually embraced the alliance and accepted the PFP's national nomination, saying on the campaign trail that "we believe that all black colonial subjects should be members of the Black Panther Party, and that all American citizens should be members of the Peace and Freedom Party." The Panthers' intention, he said, was to "use our papier-mâché right to vote to help strengthen the Peace and Freedom Party and to help it attain its objectives within the framework of political realities in the mother country."

The leftist political tumult out of which the PFP arose in 1968 had many elements that echo modern-day political dynamics. Debates raged about whether black activists should have influence above their numbers and whether the movement should explicitly oppose Zionism. The same sorts of petition barricades to getting a new party on the ballot existed then, though the PFP's campaign in California in particular was a huge success, with 105,000 signatures gathered when only 66,000 were needed.

But rumors persisted about how clearly petitioners informed signers that they were officially registering with the party. PFPers insisted they let signers know they could change their registration back after the PFP got ballot access and before the election. And indeed, the PFP got over 70 percent fewer votes for the presidential race in California than it did petition signatures.

Despite his patent ineligibility and being knocked off the ballot in a few states, Cleaver's PFP campaign garnered over 36,000 votes nationwide. In late September, he polled at 2 percent in California but received far fewer votes on Election Day—a common fate for third-party candidates. Shortly after his electoral defeat, Cleaver fled the U.S. rather than face trial for the Oakland incident, not returning until 1975, after which he served less than a year in jail along with lots of probation and community service.

The cases of Trump and Cleaver illustrate a persistent American theme. Whether because they are mad at the perverted communists dominating the Democratic Party (as per MAGA) or the colonialist and imperialist white power structure (as per the PFP), a segment of American voters want insurrectionist candidates. Who are election officials to deny them?

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6/9/1970: Justice Harry Blackmun (no relation) takes oath.

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On March 14, 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), a man who 13 months prior had vowed at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center that "as long as Hashem breathes air into my lungs, the United States Senate will stand behind Israel with our fullest support," peered solemnly over his glasses into the Senate's C-SPAN cameras and informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was time for him to go.

"The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7," Schumer declared, referring to the shock Hamas massacre and mass kidnapping event just across the militarized border separating the Palestinian Gaza Strip from the Israeli envelope around it. "Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel's credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution….At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel."

And if Netanyahu, in such an election, were to win enough votes to form another government, then continue prosecuting the war against Israel's attackers in ways Schumer doesn't approve?

"Then," the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history warned, "the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course."

It's an increasingly common refrain among American critics of Israeli policy, including many who are otherwise wary of Washington thumbing the scales on world affairs: The $3.8 billion that the U.S. gives each year should directly influence Israeli behavior—on war, on humanitarian assistance to Gaza, on settlements in the West Bank, even on proposed reforms to the judiciary branch—or be withdrawn.

"The Netanyahu government, or hopefully a new Israeli government, must understand that not one penny will be coming to Israel from the U.S. unless there is a fundamental change in their military and political positions," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said last November, reiterating a critique he and several other candidates made when seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

President Joe Biden, a stalwart supporter of Israel throughout his half-century in public office, seemed this spring to be moving closer to Sanders' point of view. Three days before Schumer's well-telegraphed speech, Politico reported, based on "four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking," that Biden "will consider conditioning military aid to Israel if the country moves forward with a large-scale invasion of Rafah."

The Rafah offensive was indeed tabled a few days later. But then, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on April 1 pulverized a World Central Kitchen aid convoy in Gaza, killing seven, Biden informed Netanyahu in a tense phone call that (in the words of a White House readout) Israel needed to "announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers," or else, for the first time in a generation, the U.S. would hold up military aid.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and three dozen other members of Congress sent a letter to the president April 5 urging him "to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed." NBC declared this a potential "turning point" in U.S.-Israeli relations.

But that turn lasted fewer than 10 days. On April 14, Iran fired more than 300 potentially lethal missiles and drones into Israel, marking the first time the Islamic republic had directly attacked the Jewish state, after decades of supporting proxy harassments from Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, and various armed factions in Syria and Iraq. Largely thanks to the technological and regional military agreements that the U.S. and Israel have jointly forged, virtually all of the projectiles that did not misfire were intercepted.

