For some people, the internet is like the wild west: a lawless play-pen where they can get away with being an asshole to anyone they’d like. You know—trolling.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve collected stories from people who have, at some point during their lives, been trolls. They’ve made it their mission to terrorize other people, though the methods and goals vary from person to person. In their own words, these reformed trolls tell us about their past exploits—and explain why they gave up the troll life.

Many of these submissions were anonymous, and have been edited lightly for typos and clarity.

The Fake Supervillain

(Via Smeagol)

Back in ‘09, when io9 ran an article about the RLSH [real-life superhero] movement, commenter Garrison Dean jokingly stated his intent to start a villainous organization, ROACH (the Ruthless Organization Against Citizen Heroes) in retaliation. I was immediately on board with the idea and signed up, creating a villainous persona and a blog.

What followed was over a year of me playing a clumsy game of cat and mouse with the RLSH community, eventually settling on three of them as my archnemeses.

My arsenal consisted of blogs, photoshop, even editing their podcasts to make them look crazy. Did it matter to me that they had doxxed me? Not in the slightest. I didn’t think I really had anything they could threaten as I sought to drive them crazy.

Thing is, I think the ‘they’re crazy’ tactic stuck on at least one of them, because he made a phone call all the way from Florida to California to tell my local police that I was a danger to myself and others. In the grand tradition of the Internet Troll, I Deleted Fucking Everything, announced that I had died suddenly in the night, and slunk into the shadows.

Well, two years, multiple blogs and at least three fake Facebook profiles later (we call it stress testing for a reason, Zuckerberg,) *I* was the one going insane. The different lives I was leading were making me start to lose my grip on my own sanity, and after making some even more spectacularly terrible decisions online, I suffered the actual breakdown. I was about a hair’s breadth from being committed. I remember there were days when I couldn’t physically drag myself out of bed due to the crippling depression and inability to turn the crazy thoughts off, and there are chunks of time missing altogether from my memory, chunks I probably don’t want back.

Finally, I started to recover mentally. Sadly, the insane shit I did to cope with what I had been through, in my online, professional and personal lives, was all out there in the public eye, thanks to a complete breakdown of all personal boundaries and barriers during my breakdown stage and an Internet connection. I knew that the only way to come back was to just put the past behind me, to learn the hard lessons from my experiences and to not ever take up a cause through trolling ever again.

When I look back on that time, I’m glad of a few of the friendships I made. I’m ashamed at the ways I acted, but I accept that I was fucked up, that I had let myself get too sucked in to the fantasy and lost sight of where the line between reality and delusion really were.

After all; isn’t that what really makes a supervillain what he is?

The funniest part of this whole sordid, tragic embarrassment was how good I got at it. I made missteps and mistakes aplenty over the first year, but by the end, I had learned how to flawlessly create an untraceable identity wholecloth. I could, if I wished, pluck a personality from thin air, spin it into fully realized existence, complete with a past, unique way of speaking, skillset, and even different sex or race. I could. I *did.*

It’s a scary skill to develop, simply because of how easy it is to become lost inside your own labyrinth.

The Smartass

(Via Sava)

I used to be [a troll] when I was younger.

I had issues with my parents and I was head of my class so I thought I was rather smart for my age.

I would always leave snarky remarks and go with the old << "I'm friendly, I'm friendly!" *shoots* >> kinda deal, or just tell people that they were really bad at games and that they “should leave the computer stuff for those who know what to do”.

I was an a-hole, I admit.

What caused me to change?

I grew up and I realised there are a lot of things to learn if I want to be as snarky as I was before.

Also my dad died when I was in highschool, so life went only downhill from there.

Now I’m working as a freelancer web designer and sometimes C++/java programs or apps.

I don’t even have time to play games anymore…

The Star Wars Hater

(Via Mark)

I used to be a Star Wars Prequel hater troll. Given any mention of them online or in real life I would always bring up everything that sucked about them. Memes, George Lucas hate, Jar-Jar jokes, Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen hate. I was terrible to people who really loved these films. Basically, I was a total a-hole to anyone who liked them and made sure they knew they were an idiot for liking something so obviously and OBJECTIVELY bad. Turns out, opinions can’t be objective.

I saw Episode I and II several times before Revenge of the Sith came out. I only saw Episode III one and a half times before giving up. About a year ago, I decided to watch the movies again and recut them to be “better.” In order to do this, I watched the film’s three times each. After doing my cuts and watching them, I realized that the films were actually pretty good before my edits.

Upon further reflection, I realized that most of my hate for the films came from two things. The more minor one was that they just weren’t what I expected them to be (how could they have been?). The major one, which I only recently realized, was that I was in a terrible, emotionally abusive relationship when Episode III premiered and that relationship had hit a horrendous middle when the movie came out on DVD (which I stopped watching halfway through). I wasn’t able to enjoy them during that relationship and I carried that baggage with any mention of them for almost a decade.

I’m now reformed and love the Prequels thanks to Star Wars Ring Theory and a better understanding of the visual and cinematic influences that informed the Saga.

The Yahoo Answers Man

(Via Sam)

2006: I was 16 and Yahoo! Answers was at the height of its popularity. I was a top contributor of the rock & Pop section by answering questions with “my chemical romance sux” or “black metal is the only real genre” which is trolly enough, but I got way worse.

I began venturing out into less suspecting sections of the site like: Fashion > Accessories or Health > skincare and would answer questions honestly and provide a link, but the link would redirect to meatspin.com. If you’ve never heard of the site, please don’t go there. I can’t imagine how many people I tricked into going there that were looking for sunburn relief. Eventually Yahoo! banned and deleted my account. And then I grew up. But hey, at least I’m not one of those kids that calls swat teams to other kids’s houses.

The Reputation Points Hoarder

(Via Sean)

A forum I used to visit a lot (<cough Sega forums cough>) had a ‘reputation points’ system for awhile. Being the Deadpan Snarker that I am, I recognized this as a perfect opportunity to throw shade on a colossal scale, like Mr. Burns blocking out the sun. For about a year, I made so many “does he mean offense or is he just being funny” comments that hurt people. Sure, I raked in the rep points, but it was a bitter harvest. After six months I felt like an utter goon, and that’s really when I felt like I had to turn things around.

As for why I went down that path for so many years? My home life wasn’t that great. My parents just weren’t supportive. Out mother was mentally ill and would aggressively verbally attack us and ground us constantly. Our father let it happen because he was too busy to care, and when he did care it was to tell us to shut up and listen to her. Our grades sucked. My sister dropped out, but I refused to give up, even if I didn’t develop the motivation to properly succeed. I know it’s cliche, but I feel like the shitty life I lived at home was a huge reason for me deciding to snap at people. I never meant to seriously hurt anyone, but my grief just felt like such a convenient little flag to fly. My humor wasn’t just a shield—it became a sword, too. That’s the worst.

The GameFAQs Commenter

(Via Kevin)

Used to be a troll on GameFAQs back when I was between 17-19 (I’m 25 now), and basically spent half of my time being a jackass. I did it because it amused me, but also because at the time, I wasn’t doing much else with my life. I wish I could say I stopped because I grew as a person, but instead I stopped because, mostly, I got bored of it. I mean, I eventually grew; now I look back and think about how idiotic I was back then. Considering the other things going negatively in my life (money, job and weight issues), it doesn’t surprise me that, as someone so enamored with the interwebs, that I trolled people for kicks.

The Troll Hunter

(Via Dave)

I used to visit a website that was very lax about the security of the users, and that also somehow had a number of trolls who were pretty vicious. Three of them, out of about eight I knew were mentally ill and on medication. A few others, like myself just got caught up in it. It became a game and a contest.

The goal was to find out the personal information of the other trolls, and one by one they were all exposed. Someone behind the scenes was able to somehow track people down and they would expose them or give the clues to expose them, and then they would just sit back and watch what was done with the information. I organized myself and two others into a little alliance and people were literally begging to be part of it. Now I know it was really stupid but at the time I enjoyed this “power.”

There was a person there who had lied about me for years, not only there but on other websites. When I found out his name I was very mean to him and I tried to scare him. I was really caught up in it. You probably think I’m one of the ones that should have been medicated, but to me it was payback for years of lies.

There was another guy there who I had never liked and he would troll people for no reason other than he was mean. There was this girl there for example who was very unattractive and would often say that about herself. He somehow got a picture of her, and put her personal information on it, name, address, phone, and he would share it in the chatroom for everyone to see. She never did anything to anyone. He would brag a lot about having money, and he posted a picture of his face. He was a typical bro, be he thought he was really hot. I just didn’t like him, and so I focused on him.

For months, with the help of one of his ex-girlfriends, I gathered info on him. The new goal became to make people we didn’t like leave the site, but he wouldn’t leave. Then we got pictures of his new girlfriend and her family and started posting pictures of them in the chatroom. Okay, this is after my name was known and pictures of my house were posted in chat, so, at the time, because I was caught up in it, I thought it was okay.

