Archive for April, 2024

The U.S. and the Middle East: A record of failure

Posted: April 16, 2024 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: , , ,

By Christopher Harper

As the U.S. government muddles its way through the current crisis in Israel, I am reminded how American involvement in Middle East affairs usually turns out badly for almost everyone involved.

Here’s a quick review of past mistakes:

–In 1953, the CIA helped launch the overthrow of duly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and helped return the shah to power. Ultimately, the coup fueled religious discontent and led to the rule of mullahs in Teheran.

–In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower launched a plan of economic and military aid to the Middle East. Lebanon was the only country to embrace the doctrine, which eventually led the U.S. Navy to send ships and troops to Beirut when the pro-Western regime was threatened. The Lebanese president, Camille Chamoun, was a Christian, and his critics were Muslims. The Christian-Muslim divide eventually broke out into a civil war in the 1970s, which continued for nearly two decades, with the United States seen as supporting the Christians over the Muslims.

–In 1982, the United States sent ‘peacekeeping forces” to Beirut after Israel invaded Lebanon. Again, the United States did not appear as a neutral play, leading Muslim extremists to launch attacks against American Marines, leaving more than 200 soldiers dead in 1983.

–In 1978-9, the Carter Administration helped create the Camp David Accords, intended to bring peace between Egypt and Israel. Ultimately, Egypt became isolated in the Arab world, leading to deeper divisions in the Middle East.

–In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. government launched several ill-advised policies. First, the United States provided weapons to Islamic groups fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Eventually, these groups fought U.S. troops after the 2001 attacks. Second, the United States asked Egypt to supply weapons to Iraqi troops fighting Iran in the 1980s. That program encouraged Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who sent his troops to Kuwait in 1990. After that, the administration launched Operation Desert Storm to drive out the Iraqi military.

–More recently, the U.S. military invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, leading to more chaos and anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East.

All told, the United States has an abysmal record in bringing stability to the region. So far, the Biden administration has vacillated between support for Israel and concern for the Palestinians in Gaza.

Given the U.S. government’s history of mistakes, I think we are unlikely to help resolve the current crisis.

Pintastic NE 2024 The Final Day Success!

Posted: April 16, 2024 by datechguy in fun, pinball
Tags: , , , ,

On the final day of Pintastic I woke around 7 (My son woke at five, went downstairs to play and then came back to snooze for an hour). The plan was to go downstairs, play a bit in the extra ball lounge, grab a bite of breakfast, pack and check out by 9:30 and then play we didn’t want to or couldn’t play anymore.

When I got to the Extra Ball lounge a few games such as Elton John were busy but the excellent Lord of the Rings was not so I took advantage of it.

There was a time when it would have been impossible to find this game empty as it’s, in my opinion one of the greatest games of all time, but then again two years ago you would never see a Willie Wonka empty either

Yet I saw it empty frequently.

Bottom line there were a lot and I mean a LOT of high quality new games there and as always the newest games get the most attention.

Traditionally the final tournament of Pintastic is the ladies tournament and that was no exception this year. I popped in to see it in full swing and spoke to the organizer, she was entered into the tourney as well so I filmed a bit as she played her ball then spoke to her at length when it was done.

Here are the trophies she referenced:

Longtime readers might wonder why I didn’t bring up a subject that I’m not shy about discussing or giving my opinion on, that’s rather simple, it’s pinball plus it’s a not my club, tourney or ox being gored.

Heading back to the Freeplay room I passed the vendor area where the Pinball machines were wrapped and packed and ready to go to the next show or back to the various showrooms. One of the things I noticed was I didn’t see the rental companies here. It could have been the economy or personal matters. After all Quigley’s cakes had to cancel for such reasons.

In the free play room the number of machines were slowly decreasing as the people who brought them packed up. I spotted game designer Steve Ritchie there signing a bunch of Elton John Pinball publicity shots.

He was packed and ready to leave but gave me a few minutes for a closing interview

I don’t know how many if any were sold at the show (I know Gabe bought one as it was in the Extra Ball Lounge) but either way it was a fun game to play and I thought I’d get some gameplay in before the end.

I had managed the 3rd high score the day before by the time I played that morning I had dropped to 4th.

Daniel dominated the high scores on that game holding 5 of the top 8 plus most of the mode championships but the #1 spot eluded him. Well there’s always next year.

By 2 pm they started shutting off machines. Last year I couldn’t find Gabe for the traditional closing interview, this year I found him but he was flat out however Michael was there as the 30+ EMP games were coming out of the club area one at a time to be packed and wrapped so we closed with him.

It’s a big difference between doing it all yourself and having a team so when you compare this video to closing videos with Michael from five years ago it’s a huge difference.

As we got up to leave the Rush games which had been there when we arrived were still being played. It was a tad odd to not be staying till the very last game was shut off as we had in prior years, but we had to be home in time for the 6 PM mass and the number and availability of Pinball machines all around the area had grown exponentially since the first time we attended a Pintastic.