"Now is not the time to abandon our friends. The House must pass urgent national-security legislation for…Israel, as well as desperately needed humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza," Biden wrote in The Wall Street Journal three days later, in support of a supplemental $26.38 billion Israeli package. "I've been clear about my concerns over the safety of civilians in Gaza amid the war with Hamas, but this aid…is focused on Israel's long-term defensive needs to ensure it can maintain its military edge against Iran or any other adversary."

That same day, after months of delay, embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) announced that the aid bill would finally be introduced on the House floor. The only attached condition was imposed not on Israeli policy makers but on the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency operation in Gaza. So much for a turning point.

Yet the conversation about leverage is precisely the one America needs to be having while confronting yet another deadly and seemingly intractable standoff in the Middle East. A realistic contemplation of Washington's regional and global system of carrots and sticks, at a time when American imperial appetites are on the noticeable decline, might reveal some awkward if potentially game-changing truths. Beginning with: There are many on the pro-Israeli side who want the same policy result as Bernie Sanders, for precisely the opposite reasons.

End it, Don't Mend it

Three months before the October 7 massacre, the American Jewish publication Tablet published a provocative essay by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz bluntly headlined "End U.S. Aid to Israel."

The brief: "Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it annually receives from Washington. That's because nearly all military aid to Israel…consists of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers," they wrote. "In return, American payouts undermine Israel's domestic defense industry, weaken its economy, and compromise the country's autonomy—giving Washington veto power over everything from Israeli weapons sales to diplomatic and military strategy."

Critics of Israel, particularly in light of the subsequent war with Hamas, will surely blanch at the notion that Washington has anything like "veto power" over Tel Aviv. Yet America has nonetheless coordinated and consulted on policy far more closely with Israel, including during this conflict, than it has on, say, nearby NATO ally Turkey in its ongoing battles with Syrian Kurds. All at a time when the comparative purchasing power of America's Israeli aid has plummeted.

"The Israel of 2023," Siegel and Leibovitz observed, "is immeasurably wealthier and more powerful than the dusty socialist country of 40 years ago, where local electrical grids could be overloaded by American hair dryers." Boy howdy is it.

Israel now has a highergross domestic product (GDP) per capita than Japan and Italy, and is closing in fast on France and the United Kingdom. In 1981, as the hawkish former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pointed out in Commentary last year, "the United States provided Israel with $4.5 billion in economic and military aid at a time when the entire GDP of the Jewish state was only $25.4 billion." Now? GDP is north of $500 billion.

Annual U.S. aid has gone from 17.7 percent of the Israeli economy to 0.7 percent; even with the big new cash infusion, that figure goes up this fiscal year to just 5.7 percent. And as Biden himself crassly observed when selling the supplemental, the strings attached include "send[ing] military equipment from our own stockpiles, then us[ing] the money authorized by Congress to replenish those stockpiles—by buying from American suppliers….[We're] help[ing] our friends while helping ourselves." So America is sending money that Israel no longer needs to lock in long-term contracts for the military-industrial complex. (The 10-year, $38-billion Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama in 2018 allowed for Israel to spend about a quarter of the annual total on its own domestic defense production until this year, after which the percentage is to be ratcheted steadily down to zero.)

This close military partnership, which has been the basic bilateral setup since not long after the 1967 Six Day War, has produced benefits for both Washington and Jerusalem. Israel gets some of the world's most advanced defense tech, such as the Iron Dome and David's Sling missile-interception systems; the U.S. gets premium intelligence in a volatile region and a privileged seat at the table for making commerce-lubricating peace deals.

But it's also true those contracts could be freely entered into, without a cent of U.S. taxpayer money, just as both Sanders and anti-interventionist Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) would prefer. What would happen to American influence then?

"Weaning Israel off of American assistance would have the added advantage of removing the issue of conditioning such aid or using it as leverage, ideas that sometimes surface when the United States and Israel differ on important policy issues, such as the peace process," former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer wrote four years ago in The National Interest.