Finally what made me stop was that he and his girlfriend had a baby, and his former girlfriend didn’t want to let up. She would not let go of it and she was really a basket case because of the baby. Something about that made me not want to talk to her anymore, and he quit the site, anyway. Although I had his info I never called him or anything. Everything I did was on that one website.

Everyone’s names came out. I knew the personal info of these people that had been making people miserable for years. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was too real and serious. At that point, there was nothing else left to discover. I saw that people that couldn’t quit were just sick. One guy found my mom’s phone number and called her. My mom had been in trouble years before for fraud and he told her that I was doing the things she had done. He didn’t say that he had found her record. They must have done background checks. She and I don’t speak so she didn’t know where I was and she believed what she was told even though it was exactly what she had done 20 years before. To her that was this “Oh wow!” coincidence instead of realizing that they had looked her up and were trolling her.

I never did anything to anyone offline and I never contacted anyone. I just tried to make people feel stupid and tried to control who could come to the site. I realized it was dumb and that I was probably breaking laws here and there. That and also as I said it was like a game but all of the objectives had been met. Every “mission” was completed. I found the name of the person who had made my personal info available, found out he was on parole, called his parole officer, and he quit coming to the site. There was nothing left to do and I realized how stupid I was being.

The One With A Thick Skin

(Via Anonymous)

For a reformed troll, the internet is a bit like the 19th century or the French Foreign Legion. If you’ve got a bad reputation in one place, then just change your name, run away (i.e. go to another site or a new IP number) and start over. As long as people can’t connect your past to your present, it’s possible to get a clean slate and leave your mistakes behind. (Yes, I know it’s not quite that easy with the FFR.)

There are many different types of trolls. Some are destructive, some verbally abusive or threatening (e.g. doxxers), some mentally abusive (e.g. “kill yourself”), and probably several others could be described (e.g. always loud louts). A rare few trolls are actually funny (e.g. Mr. Kreepy Koala who plays GTA) though not many.

I was more the obnoxious type, inflaming arguments, using profanity, insulting people. I didn’t do it “for the lulz”, I did it because I didn’t GAF about how the words and actions affected others. I always had and still have a VERY thick skin and didn’t care if other people had thin skins and were more easily bothered. My motto could have been described as “If you can’t take the *hate*, stay out of the kitchen.”

Why did I change? It was a combination of many reasons. Yes, some of them are selfish.

1) I had two different personalities and demeanours, one online and one offline. I even ended up being obnoxious online to somebody I knew personally and he pointed it out to me. It was a wake up call.

2) I wasn’t making any friends or allies. Even when I was right about something or other people held the same opinions (*), I was getting fewer and fewer responses or agreements. I didn’t care about the numbers, but I realized I was making myself irrelevant and unwelcome in discussions and forums. And sometimes I was banned.

(* Or not...I often talked out of my ass. Now I keep quiet unlike I have something insightful, instead of saying things that incite full rage.)

3) I saw the effects of trolls. The increasing number of news stories (online and IRL) about suicides, harassment, death threats, racism and other revolting behaviour got to be too much. I may not have been guilty of any of those types of assaults, but I recognized that I was part of the problem.

4) I was starting to become the target of trolls and abuse. No, I didn’t experience any, but that I might have as I was finally dealing with being gay. I saw a news item about a man who left a white supremacist group and changed his tune when he realized the group’s list of “undesirables to be euthanized” included his own mentally disabled sone. It wasn’t until the hate affected him personally that he realized he was on the wrong side. Same here.

The Anime Hater

(Via Matt)

Back when I was sixteen, wayyy back in 2001, I got my first computer with insurance money after my dad passed away. I love attention so I got involved with acting websites, mostly amateur voice acting stuff. They were boards populated by similar young teens - often younger - who just wanted to voice their favorite anime character. I used the attention I got by being quick-witted to also be mean, belittling kids I didn’t know from around the world for their “shitty anime avatars” or what have you. If it all sounds petty and small, then rest assured that I agree!

I was involved with every bit of message board drama in the community from 2001-2007ish. I was a major member, given moderator status through sheer force of will and then I would abuse my power to pick on people I thought were idiots. I would fight with the administrators just because I knew it made them mad. After about a decade of being known as an “intelligent jerk” or a “funny asshole,” I think there came a confluence of things that made me want to reform - is that even the word? It sounds so silly, but I mean I probably really hurt some peoples’ feelings somewhere along the line and that sucks. The things that made me change were:

1. I was growing older. I was in my early twenties. I wanted to go to college, which my family couldn’t afford. I had made lots of true friends via those circles who I’m still friends with today fifteen years later - they knew the real me, an incredibly polite nice guy who liked to use what was essentially a character online to cut loose and get attention. But I had friends, I was losing interest in voice acting and was there mostly for the people I liked and to troll those I didn’t know. I was, frankly, too old for that shit - but then, so I was at sixteen.

2. I knew what I wanted next. I wanted to go to school and become a teacher. I never did a good job of hiding my identity, so I figured if some enterprising student did their due diligence and found my old history I’d rather them see a good example rather than what I was. I’ve been a teacher for two years now and no one has found that old stuff, but hopefully I can use it as a teachable moment when it does happen.

3. I didn’t like what I was. “Intelligent jerk” and “funny asshole” were sentiments from friends. Who the hell wants to be known as a jerk and an asshole? It’s not that I no longer enjoyed attention, but with age came the knowledge that I can be intelligent and funny without being an assjerk.

Today I am still a moderator, in name only, at one of those communities. I’m still friends with so many from that place, many of which are professional VAs now. Now, though, I’m turning 30 and people know me for how I truly am and no little kids have to cry. I feel better about myself. If I were to die today and someone were to check my internet history (because, come on, that’s totally what you do to a friend who has just died) then I’d be more than okay with what they saw there today rather than if it had been fifteen years earlier. I’m not proud of how I was, but slowly, over time, I think anyone who is a “troll” eventually figures out that life under the bridge kinda sucks.

The Omegle Lover

(Via Kyle)

I used to be an online troll.

It all started back in the summer of 2009. My friends told me about this great new site called Omegle, where you and an anonymous partner could chat about anything you wanted. No rules, no moderators, just two anons, shooting the shit. “Wow,” I said. “That sounds awesome!”

It started out innocently enough. Most of my conversations started with the universal online greeting at the time: “a/s/l.”

Now, at this point in my online career, I usually just gave out the first two pieces of information, and left off the last bit. But on Omegle, I was whoever I said I was. I was a fifty-three year old woman from Anchorage, with seventeen dogs and two cats (I am not).

I was a thirty-three year old male sheep farmed from the Netherlands (I am not). Eventually, after about five minutes of conversation, people would realize I was just yanking their chain and send me the almighty “screw off” and disconnect from the conversation. I’d just laugh about it and head straight into another conversation, with an entirely new persona at the ready. It was a powerful feeling, knowing that I had affected these peoples’ days in such a way that they felt irritated by just a few lies.

Still, like I said, things were relatively innocent at this point. I’d usually screenshot the conversations and email them to my friends, and we’d all have a pretty good laugh about them, and move on. After awhile, though, my friends stopped thinking the conversations were so great, and would only send back a measly “lol.” To me, this was a pretty great insult. So, that’s when I moved my trolling business to Facebook.

While it was easy to hide my identity on Omegle, it was a lot more fun to do so on Facebook. I quickly made a slew of fake accounts. They came complete with stock photos of people having fun in groups and completely normal names. There were three things all of the accounts had in common: they all had listed that they went to my high school, they all were me, and the third thing, and this is the most important thing, they all had my personal account as a mutual friend. I added my friends to some of the accounts, and my family to other accounts. They mostly all accepted the accounts as just either being friends of mine, or, in the case of my friends, someone we went to school with.

I started out simple. I would like a status here, like a photo there. Nothing suspicious.

But then the comments started. “Nice ass, man.” “Wow, maybe you should take this photo down. It’s hurting my eyes.” “Did you even bother paying attention in English class? Idiot.”

“I’d tap that.”

I definitely made sure I covered the entire spectrum of things that could either creep someone out, or infuriate them.

My friends started complaining to each other, and then eventually to me, about these people being jerks. My family did the same. I acted sympathetic, and even created an account to harass myself with in order to deflect suspicion. Then it happened. All at once, my facade came crashing down around me. One of my friends pointed out that, after looking up the accounts bothering everyone else, he noticed that they only had one friend in common with everyone: Me. He also noted that they were all relatively new accounts, and that they all used the same email provider. Basically, I was busted. I didn’t even try to hide it. I even admitted to it with some weird form of bravado. My friends were furious. They refused to talk to me after that. And the same friend that found me out messaged my family on Facebook to let them know that I was the one behind the troll accounts. My siblings began giving me the gold shoulder, and my parents told me how disappointed they were in me that I could say such awful things the my friends and family, and all for no reason.

