The Last King of Scotland

The Monday night movie this week was The Last King of Scotland, starring Forest Wittaker as Idi Amin in a story based on true events and real people. It is the role for which he will receive an Oscar nod, though perhaps not Oscar himself.

But "based on true events and real people" in this case meant:

1. Idi Amin was a real person
2. Bad things happened in Uganda while he was president.

It appears that Amin never employed a Scottish doctor as his personal physician, and that the intimate view we get of an ambitious, paranoid man becoming a cruel and heartless dictator. Dr. Nicholas Garrigan is our cipher, our view onto that world. Like Ayla in Jean Auel's Earth's Children series (Clan of the Cave Bear, etc.), Nicholas is our Everyman, tangled in the center of Amin's worldview.

And the best part is, he's a flawed cipher. Nicholas is a self-centered, egotistical man who wants to believe he has a moral and noble heart. He parallels Amin in this, and that parallel is fascinating to watch.

I did not learn that Nicholas was essentially fiction until after seeing the movie, and at first I was disappointed by the revelation, but it really does not impact the effect of the movie. Go and see. It's fascinating.

Would you like to play a game? Then get out your checkbook

Remember my post of a couple days ago regarding the value of my blog? And how it was all just fake dollars that had no real world translation?

Well, brace yourselves. It appears that economists are looking to virtual capital as a source of real world tax revenues:

LONDON (Reuters) - Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of real-world authorities.

( Because news stories on Yahoo eventually disappear, text of the article behind the cut )

Okay, I can see where, if you eBay some WoW artifacts and get actual real world money for them, you should pay taxes on that gain. But this sounds like they are trying to figure out a way to tax the virtual dollars within the virtual environment and translate that tax into real world currency.

This is like Snow Crash - without all the coolness.

The more I think about it, the more the absurdity boggles me. A guy who is king of an empire in WoW is most likely not holding down a high-paying corporate position in the real world - there simply aren't enough hours in the day for both. I daresay, there may be at least some correlation between online wealth and lack of real world dollars.

So the IRS is going to send tax bills based on millions of virtual dollars to unemployed guys living in their parents' basements? How does that work?

Or maybe they'll just insert a virtual IRS into WoW, collecting virtual taxes and developing their own empire. This would be ideal: all those unemployed basement-dwellers would now be skilled workers, part of the IRS army, pillaging their way through virtual worlds and carrying their bounty back to the IRS fortress.

Where the IRS can auction stuff off on eBay to convert it into real world dollars. I guess.

And where does it stop? Ferrett is a regular tycoon on the Hollywood Stock Exchange, but his virtual millions can purchase a couple of real world sweatshirts. Where does this blurring of the line between digital wealth and milk money stop?

The sad part? Tax dollars are being spent, trying to find a way to make the translation.

Politics in the Buckeye State

The ultimate bad dream for Ohio voters:

Republican extremists, dismayed that their favorite whackjob, Kenneth Blackwell, is losing badly in the polls, are now trying to have Ted Stickland disqualified because they claim that he does not live in the house from whence his voter registration arises, but instead in a condo in another voting district. This is a minor technicality, because there is no argument whether Strickland is an Ohio resident or whether he owns a home in the district where he is registered. Only whether that home is his primary residence is being called into question. All this is important because if Strickland is deemed not to be a registered Ohio voter, he will be disqualified from running for office.

The county board split 2-2 along party lines on the question of whether to hold a hearing. The tie-breaking vote is to be cast by...

Kenneth Blackwell.

You can read all about it in this New York Times opinion article: And the Winner Is ... Me

I hope that Blackwell will do the right thing and let this ridiculous technicality remain buried. To do otherwise is to invite a lengthy legal battle and another botched Ohio election.