In other words, say goodbye to Schumer's—and Biden's—serially insisted-upon "two-state solution," which has been a political non-starter in Israel especially since October 7. And don't be surprised if the country's regional Qualitative Military Edge, enshrined in U.S. law, would be deployed more freely in preemptively striking Iran's offensive capabilities, whether in missile production, nuclear development, or senior-level military planning.

So would cutting aid to Israel actually lead to more, not less war? Making predictions in the Middle East is a fool's errand. But one way to think through the scenario planning, and move faster toward a world where foreign policy commitments are more commensurate with the domestic public opinion of the countries involved, is to remember a factor that too often escapes attention: Israel is hardly the only country along the Arabian Peninsula to receive billions in American military aid.

What Leverage Bought

If the U.S. permanently cut off all aid tomorrow—and even if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the infamous "Israel lobby," were suddenly to close up shop—the bonds of affection between the two countries would still remain strong. According to a Gallup poll, Israel has for the past quarter-century been among the leading countries toward which Americans have the most favorable opinion. Eighty-five percent of the world's Jewish population lives either in the U.S. or in Israel, in roughly equal numbers (the numerical capital of Jewry is not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but New York City). There are some 200,000 dual citizens living in Israel; at least 33 were killed by Hamas on or after October 7, and five more were still believed to be held hostage as of May 1. Even as Americans—particularly Democrats, and the young—have soured on Israel's prosecution of the war, there remains between the countries a shared liberal democratic (and capitalistic) culture and decades' worth of human intercourse.

Now consider Saudi Arabia.

The country that has purchased more U.S. military equipment than any other—at $140 billion and counting—has been unpopular with the American public for the entire 21st century, and not only because it was home to most of the September 11 hijackers. The House of Saud's dictatorial monarchy routinely ranks near the bottom of global freedom indices, women only recently were granted the right to drive a car, and the regime infamously assassinated Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Saudi Arabia has been a prime mover in the brutal, decade-long Yemeni civil war, a conflict that the United Nations estimates has led to nearly 400,000 deaths, most of them civilian.

Yet in the absence of any American sympathies at all, Riyadh has still been a key strategic partner with Washington for going on eight decades. Why? Oil production is certainly part of it, though Russia and Venezuela also have tons of the stuff. The truth is that the kingdom has been deft enough diplomatically, and flush enough with spendable petrodollars, to keep insinuating itself into whatever preoccupations the American empire has at the moment: the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, containing Iran, and doing the often messy work of behind-the-scenes negotiations on military logistics, CIA skulduggery, and peace deals.

It is in that latter category that the Saudis find themselves yet again the object of not-quite-requitable American desire, this time in the form of a tantalizing peace pact with Israel, one that could potentially dwarf in practical and symbolic significance the historic 2020 Abraham Accords between the Jewish state and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi asking price thus far? Just a military security guarantee, the likes of which America has only with Japan, South Korea, and the members of NATO.

Such are the realities of American leverage in the Middle East. Washington now includes among its major non-NATO allies Qatar (circa 2022, in exchange for help with U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan), Tunisia (2015, for its role in the Arab Spring), Morocco and Kuwait (2003, for assistance in the war on terror), Bahrain (2002, ditto), and more than a dozen other countries, including Israel and Egypt.

When states are both relatively poor and militarily insecure, as Israel was in the 1970s and Egypt remains to this day, the lure of access to the world's dominant military can persuade otherwise reluctant leaders to do things they and/or their populations would rather not. Like siting U.S. military bases, or taking the American side in a regional conflict—or recognizing Israel's right to exist.

Israel since its 1948 inception has been the single largest recipient of U.S. aid, at north of $300 billion in constant 2024 dollars. Clocking in at No. 2, with more than $150 billion, is Egypt. This American money bought the modern Middle East's most foundational peace treaty. That 1979 deal, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, not only formally ended the longtime antagonists' various wars; it marked the first time an Arab country formally accepted Israel's existence. For that move against the preponderance of his country's public opinion, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat paid two years later with his life.