I realized then that that power I was feeling from having these accounts was literally ruining my life.

I started my reformation by deleting the accounts, and then I deleted my personal account. I started to do more things off the web, and got out and made a couple of new friends. Eventually, my old friend group welcomed me back, and nowadays we mostly laugh about how much of an idiot I was back then. My family was a little harder to convince to let me back into their lives, but now at lease Thanksgiving and Christmas aren’t nearly as awkward as they used to be. It’s been over five years now since the last time I tried to make someone mad on the internet just to get that rush, but it’s still a temptation sometime. It’s getting to be election time, and the internet is rife with people who have strong opinions and thin skin when it comes to politics.

But, I let them be. I’m no longer that person, and I refuse to lose everyone again just for that rush. It’s a part of my history that I deleted, along with any cookies attaching me to it.

And man, it feels so good to be a reformed troll.

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

Ice time! Color magic! Wasp zombies! Worm tricks! Frog poison! Comet stories! Eye shapes! And the last spiders you’ll see before you die! It’s your Friday Science Watch, where we watch science—from a perch safely away from the field of battle!

“For the first time, researchers have directly calculated the rate at which water crystallizes into ice in a realistic computer model of water molecules.” Until now, scientists had no idea how long it took water to turn into ice. They were in the dark. And that’s a fact. And if you don’t like it—tough!

Why do you perceive the color yellow differently in summer than in winter? Probably because in winter it’s snow, which is white, not yellow. I’d love to hear what scientists have to say about how someone could make a mistake like that. Evolution?

Certain wasps are able to turn spiders into “zombies” by injecting poison into their brains, forcing them to build a web for the use of the wasps. It’s fair to say this isn’t “news” per se; wasps have probably been doing this for thousands or even millions of years. But one human gets around to writing a paper about it and all of a sudden it’s “news.” Is this sort of thing really “news?” I’d argue no. It’s something that’s been going on a long time. You have have a very anthropocentric viewpoint to consider this “news.” I’m a human and I like humans as much as anyone, but be fair about it.

How do earthworms digest toxic substances that plants produce specifically to ward off being eaten? Well, now we know the answer. I won’t bore you with the details but suffice it to say those worms are up to the task. If they weren’t, I never would have written this item, and the world would have been a different place, at least a little bit. Like when they talk about a butterfly flapping its wings, and later it makes a storm.

Listen to how a Brazilian scientist discovered that this frog is poisonous: he was out in the forest and all of a sudden one of the frogs “head-butted him, jabbing its spines into his hand.” And he got poisoned. Real funny I guess? The media would have you believe so. Maybe members of the media should be poisoned more regularly, to gain understanding of those they cover? Also—real good science work there, buddy (not)!

The “rubber duck comet” is a comet in space that is shaped somewhat like a rubber duck, with a smaller “head” fragment sticking out of a larger “body” fragment. So how did this rock come to be shaped this way? I’m already so fucking bored by this.

Researchers analyzed the pupils of 214 land animals and found that pupil shape is linked to an animal’s “ecological niche.” A sloth’s pupil is shaped like a tree, a cow’s pupil is shaped like hay, and so on.

A street in a Dallas suburb has been covered by a huge “communal spiderweb” holding thousands of spiders, and it’s only getting bigger. One can only hope that the spiders continue their diligent work until the web stretches through the suburbs and over the entire dreary hellscape of Dallas itself, swallowing officeworkers and oil moguls alike, until eventually covering up the totem of Texas itself, Cowboys stadium, sending star-bedecked fans fleeing in terror. Some will get away, but not Troy Aikman, whose bad knees will doom him to a slow, spidery death. Sorry Troy Aikman—them’s the breaks.

[Photo: Flickr]

Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA officer whose whistleblowing embarrassed Bush-era intelligence gathering in Iraq, died over the weekend at 63, the Washington Post reports. Drumheller was most recently implicated in an off-the-books intel gathering operation that fed into Hillary Clinton’s private inbox.http://gawker.com/leaked-private...

The Post says Drumheller’s death was attributed to “complications from pancreatic cancer, [according to] his wife, Linda Drumheller.” A joint Gawker/ProPublica investigation in March revealed Drumheller’s role in relaying foreign intel to Sidney Blumenthal meant for Hillary Clinton while she served as Secretary of State:

Indeed, though they were sent under Blumenthal’s name, the reports appear to have been gathered and prepared by Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the CIA’s clandestine service in Europe who left the agency in 2005. Since then, he has established a consulting firm called Tyler Drumheller, LLC. He has also been affiliated with a firm called DMC Worldwide, which he co-founded with Washington, D.C., attorney Danny Murray and former general counsel to the U.S. Capitol Police John Caulfield. DMC Worldwide’s now-defunct website describes it at as offering “innovative security and intelligence solutions to global risks in a changing world.”

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Would-be memoirist Kristin Cavallari has noted in multiple interviews over the past two years that designing her mid-priced shoe line for Chinese Laundry has been a dream come true for her. We recently unearthed another interview with the style blog “A Treasure Hunt” that sheds more light on how Kristin feels about her design accomplishments.

At a promotional event for Kristin’s shoes at a Francesca’s store in Southlake, Texas, in 2013, the Treasure Hunt blog asked Kristin, “How does it feel to add being a designer to the list of things you have done?”

She responded:

It’s a lot of fun. It’s cool. This is something I have really enjoyed and had a ton of fun doing. I think I can speak for every girl and say it’s a dream to have your own shoe line. And I also have a jewelry line which has been a ton of fun. Being a new mom, it’s great, because I can make my own hours and work on it when Cam is sleeping and take my time doing things. So it’s the perfect job.

The perfect answer.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Those expecting a colossal train wreck when Donald Trump went on Don Lemon’s CNN program tonight might have ended up disappointed, but The Donald still managed to engage in his own brand of media scorched-earth campaigning after a debate in which the edge was clearly against him.http://gawker.com/fox-news-wins-...

Trump continued his offensive against Megyn Kelly; after ripping her on Twitter last night, he told Lemon of seeing “blood coming out of her eyes... blood coming out of her... wherever”; he furthermore asserted the Fox News host was a “lightweight,” “zippo,” and that Lemon ought to be ashamed of himself for losing to Kelly in the ratings.

Other targets of Trump’s insult litany: Charles Krauthammer (“A real jerk...the worst”), George Will (“Pathetic”), Bret Baier (“I really don’t have any respect for him”), and pollster Frank Luntz (“A dunce...a major loser”).http://deadspin.com/the-political-...

[CNN]

To contact the author of this post, write to tim@deadspin.com (PGP key) or find him on Twitter @bubbaprog.

On Friday, a jury deciding the fate of Aurora movie theater shooter James Holmes said they were unable to reach a unanimous sentencing decision, resulting in life in prison without parole instead of the death penalty for the man who killed 12 people and wounded 70 others at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012, CNN reports.http://gawker.com/aurora-shooter...

For Holmes to be sentenced to death, every juror would have had to agree to the punishment. According to NBC News, it became clear that a unanimous verdict could not be reached after less than seven hours of deliberation:

“We ended our deliberations when one absolutely would not move,” [a] juror, who only identified herself as “juror 17,” told reporters after the verdict Friday. Two other jurors were “on the fence” about the death penalty, she said.

The jury rejected arguments from Holmes’ defense attorneys that he was legally insane when he carried out the attack and found him guilty of 24 counts of murder — two for each person he killed. Holmes’ lawyers then argued it would be inhumane to execute a man who suffered from mental illness.

Juror 17 said the issue of mental illness appeared to be the reason the juror refused to vote to sentence Holmes to death. “There was no other concern,” she said.

At a press conference on Friday, District Attorney George Brauchler expressed disappointment with the sentencing verdict while praising the efforts of the jurors themselves.

“Those jurors did a hell of a job. They were called to do things that many people wouldn’t or couldn’t do,” said Brauchler. “I thought death, I still think death for what that guy did, but the system said otherwise and I respect that outcome.”

[Image via AP Images]

Meek Mill is still battling Drake even though the Canadian was the clear winner in their war of words last week. On Thursday night, the Philly rapper explained that their beef isn’t just about untreated albums but, of course, Nicki Minaj.

Here’s a transcription of what Meek’s rhymed during the Camden, New Jersey stop of girlfriend Nicki Minaj’s Pinkprint Tour, where he’s an opening act. There’s a bit of what I think is transphobia, though Rahmeek’s final bar doesn’t really make sense. Via the Smoking Section:

So I don’t think it’s bout no rapping, it’s bout Nicki

He told us he was first in line but it got tricky

I still wake up with the lady you said you was first in line with

Did 5 months came home, that’s perfect timing

To make a sucka n**** look sucka without crimeing

If Quentin Miller wrote that shit, what were we buying?