It’s true you didn’t see too many pizza places with pinballs anymore but between barcades and arcades offering unlimited play for a flat fee and even some like Tycoon in Manchester that still work on the token based system there is plenty of pinball available within a 20-40 minute drive for us to enjoy with the prospect of a local club and barcade still in the cards.

That more than anything else is a solid sign that while Pintastic New England 2024 was clearly a success, Pintastic NE as a whole series of events to promote the hobby has been a bigger and resounding one.

UPDATE: By an odd coincidence this appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Pinball, and Stern in particular but the killer quote comes from Jersey Jack himself:

As digital as the guts of this thing may be, the experience is far from virtual.

You can see why, as wildly unpredictable as the industry has been, it requires a factory. “It’s such a handcrafted product,” said Jack Guarnieri, owner of Jersey Jack Pinball. “People forget, yet anyone who makes these things can tell you: build 10 machines in a row with the same parts and, depending how tightly a rubber is fixed to a post, or how a lever gets adjusted, that’s an assembly line full of small tweaks. It’s not a video game.

“And yet that’s also the best part — the randomness.”

Pintastic NE Day Three Oh the People You’ll Meet

Posted: April 15, 2024 by datechguy in fun, pinball, special events
Tags: , , ,

I know I should have gotten this post up yesterday but there was simply too much pinball to play and not enough time to play it so here goes…

Pintastic NE 2024 The Map

Day 3 of Pintastic NE started late for me as I stayed up much later than I expected both uploading videos and getting in a pair of games in my 1972 Dynasty Baseball online league (getting my first series loss of the season by losing two games to the Yankees now tied for 1st in the AL Alpha division)

After a late breakfast I headed to the freeplay room and finally managed to get in line to try the Looney Tunes game.

It’s one of the best game to be waiting to play because you get to watch the old cartoons while you’re in line.

But the game in the free play room I really wanted to play wasn’t The Godfather, wasn’t James Bond or even Elton John, it was Paragon!

Paragon is one of my favorite games hands down and it’s has never been at Pintastic before at least not in the free play room, so whenever it was open (which was not often) I made it a point to play.

After a bit I checked out the homebrew room and found that Brian had fixed this Boarderlands 2 game (it turned out to be a software bug) and had it up and running and what I saw was incredible.

A game whose playfield moves in the X-Y AND Z plane during gameplay? Absolutely amazing!

After another stop in the Tycoon room where the line for the Princess Bride was out the door but the line for Batman 66 which I wanted to play the most was short I headed back toward the Extra Ball Lounge where I saw a familiar face.

Saturday is generally the kids day at Pintastic NE so of course Maggie the Clown would be there again as she has for so many years at Pintastic painting faces and making balloon animals for the tots and others.

At this point I ran into Michael who showed me something that I had never seen at a Pintastic NE a NASCAR racer and team with their car:

While what he said about people being in too much of a rush might be a tad ironic for a race car driver it mimicked what a trucker once told me about his driving philosophy: “I’d like to be 1st, I’m glad to be 2nd but I don’t want a tie.”

Incidentally Michael let me know the next day that there is an unwritten rules against mentioning crashes to a driver during interviews. Having never met a NASCAR driver or team I was unaware of this and I’ll make it a point to observe said rule when they return next year.

This was followed quickly by another sight I’ve never seen at Pintastic, the Sock Fairy:

When the booth was closed late in the evening I saw her getting serious playtime in.

BTW she occupied the space next to what usually would be the Cupcake Lady, who was scheduled to be there but alas had a personal issue pop up while required her to cancel leaving many a sweet tooth unsatisfied.

When I went back to the extra ball lounge the team that produced the Happy Gilmore game that I wrote about for day 2 was there.

And THAT’s when I realized that the lady sitting down behind me as I played Elton John with my son was Reby Hardy and this was the same team that produced the excellent Ferris Bueller Game a few years ago who where back with their new game. They kindly game me a second interview:

It astounds me that I didn’t recognize Mrs. Hardy but what really caught my attention was my conversation with Brian afterwards about the whole personal custom Pinball business. It simply had not occurred to me that the rich and famous who might be pinball fans might order specialty pinballs made for themselves. And the idea of a family having a custom pinball made of a parents life was simply astoundingly clever.

Daniel my son was very interested in playing the Labyrinth pinball game again, having not seen the movie I wasn’t all that excited about it as there were quite a few games I wanted to repeatedly play but as it had a pretty good reception I thought I should give it a try. We were waiting in line when my son noted that the creator for the new company Barrels of Fun was standing right behind me so I jumped at the chance for an interview:

David was rather proud of his game and team and when I got a chance to play as part of a four player group I enjoyed it. After my first ball I noticed them packing up the 2nd Labyrinth game as a family had just purchased it. They graciously consented to an interview was I awaited my next ball:

I admit it now I want to see the movie and I suspect that while I liked the game, I’ll like it even more once I see the picture.