Such are the inherent and ongoing tensions of bribing authoritarians to make unpopular deals, particularly in countries predisposed toward resenting Israelis and/or Americans. The basing of non-Muslim U.S. troops near Saudi Arabia's holy Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina was the original radicalizing complaint of Osama bin Laden. The Jordanian population, long encouraged to treat neighboring Israel as the enemy, was ill-prepared to accept King Hussein's 1994 signing of mutual recognition, nudged in part by President Bill Clinton's promise to forgive $700 million of the country's debt. A 2022 poll of the Hashemite kingdom by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies found opposition to diplomatic recognition at a staggering 94 percent.

That number would almost certainly be lower if the Jordanian monarchy didn't choose to stoke anti-Israeli sentiment in public while cooperating privately to such a degree that the country shot down several Iranian missiles before they could even cross into Israeli airspace. King Abdullah II called for three noisy days of national mourning last October over the deadly explosion outside of Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital even after Israel's involvement and the initial death toll had both been convincingly debunked. Queen Rania that same month told CNN that the world "silence" in the face of Israel's war was "deafening," and that "to many in our region, it makes the Western world complicit." The kingdom tamps down criticism of the normalization deal (which it still publicly defends) and prevents protesters from ransacking the Israeli embassy but otherwise keeps the rhetoric ratcheted.

A poor country with rampant unemployment, Jordan is a top-10 recipient of U.S. aid, and it relies heavily on Israel for trade and resource cooperation. Caught literally between Iran and Israel, home to a large and restive Palestinian population, beset by months of anti-Israel protests, the monarchy is increasingly fragile and constantly triangulating. If the U.S. were to suddenly pull the rug out from underneath Jordanian aid, some 6 percent of the country's GDP would go poof.

It is easy to look upon such realities as an excuse to keep perpetuating the American foreign policy status quo. If leverage in the authoritarian Arab neighborhood has bought peace deals with Israel, the reopening of the Suez Canal, and the forging of an anti-Iran axis in the Persian Gulf, why threaten to unravel these projects by beating a hasty retreat?

That question implies a far-too-rosy picture of the status quo, and it ignores the extent to which American public opinion deviates from the conventional wisdom in Washington.

Imperial Autopilot

The American-led world order, with its emphases on international cooperation, tariff reduction, and mutual military treaties, arose out of the ashes of World War II as a bulwark against communism. That comprehensible project, while the source of semi-constant controversy in implementation, was broadly popular in the United States; it was articulated regularly by every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. With the end of the Cold War, and the failure to secure an explicit postwar settlement, came the end of domestic support for America's starring global role.

What happens when institutions wheeze on long after their rationales have collapsed? Elite corruption and populist revolt.

Corruption doesn't necessarily have to mean self-enrichment, though surely the people near the top of the American foreign policy pyramid rarely have to scrounge up their next meal. It's more about the temptations of using America's unmatched power. In the immortal 1993 words of the United States' then-ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, spoken to the more restraint-oriented Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Albright's interventionist point of view ended up winning the battle for Clinton's foreign policy, and then Powell became the chief salesman for President George W. Bush's disastrous war of choice in Iraq.

Afghanistan was America's longest and least popular war, yet imperial autopilot, along with the fallacy of sunken costs, meant that it took more than two decades until Biden finally (and messily) ended it. NATO, and Washington's preeminence within it, is still the dominant military paradigm on the decidedly non-American continent of Europe, even with the open skepticism about the alliance expressed serially by the former and possibly future president Donald Trump.

America has already retreated under both Trump and Biden from its legacy role in reducing global tariffs, embracing instead the kind of made-in-America mercantilism that generations of their predecessors had mostly resisted. Wherever there is some 75-year-old, Washington-forged institution and commitments thereof, there is active domestic politics railing against it.

Washington's leading role in the Middle East is somewhat younger, at around a half-century, but similarly archaic. We no longer need to counter the Soviet Union, no longer depend on foreign oil, and no longer cling to the messianic delusion that liberal democracy in the region can be spread at the point of a gun. If you could somehow wipe the slate clean and craft a new U.S. approach to the Middle East that would better align with public opinion, what would that look like?

Almost certainly, the vast majority of foreign aid to this and other regions would vanish overnight. Nos. 3 through 10 on the 2022 aid-recipient list—Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan—would be cut off. But Nos. 1 and 2 might well remain.