Might as well go get his tape, is he good or is he great?

N****s turn to hoes, Caitlyn Jenners turn to Drizzy Drakes

This collection of words, which Meek would like to be a preview of a damaging diss, follows Drake’s polite Canadian OVO Fest version of putting Meek On The Summer Jam Screen. It was a reference to the 2001 Hot 97 Summer Jam concert in New York, when Jay Z projected photos of Mobb Deep’s Prodigy as a child dressed up like Michael Jackson. Prodigy’s never really recovered.

Jay’s move was brutal—the realtime embodiment of Mortal Kombat’s “Finish him!” But Drake just projected a bunch of embarrassing fan-made memes we all saw on social media, which clowned Meek for his subpar “Wanna Know”—it didn’t pack the punch of Jay Z’s stunt, perhaps because we’re in 2015 and rap is “soft.” Here’s hoping Meek’s full version won’t include another troublesome WWE snippet, rambling allegations of pee or a wedgie this time.

Additionally: Rahmeek gave Nicki a chain last night, either before or after they made out on stage.

Contact the author at Hillary@jezebel.com.

Image via AP.

Re Megyn Kelly quote: "you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever" (NOSE). Just got on w/thought

August 8, 2015

It’s been one year since 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson police officer who gunned down the unarmed black teen on August 9, 2014. Brown’s death, which came just weeks after Staten Island resident Eric Garner was choked to death by NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo, sparked national protests that called for, among other demands, the end of state violence upon America’s black citizenry.

On November 24, a jury decided to not indict Wilson. As dissent grew among locals and national outcry reached a fever pitch, Ferguson’s Police Chief Thomas Jackson, City Manager John Shaw, Court Clerk Mary Ann Twitty, and Judge Ronald J. Brockmeyer were given the boot. In March, the Department of Justice released multiple reports, one of which was a damning assessment of the local police force. The report concluded that, from 2012 to 2014, black Ferguson residents accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 93 percent of arrests, 90 percent of citations, and 88 percent of cases involving force. The DOJ also concluded that Wilson’s shooting of Brown, who had now become the most recognizable face of the #BlackLivesMatter movement sweeping across the country, did not justify criminal charges.

The media eventually left—to Cleveland (Tamir Rice), to Charleston (Walter Scott), to Baltimore (Freddie Gray), to Prairie View (Sandra Bland)—and Ferguson, a predominantly black suburb north of St. Louis, continued to bleed: locals business were looted and burned, and property damage was estimated to be in the millions. Divided by Brown’s killing, communities stood at odds with one another unsure of a way forward.

But what of Ferguson now, one year later?

“Ferguson: The Shooting” by Wesley Lowery

Brown’s sudden stop was fleeting, but it became the subject of many hours of investigation and testimony. The 12-member grand jury met for 25 days from August through late November, and prosecutors focused more on the meaning of Brown’s movement toward Wilson than on any other moment on that August afternoon.

Was Brown trying to surrender? Was he charging the officer? Was he falling from his wounds? Did his movement have any meaning at all?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/rweb/top/fergu...

“The Cop” by Jake Halpern

The Justice Department found other examples of systemic racial bias in Ferguson. From 2012 to 2014, the Ferguson police issued four or more tickets to blacks on seventy-three occasions, and to whites only twice. Black drivers were more than twice as likely as others to be searched during vehicle stops, even though they were found to possess contraband twenty-six per cent less often. Some charges, like “manner of walking in roadway,” were brought against blacks almost exclusively.

Wilson told me that Ferguson’s force had a few bigoted members, but he denied that racism was institutional. The Justice Department’s numbers were “skewed,” he said. “You can make those numbers fit whatever agenda you want.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/...

“A Year Later, Ferguson Sees Change, but Asks If It’s Real” by Monica Davey

The pressure to swiftly present a new image here is palpable. City leaders say they hope to reach a settlement with the Justice Department over its findings that the city’s law enforcement policies were predatory, and that city officials stood by as some employees shared racist emails.

But much remains in flux. Efforts to hire more black officers have moved slowly: A year ago at this time, four of the city’s approximately 50 officers were black; by this week, five were, including Chief Anderson. For now, Chief Anderson is expected to stay only six months; hiring permanent police chiefs and city managers can take as long as nine months, officials here say. (The city already has a number of vacant jobs, including human resources director and public works director.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/06/us/...

“The Ferguson Protests Worked” by Julia Craven, Ryan J. Reilly, and Mariah Stewart

Ferguson’s protests spawned at least 40 state measures aimed at improving police tactics and use of force. The national conversation around race and policing has shifted so dramatically that the director of the FBI said law enforcement officials historically enforced “a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups” and discussed how unconscious racial bias affects police officers with no pushback from the law enforcement community.

“I don’t think there has ever been this level of attention being paid to communities all over the country,” Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a recent interview with The Huffington Post. “As a country, it will be shame on us for missing the opportunity ... given the kind of elevated attention that is being paid to criminal justice.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ferguson...

“Ferguson, One Year Later: From a City to a Symbol” by Kevin McDermott

As with most epic conflicts, Ferguson engendered some myth-making. Most notably, it fostered a devastating new civil rights slogan — “Hands up, don’t shoot!” — that a U.S. Department of Justice report would later determine was based on a fiction.

But the shooting alerted a sobered nation to some broader truths about police-minority relations in an era that not so long ago was being smugly declared “post-racial.”

“It really pulled the covers back on how people of color have been treated for years” by police, says Miranda Jones, vice president of the Better Family Life Neighborhood Resource Center, a nonprofit community service organization based in Ferguson. “It was a national wake-up call.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/special-r...

“Ferguson Class of 2014” by Samantha Storey and Savannah O’Leary

What happened to Michael Brown hurt me. I’m just now really speaking to people about it. Like I go on his Instagram page and Facebook page quite frequently and just type something – you know, “I miss you,” and stuff like that. Michael Brown was really friendly. I used to always run into him, like, “you’re not going to give me a hug today?” and he would give me this big, ol’ hug. He was like my big old teddy bear and he smelled really good. You know when guys wear the cologne? He was really nice and friendly. He was very protective over his close ones.

http://testkitchen.huffingtonpost.com/ferguson-class...

[Image via Getty]

The estate of Bobbi Kristina Brown amended a $10 million lawsuit against boyfriend Nick Gordon on Friday, accusing him of being responsible for the injuries that later led to her death, CNN reports.http://defamer.gawker.com/10-million-law...

The wrongful death amendment claims Gordon came home from an all-night “cocaine and drinking binge” on January 31 and argued with Brown before giving her a “toxic cocktail” and placing her face down in a tub of water. From WXIA-TV:

Gordon allegedly accused Brown of cheating and called her a number of names, the lawsuit alleges. The argument lasted about 30 minutes and then “everything abruptly became quiet.”

The lawsuit then says that Gordon “gave Bobbi Kristina a toxic cocktail rendering her unconscious and then put her face down in a tub of cold water causing her to suffer brain damage.”

According to the suit, Gordon then came out of the bedroom wearing different clothes than he was wearing in his argument with Bobbi Kristina, got into bed, laid his head on a female guest’s ankle and said, “Now I want a pretty little white girl like you.”

About 15 minutes later, a guest at the home went in to check on Brown and found her face down in a tub. A dust pan was at the bottom of the tub, the lawsuit states. Bobbi Kristina [was] unresponsive, unconscious with a swollen mouth and a tooth hanging loosely from her mouth.

No criminal charges have been filed against Gordon, who has denied any wrongdoing in Brown’s death.

“The recent lawsuit against Nick is slanderous and meritless,” said Gordon’s attorneys in a statement Friday night. “Nick has been heartbroken and destroyed over the loss of his love and it’s shameful that such baseless allegations have been presented publicly. Nick has engaged civil counsel and intends to defend the lawsuit vigorously and expose it for what it is: a fictitious assault against the person who loved Krissy most.”

[Image via Getty Images]

Early Friday morning, Christian Taylor was shot and killed by Arlington, Tx. police at the Classic Buick GMC Dealership. Taylor, 19, was set to begin his sophomore season at Angelo State University in San Angelo—a DII school that is part of the Texas Tech system—where he played defensive back for the Rams.

According to the Arlington Star-Telegram:

Officers were dispatched to a call about a burglary in progress about 1 a.m. at the Classic Buick GMC dealership on the Interstate 20 service road east of Collins Street, said Sgt. Paul Rodriguez, a police spokesman.

A security company had called 911 after observing the suspect on a security camera outside the business.

Rodriguez said police arrived to find that Taylor had used a vehicle to crash through glass in the front of the showroom.

