Al Franken on the Rez

Another week, another blog post that I bug everyone about in hopes of using you all to get me more money.

This latest post marks a small change in my approach to 'Off the Reservation.' As much as I love the long, involved op-eds, they're simply too time demanding to consistently write and still expect to get anything of a profit from New West. So I'll try out smaller posts with links to stories as my main content.

But you're not reading this for my scintillating blog post theories. If you are reading this, it's because you want a link to and brief summarization of my blog post. It's quite simple: I don't think Republicans care about Indians. Am I wrong? Let me know.

My editor made some trims and changes that I'm not the biggest fan of, but whatever. It's still a good piece.

Get with the clicky,
-Troy

American Dream Scientifically Impossible

According to a major nueroscientist, the pursuit of the American Dream through securing our own chunk of the pie is actually not going to make us any happier in the long run. The consumer society is a beast doomed to fatten and depress itself. Our very genetics make the quest for the American Dream a quixotic disaster. Screening for a replacement should begin immediately.

from Wired:

"We've been taught, especially in America, that happiness will be at the end of some sort of material road, where we have lots and lots of things that we want," said Whybrow, a 2008 PopTech Fellow and author of American Mania: When More Is Not Enough. "We've set up all sorts of tricks to delude ourselves into thinking that it's fine to get what you want immediately."

And if we aren't seeing the effects of immediate gratification on a national level now, then I dread to see what happens when the real consequences of a superpower Id nation take hold. It's not all doom and gloom for the shattered American Dream, though. There are ways to work our way out from the false land of plenty.

"America has always believed that it was the perfect society. When you have that mythology driving your culture, it's hard to look around and say, 'Is someone else doing it better than us?'" said Whybrow. "But you can trace the situation we're in to our evolutionary origins. Now that we find ourselves in the middle of this pseudo-abundance, we're in trouble. And the fantasy that we can restart the American dream just isn't true."

It's In The Game for Obama

One of the most impossible to reach swing voters include gamers. Amazing, considering how close the information needed to make a decision is to their fingertips. That aside, Barak Obama has fired the first shot in getting the attention of these sedentary couch surfers: He's bought ad-space in game.

Damned clever, I say. Inevitable, to boot. Will McCain fire the next shot and put ads for him throughout the bombed-out backgrounds of Gears of War 2?

from The Sydney Morning Herald:

Nine video games from Electronic Arts, ranging from the extremely popular Madden 09 football game to the street racing Burnout: Paradise, feature in-game ads from the Obama campaign. The ads - they appear on billboards and other signage - remind players that early voting has begun and plug a campaign website.

The idea of embedding advertising temporarily inside a video game is relatively new, having only begun about 18 months ago, and Obama is the first presidential candidate to buy space, company officials said.

If You're Not Pure, Then Fuck Off?

Racial purity is a touchy to the point of taboo. To discuss it, you're either a racist, or debating the merits of tribal blood quantum, or a conservationist.

It seems that some of the quintessential North American species are spreading their love around, much to the dismay of preservationists. This raises a lot of questions on just which species get the support of wildlife preservation programs, and just what pure is.

from New Scientist:

Conservationists are debating, for example, whether the western grey wolf should have been removed from the Endangered Species list because genetic studies suggest some of them are wolf-coyote hybrids.

Grey wolves are not the only ones mixing up their historical genomes. Six of the 15 bison herds in the US have pieces of cattle DNA. Meanwhile, polar bears are mating with grizzlies, resulting in hybrid "grolar bears".

Taking Columbus Day Off (the Calendar)

It's Columbus Day, everyone! Unsurprisingly, I'm not only displeased with this, but I also made a post about it.

Click, voice opinion, spread awareness. If my last entry was any sign of the atmosphere on these topics, there will be people who will fight tooth and nail against things that make sense.

-Troy

Learn Judo the KGB Way

He may be a shifty tyrant with a penchant for totalitarian activity & violence, but damn, isn't Vladimir Putin the most entertaining head of state nowadays?

When he's not getting frisky with Olympic gymnasts, shutting down newspapers, shooting tigers or invading former Soviet Bloc countries, he's honing his judo skills to crush people & getting paid to show you.

from the Independent:

In Let's Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin, a 90-minute film shot over the past year-and-a-half, the former Russian president shares his favourite judo moves with viewers, who are intended to be young Russians learning the Japanese martial art.

You have admire the chutzpah of Putin. Outside of Sarkozy, there isn't a world leader this cool (even if it's cool in a douchebag kind of way). I don't see George Bush releasing any instructional vids...Cheney might release "How to Shoot Your Friends In the Face (And Get Them to Apologize)"