The Intolerability of October 6

The Republicans who unsuccessfully opposed the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were onto something, as have been such presidential candidates as Pat Buchanan, 1992 Clinton, and 2000 George W. Bush. Americans are generally weary of throwing billions abroad at problems that should be solved by someone else, particularly when there are unresolved problems galore at home.

But specifically, Americans favor helping with the defense of Ukraine (No. 1 on the 2022 aid recipient list), Israel (No. 2), and Taiwan. In the absence of a coherent and comprehensible strategy, one that reflects the more modest ambitions of voters, foreign policy remains subject to the temporal emotions and legacy attachments of the public. Jordan probably wouldn't win an up-or-down referendum on U.S. support; Israel almost certainly would. Both, however, could benefit from being cut off.

The Israeli case for independence is largely about latitude, but not only: Having to spend $3.8 billion a year rather than receive it means making some responsible choices about budget priorities. Authoritarian Arab governments, too, need to take, rather than continue to shirk, responsibility.

The horrors of October 7 revealed that the seemingly operable status quo of October 6 was in fact untenable. It was, and is, untenable for Israel to live next to neighbors, to the north and southwest, who regularly fire rockets into the country and sporadically dig tunnels to execute acts of terrorism. It's untenable for Gaza's residents to live under the dictatorial whims of a theocratic death cult that takes money from foreign governments not to build prosperity but to harass and murder Israelis. It's untenable for the region's autocrats to loudly pin the blame for their own heavy-handed misgovernance on American and Israeli scapegoats while quietly reaching out for assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Qatar enjoys the status of being a major non-NATO ally with the U.S. while also financing and sheltering the leadership of Hamas. That too is untenable, and the designation should be withdrawn. Residents of the Palestinian West Bank live in a harassed and conflict-ridden uncertainty and emasculation, with second-class property rights and lousy government services. Untenable. Iran flexes its muscle to turn parts of Israel's neighbors into vassal states rather than fully fledged independent entities. None of this is tenable.

Meanwhile, the U.S. floats above the whole region, handing out aid and military contracts like a grand seigneur, hoping on Mondays to build peace, on Tuesdays to launch airstrikes, and on Wednesday try to tamp down the resulting messes from spreading into a regional war. It does deals with some of the most hideous regimes on earth while the captive populations seethe.

It is axiomatic, yet catastrophically underappreciated in Washington: Those with the most power will inevitably behave corruptly, and those without responsibility will inevitably behave irresponsibly. An Israel less tethered may feel less constrained, sure, but it may also find itself more isolated on the world stage, and therefore a tad more cautious. Arab leaders without the American security blanket may find themselves having to speak blunt truths to their populations, including about the true sources of their comparative lack of prosperity and freedom. And a United States less compromised by getting its thumbs in every pie will potentially have more, not less, moral standing in the world.

So cut off Israel. And Egypt, and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well. Let them bear the responsibility of their own actions, and the costs of their own security. It's time to consciously manage America's imperial drawdown, rather than careen between fading Atlanticism and resurgent populism. What's the point of having this superb military? To defend America.

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6/8/1925: Gitlow v. People of the State of New York decided.

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David Boaz, longtime executive vice president at the Cato Institute, died this week at age 70 in hospice after a battle with cancer.

Boaz was born in Kentucky in 1953 to a political family, with members holding the offices of prosecutor, congressman, and judge. He was thus the type "staying up to watch the New Hampshire primary when I was 10 years old," as he said in a 1998 interview for my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

In the early to mid-1970s, Boaz was a young conservative activist, working on conservative papers at Vanderbilt University, where he was a student from 1971 to 1975. After graduation, he worked with Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), in whose national office he served in various capacities from 1975 to 1978, including editing its magazine, New Guard.

In the 1970s, he recalls, YAF saw themselves as not merely College Republicans but were instead "organized around a set of ideas." When he started with YAF he already thought of himself as a libertarian but saw libertarianism "as a brand of conservatism. But during my tenure at YAF, as I got to know people in the libertarian movement, I came to believe that conservatives and libertarians were not the same thing and it became uncomfortable for me to work in the YAF office."