“The officers went and confronted him. There was an altercation. An officer discharged his weapon and struck the suspect,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez alleges that security footage shows the unarmed Taylor perpetrating “criminal activity” in the lot. However, there is no footage of either the confrontation or the shooting of Taylor. The Arlington police are in the process of rolling out a body camera program for officers, but nobody is wearing them yet. Brad Miller, the officer who shot Taylor, was a trainee who has been on the force for less than a year, and has been placed on administrative leave.

There is something off about this story. The police are specific about why they ended up at the dealership, but not what happened once they got there. They have footage of Taylor allegedly “damaging vehicles,” but not of the fatal confrontation. And what kind of harebrained scheme involves crashing your own car into a showroom to steal another one?

[Arlington Star-Telegram]

Photo via Angelo State

“The wicked Japanese imperialists committed such unpardonable crimes as depriving Korea of even its standard time while mercilessly trampling down its land with 5,000 year-long history and culture,” said North Korean state news on Friday, announcing the country’s new “Pyongyang time” zone.

While crowds cheered Donald Trump’s misogyny at this week’s GOP debate, his suggestion yesterday that moderator Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever” proved to be one ugly comment too far for fellow sexist Erick Erickson, who announced he was inviting Kelly to take Trump’s place at his influential RedState Gathering.http://gawker.com/trump-on-megyn...

“His comment was inappropriate,” wrote Erickson on RedState.com late Friday night. “It is unfortunate to have to disinvite him. But I just don’t want someone on stage who gets a hostile question from a lady and his first inclination is to imply it was hormonal. It just was wrong.”

Less than 12 hours later, however, the Trump campaign fired back, releasing a statement calling Erickson “a total loser,” claiming that “only a deviant” would think Trump wasn’t talking about Kelly’s nose and saying he was “honored to be uninvited” from the 900-person event:

Mr. Trump made Megyn Kelly look really bad—she was a mess with her anger and totally caught off guard. Mr. Trump said ‘blood was coming out of her eyes and whatever’ meaning nose, but wanted to move on to more important topics. Only a deviant would think anything else. This related to the debate, which because of Mr. Trump had 24 million viewers—the biggest in cable news history. According to TIME, Newsmax, Drudge Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hill and many others, Mr. Trump won the debate,” the Trump campaign statement said.

By the way, the guy (Erick Erickson) who made the decision about RedState called Supreme Court Justice David Souter a “goat [expletive] child molester” and First Lady Michelle Obama a “Marxist Harpy.” He was forced to make a humbling apology.

Also, not only is Erick a total loser, he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be uninvited from his event. Mr. Trump is an outsider and does not fit his agenda.

Many of the 900 people that wanted to hear Mr. Trump speak tonight have been calling and emailing—they are very angry at Erickson and the others that are trying to be so politically correct. To them Mr. Trump says, “We will catch you at another time soon.”

Say what you want about Trump and his staff, but they certainly have a way with (disgusting, hate-filled) words.

[Image via AP Images]

Bugs in Fallout: New Vegas might have eaten your save file. Maybe they took away a few hours of progress, or forced you to reset a couple of quests. Maybe game-crashing bugs pissed you off to the point where you wished you could get your $60 back. But they probably didn’t cost you a million dollars.

[This article was originally published on April 11, 2013.]

Perhaps you’ve heard the story: publisher Bethesda was due to give developer Obsidian a bonus if their post-apocalyptic RPG averaged an 85 on Metacritic, the review aggregation site. It got an 84 on PC and Xbox 360, and an 82 on PS3.

“If only it was a stable product and didn’t ship with so many bugs, I would’ve given New Vegas a higher score,” wrote a reviewer for the website 1up, which gave New Vegas a B, or 75 on Metacritic’s scale.

“It’s disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant and polished game suffer from years-old bugs, and unfortunately our review score for the game has to reflect that,” said The Escapist’s review, which gave the game an 80.

If New Vegas had hit an 85, Obsidian would have gotten their bonus. And according to one person familiar with the situation who asked not to be named while speaking to Kotaku, that bonus was worth $1 million. For a team of 70 or so, that averages out to around $14,000 a person. Enough for a cheap car. Maybe a few mortgage payments.

Those sure were some costly bugs.

This is not an anomaly: for years now, video game publishers have been using Metacritic as a tool to strike bonus deals with developers. And for years now, observers have been criticizing the practice. But it still happens. Over the past few months, I’ve talked to some 20 developers, publishers, and critics about Metacritic’s influences, and I’ve found that the system is broken in quite a few ways.

There is something inherently wrong with the way publishers use Metacritic.

Why Metacritic Matters

Hop into a debate with some video game fans on your favorite message board, and there’s one subject that will always come up: review scores. Which game scored the highest? Which scored the lowest? Which are the best review websites? Which are the worst?

Inevitably, at some point, someone will jump into the fray and say something like “lol review scores mean nothing anyway.” To some people, maybe that’s true. But to the people who make and sell video games, review scores are more important than many casual fans realize. Mostly because of Metacritic.

For the uninitiated: Metacritic is an aggregation website that rounds up review scores for all sorts of media, including video games. The people who run Metacritic take those scores, convert them to a 100-point scale, average them out using a mysterious weighting formula (more on that later), and spit out a number that they call a Metascore, meant to grade the quality of that game. The Metascore for BioShock Infinite, for example, is currently an 94. Aliens: Colonial Marines? 48.

To people who work in gaming, these Metascores can mean a lot. Say you’re a developer who needs money. You’ve got some ideas to pitch to publishers. You take some meetings. They’re going to ask: just how good have your games been?

“Typically, when you go into pitch meetings and whatnot, publishers are going to want to know your track record as far as Metacritic,” said Kim Swift, a game designer best known for helping create games like Portal and Quantum Conundrum. “As a company, what is your Metacritic average? As an individual, what is your Metacritic average?”

Swift works for Airtight Games, an independent studio that is tied to no publishers. Their Metacritic history: Dark Void, which has a 59 on Metacritic, and last year’s Quantum Conundrum, which sits at 77. [UPDATE: In 2014, a year after this article was originally published, Airtight shut down. Swift now works for Amazon Games.]

In order to survive, studios like Airtight have to negotiate deals with big companies like Capcom and Square Enix. Often that means talking about Metacritic. Sometimes that means wearing their history of Metacritic scores like a scarlet letter.

This is common. An employee of a well-known game studio told me about a recent pitch meeting with a publisher, during which the publisher brought up the studio’s last two Metacritic scores, which were both average. The studio employee asked that I not name the parties involved, but claimed the publisher used the Metascores as leverage against the studio, first to negotiate for less favorable terms, and then to turn down the pitch entirely.

Often, developer bonuses or royalties are tied to game review scores. Fallout: New Vegas is one high-profile example, but it happens fairly often.

“It’s pretty common in the industry these days, actually,” Swift told me. “When you’re negotiating with the publisher for a contract, you build in bonuses for the team based on Metacritic score. So if you get above a 90, then you get X amount for a bonus. If you get below that, you don’t get anything at all or get a smaller amount.”

In other words, a developer’s priority is sometimes not just to make a good game, but to make a game that they think will resonate with reviewers, which could mean anything from artificially extending a game’s length or adding superfluous features that they believe reviewers like.

“When you’re working on a game, part of what you want to do is have a high score,” said Swift. She said she’d never seen a developer change part of a video game just for the sake of raising scores, but the influence is undoubtedly there.

“It’s usually some other thing like, ‘Hey, we could use another couple hours on this game because people perceive a longer game to be a higher value,’” Swift said. “It’s never directly pointing back to, ‘This is gonna improve our score by X number of points.’”

Matt Burns, a longtime game designer who worked for a number of big shooter companies and now makes indies with his company Shadegrown Games, wrote about his personal experiences with Metacritic back in 2008. Burns said he watched firsthand as a development studio worked as hard as possible to make a game that would snag high review scores.

“Armed with the knowledge that higher review scores meant more money for them, game producers were thus encouraged to identify the elements that reviewers seemed to most notice and most like–detailed graphics, scripted set piece battles, ‘robust’ online multiplayer, ‘player choice,’ and more, more of everything,” Burns wrote.

“Like a food company performing a taste test to find out that people basically like the saltiest, greasiest variation of anything and adjusting its product lineup accordingly, the big publishers struggled to stuff as much of those key elements as possible into every game they funded. Multiplayer modes were suddenly tacked on late in development. More missions and weapons were added to bulk up their offering–to be created by outsource partners. Level-based games suddenly turned into open-world games.

“Before you cry in despair, keep in mind that all these people wanted in the end was the best game possible–or, more precisely, the best-reviewed game possible.”

And then there’s this wry joke by Warren Spector, talking about the words that influenced his career during a talk at the DICE conference earlier this year. Powerful words. Legacy. Mentor. And...