We took some time for dinner and a bit of prayer at a local church that had an adoration chapel (that when I found out about the Iranian attack on Israel but I’ll blog on that later) when we came back it was some serious pinball time, but as I passed the main area I noticed that for the 2nd night there was stand up comedy another first for Pintastic NE. I caught the end of comic Trent Wells set and he gave me an interview afterwards:

It looks like the comedy might return next year as well. I played for a while longer and had intended to get upstairs before midnight but ran into a fellow named Mark who I had met the day before and we chatted an chatted and before you knew it was after 1 AM and I had to head up.

This was actually a common theme of Pintastic NE 2024 for me. Many people came up to me saying: “I’ve seen you at every pintastic but never knew who you are” and introduced themselves. It was quite a pleasure.

I had planned to crash at once but the upload speeds were solid so I uploaded all I could before I could keep the eyes open no longer. It was time for sleep perchance to dream about the final day of Pintastic NE 2024 that would follow.

Media malpractice on the Dexter Reed police shooting

Posted: April 14, 2024 by John Ruberry in crime, culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Dexter Reed Chicago Police mugshot. Source: Chicago City Wire.

By John Ruberry

On his Prime Time show last Thursday, Jesse Watters, nailed it when he excoriated the mainstream media over headlines used to describe the deadly shooting of Dexter Reed by a Chicago Police tactical squad last month.  Reed was pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt, which in Illinois, is a legitimate reason for police to pull a driver over. 

A Chicago police officer asked Reed to roll down his front windows, which initially he did, but then he rolled them up, he ignored demands to get out of his SUV, then he fired his gun eleven times, wounding one cop.

Headlines like these, Watters reported, were used about the Reed shooting:

“Black man dead on Chicago street after cops fired nearly 100 bullets.” 

“Police fired 96 shots in 41 seconds killing Black man during traffic stop.”

“Deadly Chicago traffic stop where police fired 96 shots raises serious questions about use of force.”

Watters points out that deep in the story the “journalists” mention that Reed shot as the cops first. 

But the media knows that often users only look at headlines of stories as they appear on their smartphones. They don’t bother to read the stores that accompany these headlines, or they are blocked by paywalls. 

The mainstream media doesn’t want to report the news–it wants to advance a left-wing agenda. Foremost on their agenda is to re-elect Joe Biden so the man who sends mean Tweets, Donald Trump, doesn’t return to the White House. The uproar over the police killing of George Floyd pushed the frail Joe Biden past the finish line in 2020. The media is hoping, with Reed, that history repeats and a new backlash can drag an ever-frailer Biden to victory.

The media, both local and national, is borrowing a page from the Trayvon Martin shooting, by using old photographs of him, of when he was younger and well, cuter. The Chicago media, in their stories, used high school photos of Reed, who was 26 when he was killed.

Chicago’s most-read newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, have a general policy, instituted in 2021 against using mugshots in stories. Of course, they both made an exception in the case of Donald Trump. The Chicago City Wire, derided as a “fake” newspaper by Chicago’s self-appointed media elite, has no such rule, so it published Reed’s mug shot.

That’s not all. The City Wire reports that was Reed arrested twice in 2023. The first bust was for retail theft, the second was for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon.

The City Wire also revealed that Reed, who once worked as a security guard, received a Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) loan of $20,832 for his business that consisted of “all other support activities for transportation.”

Thousands of very suspicious PPP loans were issued to Chicagoans during the COVID pandemic, particularly in impoverished areas not known as hubs for business activity, including West Garfield Park, where Reed lived.

Sam Charles of the Trib managed to do some insightful reporting today when he revealed that Reed was shot in 2021.

“I’m physically disabled and mentally unstable with PTSD, short-term memory loss, slurred speech, drop foot in one of my legs, blindness in one eye, shoulder/arm hard to move, weakness and/or sensitivity,” Reed, who was 26 when he was killed last month, wrote in an August 2023 court filing. “With all these medical conditions it has been hard for me to work and/or do certain things.”

Well, if Reed was truthful in that filing, then I have a question: Why did Reed–and as we know, he was arrested for aggravated unlawful use of a weapon last year–have a gun? And where did he get the firearm?

Chicago has among the toughest gun laws in America.

And of course, Reed, despite his troubles, should have known want what to do when police officers pulled him over.

On Thursday’s Chicago’s Morning Answer show with Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson on WIND-AM, John Garrido, a former CPD lieutenant, told the hosts, “This incident, like so many other ones, could have easily been avoided,” Garrido explained, “all [Reed] had to do was comply. All he had to do was roll the window down, open the door, get out of the car, and he would live another day to tell stories about how the police somehow violated his rights.”

Garrido had more to say about Reed. “He was in court–or supposed to be in court–two weeks prior to this incident.” The former cop theorized that Reed possibly was afraid if he was caught by the CPD tactical squad with a weapon, one that he was not supposed to have, that he could have been sent to jail.

Clearly, there is more to learn–and report–about the Reed death. But it appears that the mainstream media cares more about one thing–advancing their left-wing narrative.

As for the Tribune and the Sun-Times–as well as national outlets–why not reach out to someone like Garrido when reporting on Reed and similar police stories?

Note: Proft says he is a principal of Local Government Information Services, which publishes the Chicago City Wire and other local publications.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Older Entries
Newer Entries