Now fully understanding libertarianism as something distinct from right-wing conservatism, "I badgered Ed Crane to find me a job and take me away from all this." Boaz had met him when Crane was representing the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the mid-'70s and kept in touch with him when Crane was running Cato from San Francisco from 1977 to 1981. Via his relationship with Crane, Boaz became one of two staffers on Ed Clark's campaign for governor of California in 1978, which earned over 5 percent of the popular vote. (Clark was officially an independent because of ballot access requirements but was a member of the L.P. and ran with L.P. branding.)

Boaz then worked with the now-defunct Council for a Competitive Economy (CCE) from 1978 to 1980, which he described as "a free market group of businessmen opposed not only to regulations and taxes but to subsidies and tariffs…in effect it was to be a business front group for the libertarian movement." He left CCE to work on Ed Clark's 1980 L.P. presidential campaign, where Boaz wrote, commissioned, and edited campaign issue papers as well as the chapters written by the various ghosts for Clark's official campaign book. Boaz also did speech writing and road work with Clark.

The campaign Boaz worked on earned slightly over 1 percent, 920,000 total votes—records for the L.P. that were not beaten until Gary Johnson's 2012 run (in raw votes) and 2016 run (in percentages). "The Clark campaign was organized around getting ideas across in a way that is not outside the bounds of what was politically plausible," Boaz reminisced in a 2022 interview. "When John Anderson got in [the 1980 presidential race as an independent], we recognized he was going to provide a more prominent third-party choice, maybe taking away our socially liberal, fiscally conservative, well-educated vote, and he ended up getting 6 percent. We just barely got 1 percent. And although we said, 'This is unprecedented, blah blah,' in fact we were very disappointed."

Boaz began working at the Cato Institute when it moved to D.C. in 1981, where he became executive vice president and stayed until his retirement in 2023. He was Cato's leading editorial voice for decades, setting the tone for what was among the most well-financed and widely distributed institutional voices for libertarian advocacy. Cato, with Boaz's guidance, provided a stream of measured, bourgeois outreach policy radicalism intended to appeal to a wide-ranging audience of normal Americans, not just those marinated in specifically libertarian movement heroes, styles, and concerns.

Boaz was, for example, an early voice getting drug legalization taken seriously in citadels of American cultural power with a forward-thinking 1988 New York Times op-ed that concluded presciently: "We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this war—billions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedom—is too high."

Boaz wrote what remains the best one-volume discussion of libertarian philosophy and practice for an outward-facing audience, one that while not losing track of practical policy issues also provided a tight, welcoming sense of the philosophical reasons behind libertarian beliefs in avoiding violence as much as possible to settle social or political disputes, published as Libertarianism: A Primer in 1997.

Boaz's book rooted its explanatory style in the American founding, cooperation, personal responsibility, charity, and uncoerced civil society in all its glories. He explained the necessity and purpose of property, profits, entrepreneurship, and how liberty is conducive to an economically healthy and wealthy society, and how government interferes with the growth-producing properties of the system of natural liberty. He discusses the nature and excesses of government in practice and applies libertarian perspectives to many specific policy issues: health care, poverty, the budget, crime, education, even "family values." Boaz's book is thorough, even-toned, erudite, and thoughtful and intended for mass persuasion, not the sour delights of freaking out the normies with your radicalism.

Meeting Boaz in 1991 when I was an intern at Cato (and later an employee until 1994) was bracing to this wet-behind-the-ears young libertarian who arose from a more raffish, perhaps less civilized branch of activism. As a supervisor and colleague, Boaz was a civilized adult, stylish, nearly suave, but was patient nonetheless with wilder young libertarians, of whom he'd dealt with many.

His very institutional continuity—though it was barely two decades long at that point—was influential in a quiet way to the younger crew. It imbued a sense that one needn't frantically demand instant victory, no matter how morally imperative the cause of freedom was. Boaz's calm sense of historical sweep both as a living person and in his capacious knowledge of the history of classical liberal ideas was an antidote to both despair and opportunism for the young libertarians he worked with.