While chatting with Obsidian head Feargus Urquhart for the profile I published in December of 2012, I asked him about what had happened with Fallout: New Vegas. For legal reasons, he couldn’t get into the specifics.

“I can’t comment on contracts directly,” he said. “But what I can say is that in general, publishers like to have Metacritic scores as an aspect of contracts. As a developer, that’s challenging for a number of reasons. The first is that we have no control over that, though we do have the responsibility to go make a brilliant game that can hopefully score an 80 or an 85 or a 90 or something like that.”

According to Metacritic’s rating scale, any game above a 75 is considered “good,” but realistically, according to multiple developers I spoke with, publishers expect scores of 85 or higher. Sometimes, Urquhart told me, the demands can get unreasonable.

“A lot of times when we’re talking to publishers–and this is no specific publisher–but there are conversations I’ve had in which the royalty that we could get was based upon getting a 95,” Urquhart said. “I’ve had this conversation with a publisher, and I explained to them, I said, ‘Okay, there are six games in the past five years who have averaged a 95, and all of those have a budget of at least three times what you’re offering me.’ They were like, ‘Well, we just don’t think we should do it if you don’t hit a 95.’”

That’s the developer’s perspective. Now let’s look at this from the other side. Say you’re a publisher. You’re about to sign a seven- or eight-figure deal with a development studio, and you want to make sure they’re not going to hand you a clunker. Why not use Metacritic as a security blanket in order to minimize risks and ensure you get yourself a great game?

Here’s some very reasonable rationalization from a person who worked at a major publisher and asked not to be named:

“Let’s say that [a publisher] wanted to pay $1 million up front (through milestone payments over the course of development), but the developer wanted $1.2 million. If they wouldn’t budge, sometimes we would offer to make up the difference in a bonus, paid out only if the game hit a certain Metacritic [score].

“That conversation could happen during development too. Maybe a developer wanted more time and money in the middle of the production, to make a better game. So the counter was, ‘If you’re so sure it will make the game better, we’re gonna tie the additional funds to the Metacritic score.’ It was a way to minimize risk.”

But a different person who once worked for major publishers (and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on this issue) says that Metacritic scores are just an excuse publishers use in order to deprive developers of the bonuses they deserve.

“Well, generally the whole Metacritic emphasis originated from publishers wanting to dodge royalties,” that person said. “So even if a game sold well, they could withhold payment based off review scores... The big thing about Metacritic is that it’s always camouflaged as a drive for quality but the intent is nothing of the sort.”

Multiple developers I spoke to echoed similar thoughts, although nobody could share hard evidence to back up this theory. I reached out to a number of major publishers including Activision, EA, and Bethesda, but none agreed to comment for this story.

Marc Doyle, the former lawyer who co-founded Metacritic in 2001 and keeps it running every day, told me during a phone conversation last week that he feels no responsibility for what video game publishers or developers do with his website.

“Metacritic has absolutely nothing to do with how the industry uses our numbers,” he said. “Metacritic has always been about educating the gamer. We’re using product reviews as a tool to help them make the most of their time and money.”

But gamers aren’t the only ones who use Metascores. Not by a long shot. Even the massive Japanese publisher Square Enix recently cited Metacritic as one of the factors they used to predict sales for their games.

“Let’s talk about Sleeping Dogs: we were looking at selling roughly 2~2.5 million units in the EUR/ NA market based on its game content, genre and Metacritic scores,” former Square Enix president Yoichi Wada wrote in a recent financial briefing. “In the same way, game quality and Metacritic scores led us to believe that Hitman had potential to sell 4.5~5 million units, and 5~6 million units for Tomb Raider in EUR/ NA and Japanese markets combined.”

“Review scores are a part of our industry and it’s something we pay attention to as developers,” said Swift. And they lead to trends. “Review scores of this year are gonna drastically affect what’s gonna be seen next year,” she said.

Even big retailers like Walmart and Target ask publishers for Metacritic predictions when deciding whether or not to feature certain games. “One of the criteria [retailers] have is, ‘What’s the review score gonna be?’” said Tim Pivnicny, vice president of sales and marketing at Atlus USA. “That comes up a lot... They’re concerned if it’s going to be a good game.”

Metacritic has a significant influence on the way games are produced today. That’s a problem.

Why Metacritic Shouldn’t Matter

When I first heard about the Fallout: New Vegas bonus, I wrote an editorial about how silly it is for publishers to use Metacritic as a measure of quality. Video games are personal experiences, and they can’t be evaluated objectively, especially through some sort of arbitrary numerical score that means different things to different people. (Go ahead and try to explain the qualitative difference between an 81 and an 82.)

That’s the obvious reason. But there are others. For one, people are gaming the system. On both sides of the aisle.

There’s the story of the mocked mock reviewer, for example. Some background: game publishers and developers often hire consultants or game critics to come into their offices, play early copies of games, and write up mock reviews that predict how those games will perform on Metacritic. Often, if possible, publishers and developers will make changes to their games based on what those mock reviews say. Mock reviewers are then ethically prohibited from writing consumer reviews of that game, as they have taken money from the publisher.

One developer–a high-ranking studio employee who we’ll call Ed–told me he hired someone to write a mock review, then just shredded it. Ed didn’t care what was inside. He just wanted to make sure the reviewer–a notoriously fickle scorer–couldn’t review his studio’s game. Ed knew that by eliminating at least that one potentially-negative review score from contention, he could skew the Metascore higher. Checkmate.

(In case you’re wondering, Kotaku writers are prohibited from doing mock reviews or taking any work from the publishers we cover.)

When I asked Metacritic’s Doyle about practices like this, he admitted that he had heard similar stories. He said he works closely with all 140 review publications that he aggregates on Metacritic, and he said he constantly evaluates and examines each one. “Trying to prevent people from gaming the system is something I always think about,” Doyle said.

But it’s still happening.

“Anything we can do to optimize the score, we’re gonna do,” Ed told me.

Sometimes it’s subtle things: lavish review events that force game critics to review games on a studio’s terms; review embargoes that become more flexible when a score is higher; swag that gets sent to offices and discarded oh-so-often, like Gears of War beef jerky and Legos based on sets from Lego City Undercover. So long as Metacritic has an effect on the people who make games, the people who make games will find ways to influence it.

Those most susceptible to pressure from video game publishers may be the smaller websites that need traffic from aggregate sites like Metacritic in order to survive–websites that might make sketchy deals in order to get that traffic. Jeff Rivera, a game journalist who worked as an editor for a group of websites called Advanced Media Network (which later became Kombo.com), told me he saw one of those deals back in 2006.

“We had an agreement with Sega that we would run a week-long special with our top stories on the DS channel being dedicated to Super Monkey Ball,” Rivera said in an e-mail. “I was handling the review, and on the night before we were going to publish, I got an IM from a co-worker asking what I was going to score the game.

“I told him that I didn’t know yet and wondered why I was being asked, as it was something I’d never had happen before. He went on to tell me that PR said that our review would be guaranteed exclusive for a day if my score was to be 8.0 or better.”

Rivera said he had already written his review at that point, and that he had scored the game an 8.1. (The review is no longer online, but it’s still listed under Kombo on GameRankings.)

“I told them I that didn’t know what I would give it, because I didn’t want them feeling like they ‘bought’ my review score,” he said. “More pressure came to divulge my score, and I kept saying that I didn’t know, but that 8.0 was the ball park range.”

When I asked Sega for comment on this story, they sent over a statement: “Sega has a strict internal policy against soliciting high scores in exchange for early reviews and against the practice of influencing reviewers.” But Rivera said this had happened in 2006. I asked Sega when they’d enacted this policy, but the publisher never got back to me.

From conversations I’ve had with developers and other press, it seems like this sort of thing occurs less often these days. But there are always stories and whispers. Developers begging reviewers to change their scores. PR people intentionally sending out late review copies when they know a game is going to be bad, or sending early copies to websites known for handing out higher scores.

If you read about games online, you’re probably familiar with some of the websites on Metacritic: outlets like IGN and GameSpot are well-established publications that pay their writers and have solid reputations. But other names on Metacritic’s large list of publications are less recognizable. Some are run by volunteers; others are lesser-known to American gamers.

In order to give more importance to the bigger websites, Metacritic uses a weighting system that puts more emphasis on the heavy-hitters, making their scores count for more. But Doyle and his team won’t give any details about the system they use. This opaqueness has led to some controversy over the years: most recently, a Full Sail University study made headlines when the people behind it claimed to have modeled Metacritic’s formula, but their model turned out to be wrong. The event led many to ask: why doesn’t Metacritic just tell us how they weigh outlets?

“We’re transparent about everything on Metacritic except for the critic weightings,” Doyle told me. “That may seem like a drastic thing, but I’m just telling you that, in my opinion, it’s not. If you simply stripped out all the weights, it wouldn’t have a huge effect on that number.”

Doyle gave me a few explanations: for one, he said he doesn’t want publishers pressuring the highest-weighted publications. Another reason: Metacritic tweaks the system frequently, and they don’t want to have to talk about it every time they do, potentially embarrassing a publication whose weight they’ve just lowered.

But people find it hard to trust what they don’t understand. And nobody understands how Metascores are computed.

One of Doyle’s other big policies has also been in the news recently: Metacritic’s refusal to change an outlet’s first review score, no matter what happens. It’s a policy they’ve had for a while now, Doyle told me. He enacted it because during the first few years of Metacritic, which launched in 2001, reviewers kept changing their scores for vague reasons that Doyle believes were caused by publisher pressure.

“I decided that if we can, as an aggregator, act as a disincentive for these outside entities, whoever they may be, to pull that kind of stuff, and we can protect our critics by backing up their first published and honest opinion, then we’re gonna do what we can to do that.”

Sometimes, however, this leads to some skewed Metacritic results. In late 2012, GameSpot pulled their review of Natural Selection 2, which had been written by a freelancer. The review contained multiple factual inaccuracies. A different writer then reviewed the game, giving it an 8. But the original score–a 60–remains on Metacritic to this day.

More recently, the website Polygon, which uses an adjustable review scale, gave SimCity a 9.5 out of 10 before it launched. On launch day, when crippling server errors rendered the game unplayable for most, Polygon changed their score to an 8. A few days later, as the catastrophic problems continued, they switched it to a 4. It’s currently a 6.5. Yet anyone who goes to SimCity’s Metacritic page will still see the 9.5.

Still, Doyle stands by his policy.

“Metacritic scores really are that snapshot in time when a game is released, or close to after it’s released,” said Doyle, “when the critics decide, ‘I’ve played this enough, I can evaluate this now fairly, and here’s the score.’”

Another problem for developers: outlier scores. What happens when tons of people like a game, but for one or two reviewers, it just doesn’t click?

“The problem is the scale,” said Obsidian’s Urquhart. “There’s an expectation that a good game is between 80 and 90. If a good game is between 80 and 90, and let’s say an average game is gonna maybe get 50 scores, if you wanna hit that 85 and someone gives you a 35, that just took ten 90s down to 85... Just math-wise, how do you deal with that? Some guy who wants to make a name for himself can absolutely screw the numbers.”

One reviewer well-known for aberrant scores is Tom Chick, who runs the blog Quarter To Three. Chick is listed for having the lowest Metacritic score on BioShock Infinite (a 60) and Halo 4 (a 20), among others. He uses a 1-5 scale that Metacritic converts into multiples of 20, so Chick’s “I liked this game,”–3 out of 5–is converted into a 60, which most Metacritic readers see as a bad score.

But Chick is okay with this system, and when I asked him his thoughts on how Metacritic uses his numbers, he defended the aggregation site.

“An aggregate is only as good as its individual components,” Chick said in an e-mail. “And I feel that a lot of the data fed into Metacritic is of questionable value for how it clusters ratings into a narrow margin between seven and nine. But that’s not a Metacritic problem. That’s an IGN problem, a Game Informer problem, a GameSpot problem. And part of how we get past that problem is by recognizing more varied data. That’s ultimately one of the reasons I’m on Metacritic: I believe a wider range of opinions can add to its value.”

Chick uses a totally different scale than many other websites on Metacritic: Game Informer, for example, describes their 6/10 as follows: “Limited Appeal: Although there may be fans of games receiving this score, many will be left yearning for a more rewarding game experience.” Chick, on the other hand, says his 6/10 means something else entirely. “I believe strongly in using the entire range of a ratings scale, so three stars means that I like a game,” he said. “Quite literally. We have a ratings explanation on Quarter to Three that explains that three stars means ‘I like it.’ It’s that simple.”

Yet Chick’s 60 and Game Informer’s 60 are averaged together. They both affect developer bonuses. They both have an impact on contract negotiations. And they both change the way video games are made.

“The nature of an aggregate system is that multiple scores are aggregated,” Chick said. “You might as well blame IGN for giving a game a 92 instead of a 96. As for how I feel about a studio losing its bonus because the publisher has set an arbitrary number, that’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is solely to my readers.”

Chick’s message is admirable, and his criticism is always sharp, but his scores illustrate one of the biggest problems with how publishers and developers use Metacritic today: inconsistency. When Chick’s scale is so drastically different than Game Informer’s, how can any outside observer look at an average of the two and think that number has any meaning or significance?

There are other points to think about, too. If one person loves a game, and another person hates a game, is it an *average* game? Or just a game that one person loved and another person hated? If two people score a game 100 and two people score it 0, it’s not worth a 50–it’s just polarizing.

The system doesn’t work. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Outside Voices Weigh In

“Metacritic’s usefulness as a consumer aid is clear and obvious,” said longtime critic and Gears of War: Judgment writer Tom Bissell. “That the game industry has internalized its values, however, and uses its metrics, apparently uncritically, as a valuable source of self-appraisal, has to be one of the great mysteries of modern industry. It cannot be a coincidence that the form of modern entertainment most self-conscious about its status as an art form is also so slavishly attached to Metacritic.”

“It bastardizes the editorial process for reviews,” said Justin Kranzl, an ex-game critic and current PR rep for Square Enix. “We’re conditioning readers to skip the copy or the video and just get the score. For people who love a dynamic and varied media landscape–and any self respecting PR person should fall into that category–that’s terrible.”

“I think Metacritic is something only publishers care about,” said Monkey Island designer and longtime game developer Ron Gilbert. “The devs I know only care about it to the extent that a publisher bonus has been tied to the game’s Metacritic score (which is a stupid, stupid, stupid thing to do). I’ve never looked up the Metacritic score for any game I’ve worked on. It’s completely irrelevant to me.”

“Metacritic encourages the fallacy that all opinions should be weighted equally, and that a ‘bad’ review is an unenthusiastic review,” said Bissell. “But that’s not true. There are some games I am *more* likely to play when a certain critic gives them what Metacritic regards as a ‘bad’ review. Metacritic leaves no room to discuss, much less pursue, guilty-pleasure games, noble failure games, or divisive games. Everything’s just a 7, or an 8, or a 6.5. That’s the least interesting conversation I can imagine.”

(Metacritic game hubs do include blurbs from each of the reviews they aggregate.)

“Rating a game is so subjective,” said Airtight’s Kim Swift. “I think one of the scarier things for a developer is when a reviewer opens up with ‘I typically hate this type of game’ and you’re like ‘Oh, crap.’”

“I don’t want to carry that burden... these are people with children and families,” said longtime critic Adam Sessler, an ex-TV host who now produces videos for Revision 3 Games. “It is a horrible feeling that what I’m saying–I’m giving my subjective evaluation of an experience that will not be the same experience as other people are going to have–that somehow withholds food and resources... To me it is noxious in the extreme.”

“In fact I would encourage more outlets to employ scoring scales that are incompatible with Metacritic,” said Kranzl, “and I’m always down to discuss with them different ways of getting there.”

“I’ll say this,” said Sessler. “I have considered not doing this job before because of this, because I think there’s something so morally questionable and repugnant about it.”

“I wish it would go away, but if not Metacritic, then some other service would pop up,” said Gilbert. “We humans love to quantify stuff. I wonder what the Metacritic of the Mona Lisa was. I heard it hung in King Louis XIV’s bathroom for many years.”

Perhaps it’s in our nature to make numbers out of everything. And it’s hard to deny that Metacritic is a useful tool for measuring how a small group of people felt about a game at one particular point.

But it’s not a useful tool for much else. There are too many variables, too many people trying to manipulate the system. There’s too much subjectivity in the review process for anyone to treat it like an objective measure of quality. Video games are designed to be personal experiences, and it is disingenuous for publishers to act like review scores are any more than the quantification of those personal experiences. It’s harmful to everyone. Everyone.

It’s harmful to critics, who have to deal with PR pressure and the guilt of taking money out of peoples’ pockets.

It’s harmful to developers, whose careers can be tied to the whims of a critic who may be in a bad mood when he or she plays their game.

It’s harmful to publishers, who must be concerned that they have to put so much value on a website that won’t tell anyone how they calculate their review score averages.

Most importantly, it’s harmful to gamers, because it has a palpable negative impact on the way our video games turn out every year. When developers change games because they think that’s what reviewers will want to see, nobody wins.