His edited anthology The Libertarian Reader: Classic & Contemporary Writings from Lao-Tzu to Milton Friedman—which came out accompanying his primer in 1997—was a compact proof of libertarianism's rich, long tradition, showing how it was in many ways the core animating principle of the American Founding and to a large extent the entire Enlightenment and everything good, just, and rich about the whole Western tradition. The anthology featured the best of libertarian heroes both old and modern, such as Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Constant from previous centuries and Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises from the 20th, as well as providing even wider context with more ancient sources ranging from the Bible to Lao Tzu. He also placed the libertarian tradition rightly as core to the fights for liberation for women and blacks, with entries from Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Angelina and Sarah Grimké.

Asked in 1998 why he chose a career pushing often unpopular and derided ideas up a huge cultural and political hill, Boaz told me: "I think it's satisfying and fun. I believe strongly in these values and at some level I believe it's right to devote your life to fighting for these values, though particularly if you're a libertarian you can't say it's morally obligatory to be fighting for these values—but it does feel right, and at some other level more than just being right, it is fun, it's what I want to do.

"I like intellectual combat, polishing arguments, and I also hate people who want to use force against other people, so a part of it is I am motivated to try to fight these people. I wake up listening to NPR every morning and my partner says, 'Why do you want to wake up angry every morning?' In the first place, I need to know what's going on in the world, and in the second place, dammit, I want to know what these people are up to! It's an outrage what they're up to and I don't want them to get away with it. I want to fight." For decades, at the forefront of the mainstream spread of libertarian attitudes, ideas, and notions, David Boaz did.

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6/7/1965: Griswold v. Connecticut is decided.

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This POV rollercoaster ride was filmed in the 1930s at Pittsburgh's Kennywood amusement park. 

I've been on this ride myself, and it looks like it hasn't changed a bit. Despite being an old, wooden coaster, this ride is surprisingly thrilling and lives up to its name as it feels like its bouncing up and down a series of hills on the track.  — Read the rest

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Mechanical calculators are fascinating. They represent the early ingenuity and groundbreaking prowess that paved the way for modern computing. While the iPhone or Android device you are likely reading this on is exponentially more powerful and useful, these devices are where it all began! — Read the rest

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5/31/1860: Justice Peter Daniel's death.

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5/30/1865: Justice John Catron dies.

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Cabel Sasser (previously) spotted an early Apple employee's ID card on sale on eBay—a fantastic find for anyone interested in computer history. But he noticed something off about it—the crispness of the typewritten details—and then a few other things, too. — Read the rest

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Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the government hit whistleblower David Hale with espionage charges. All four major wireless carriers were hit with lawsuits over sharing location data, while employees of AT&T and Verizon were caught up in a DOJ bust over SIM hijacking. Canada’s Prime Minister was threatening to fine social media companies over fake news, while a Canadian committee published a ludicrous fantasy pretending to be a copyright reform analysis. And, in perhaps the most notable news for us this week, we announced the conclusion of our legal dispute with Shiva Ayyadurai.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, AT&T was warning of a parade of horribles that would supposedly happen if the FCC reclassified broadband, the cable industry was lying about having invested in broadband and supported net neutrality (since the industry’s own numbers showed a general decline in investment over the years), and Tom Wheeler was revising his net neutrality plans before opening the floor to comments. Then, an initial vote on new open internet rules was reported in drastically different ways in different publications. We also wrote about why making APIs copyrightable is bad news for innovation, while Automattic announced that it wouldn’t claim copyright over its APIs.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, there was a tidal wave of lawsuits over pirated clip-art, while we continued writing about how people make a lot of bad assumptions about copyright and it’s almost impossible to live your life without infringing. The BSA released more bogus piracy numbers, the CEO of Sony Pictures was complaining about the internet, and Francea approved a three-strikes law. Meanwhile, Craigslist gave in to constant attacks by Attorneys General and started locking down its “erotic services” category, which (amusingly) actually annoyed some AGs like Andrew Cuomo and Henry McMaster, because Craigslist just did it without giving them the photo op and fawning press coverage they hoped for.

5/19/1921: Chief Justice Edward Douglass White dies.

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5/18/1860: Abraham Lincoln wins the Republican Party presidential nomination.

5/18/1896: Plessy v. Ferguson decided.

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5/17/1954: Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe are decided.

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