Metacritic is a useful tool, but video game publishers have turned it into a weapon. And something’s gotta change.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

D’Angelo’s “Untitled” is on BET, your forehead pressed against the screen trying to look down, praying there’s a few more inches of TV. you don’t know what drives you to press your skin to the screen filled with his skin but you let yourself be driven, be hungry, be whatever this is when no one is around. you don’t know what a faggot is but you know a faggot would probably be doing this. you don’t know what a faggot is but you know you might be one. You don’t know what you are but you know you shouldn’t be. but you know that when D’Angelo sings how he sings looking how he looks, inside you something breaks open & then that odd flood of yes, a storm you can’t call a storm but the wind sounds like your name.

your auntie & ‘nem done finished the wine & put on that Ohio Players or whatever album makes them feel blackest. they dancin’ nasty & you watching from the steps when you should be sleep. your uncle is usually a man of much shoulders & silence but tonight he is a brown slur in the light, his body liquid & drunk with good sound. you feel like you shouldn’t be looking at how shameless he moves his hips, how he holds your auntie like a cliff or something that just might save him. your mama is not your mama tonight – she is 19 again, unsure what burns in her middle. your not-mama is caught in a rapture so ungospel you wonder if this is what they mean by sin, & if it is, how, like really how, could this be the way to hell? you’ve never seen her this free, this on fire this — “BOY!” she screams at you but not so you’ll go back to bed. she calls you to her, you grab her hands, she shows you where you come from.

your grandma sent you out to the big freezer to get some pork chops & while she said they were on top, you can’t find them to save your behind. you see neck bones, pig feet, whole chickens, chicken wings, chicken thighs, chicken nuggets, chitterlings, pizzas, freeze pops, some meat you don’t know the name of, but not the chops. grandma is gonna have to find it herself. your grandma doesn’t have much but she has this. who cares about kingdom if the children don’t thin? this was her great northern prayer to make the girls round & winter tough, watch the boys grown broad & alive. glory be the woman with enough meat to let the world starve but not her family, glory the pork chops she sends you to get but you can’t find, glory the woman who knows where she placed what is dead & what feeds, who rules the skillet with both hands while both she & the dinner bleed.

last summer you weren’t bowlegged & your mama noticed you got thick once you shed winter’s wool & she damned the young new fat wrapped around her narrow boy & the secret was out: you had secrets & those secrets had hands & mouths & bulges pressed against your jeans in someone else’s mama’s basement & your jeans are too little & this city was too beige & small for your wild, stay oiled legs to walk & run your mouth to someone’s son talking grown & acting like y’all got no home training & oooo he spread you flat & open & arched, your back the black edge of everything, the sun dipping down, look how quick the stars came to spill their barely light everywhere & somewhere on the other side of the horizon inside you a sun falls right out the sky, burns & burns until it pulls back out & you get darker every week in August walking around so black & sassy & unkillable & filled with shine boys look at you & go blind — most with rage, some with hunger.

you went to the mall & got errrrythang airbrushed cause homecoming next week. you been practicing the heel-toe for a month now & you need the fit to be as on point. you buy a tall-tee cause you must. you cop some forces cause what else? you didn’t buy new jeans but you’ll ask your grandma to iron a hard crease how she used to do your church clothes & you expect to be some kind of holy. you bring the tee & the forces & the yet-pressed jeans to the airbrush booth, you want your name in red, your school year down the leg, the shoes with a design almost bloody & all those little stars that they do for free. so many stars. you gonna be so fly. a sky decked out in ruby.

when white folks talk about being black they never talk about how your grandma’s brow softens when you raise the spoonful of hot peas to your mouth on New Year’s or how your mother called you into her room in the morning to rub lotion on your face when she’d pumped too much. they don’t talk about being called into the kitchen to do your dance or sing that little song you sing or just stand there so your mama could be proud in front of company. they won’t talk about the rage & terror in her voice when she catches you fighting in the park or with liquor on your breathe or anywhere you ain’t supposed to be, but are, or the joy she feels when she looks at you, grateful she still has a boy to look at, that no one has tested her joy & succeeded.

Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Black Movie, winner of the 2014 Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. He is a 2014 Ruth Lilly-Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. Smith’s writing has been published in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ploughshares and elsewhere. A founding member of two collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club, Smith is currently the micro-editor for The Offing.
http://buttonpoetry.com/product/black-...

A version of this essay was originally published in Blueshift Journal.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

According to AJC.com, holidays honoring Confederate soldiers and General Robert E. Lee have been removed from Georgia’s official state calendar and are now simply listed as “state holidays.” “Those so inclined can observe Confederate Memorial Day and remember those who died,” said a spokesperson for Gov. Nathan Deal.

The first Republican debate was a lively one. Topics spanned the gauntlet of domestic issues with a few foreign policy and defense topics sprinkled in – mainstays of the Republican platform. So what did these 10 hopefuls have to say? A mix of hollow statements, generalities and a host of blatant inaccuracies.

It’s not easy getting substance out of any candidate for President when the debate stage is as stuffed as it was on Thursday night in Cleveland. Having just 90 seconds to get your boilerplate platform out there and then actually addressing complex issues is nearly impossible. As such, we’ll take a look what the candidates said and – more importantly – didn’t say when it comes to defense and foreign policy.

The fact of the matter is that only a handful of the candidates were actually asked foreign policy questions. One of the most heated exchanges came between Governor Chris Christie and Rand Paul, who are not known to have much love when it comes to how they would treat the NSA’s bulk surveillance programs.

Rand Paul demanded that personal freedoms are protected and warrants are garnered by the government when spying on U.S. citizens, while Christie accused Paul of not knowing what it’s like fighting terrorism directly, as he supposedly did as an the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. The whole blowout ended in a crack about Christie hugging Obama during Hurricane Sandy. It was the most fiery exchange of the night and probably didn’t help either candidates bid for the White House. Not that the rest of the field did much better.

One area where there was little difference between the candidates – aside from their level of hyperbole – was their outright disapproval of recent cuts to America’s military force structure, as well as their seemingly unified hatred for the Iranian nuclear deal. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/here-are-the-p...

Mike Huckabee talked about a metaphorical gun to our head and Jeb Bush talked about the American blood on the Mullah’s hands, but Rand Paul did mention a caveat to his lack of support for the deal that went outside the normal partisan bluster. He thinks talking with our enemies is a good thing, and referenced Reagan’s engagement with the Soviet Union as an example:

Paul- “I oppose the Iranian deal, and will vote against it. I don’t think that the president negotiated from a position of strength, but I don’t immediately discount negotiations.

I’m a Reagan conservative. Reagan did negotiate with the Soviets. But you have to negotiate from a position of strength, and I think President Obama gave away too much, too early.

If there’s going to be a negotiation, you’re going to have to believe somehow that the Iranians are going to comply. I asked this question to John Kerry, I said “do you believe they’re trustworthy?” and he said “No.”

And I said, “well, how are we gonna get them to comply?” I would have never released the sanctions before there was consistent evidence of compliance.”

Nobody actually articulated an alternative to the deal aside from that they would have negotiated much harder with Tehran, increasing sanctions not easing them, or seemingly not negotiated at all. American captives currently in Iranian custody were brought up in relation to the talks, as well as a highlight to just how little we got in return for the deal. In all, the mood vis-a-vis Iran was very dark, although a military operation to destroy Iran’s ability to ever build a nuclear bomb was not discussed.

America’s declining military force structure did pop up on several occasions.

To wit, here’s Dr. Ben Carson stated:

Carson- “Well, what we have to stop and think about is that we have weakened ourselves militarily to such an extent that if affects all of our military policies. Our Navy is at its smallest size since 1917; our Air Force, since 1940. In recent testimony, the commandant of the Marine Corps said half of the non-deployed units were not ready and you know, the sequester is cutting the heart out of our personnel. Our generals are retiring because they don’t want to be part of this, and at the same time, our enemies are increasing.

Our — our friends can’t trust us anymore. You know, Ukraine was a nuclear-armed state. They gave away their nuclear arms with the understanding that we would protect them. We won’t even give them offensive weapons.

You know, we turned our back on Israel, our ally. You know, and a situation like that, of course Obama’s not going to be able to do anything. I would shore up our military first, because if you don’t get the military right, nothing else is going to work.”

Carson’s claims about the size of the Navy, Air Force and the readiness of our forces may be true, sequestration had a very deep, albeit temporary impact on readiness especially. This came on top of drastic declines in equipment inventories across the services that started after the Cold War, and then happened again in the later part of the last decade, and then again in recent years. Still, comparing the size of our Navy, or even the Air Force (aka the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1940) is a amateurish way of handicapping America’s naval or air combat capabilities.

Today, a single F-16 can hit four 2,000-pound bomb class large scale-targets with almost perfect certainty of destruction on a single mission. The same target set would have taken four strike packages with dozens of aircraft each to achieve before the advent of guided “smart” air-to-ground weaponry, and even then there would be a low probability that that a single target would actually been destroyed on the first try. During WWII it would have taken throngs of bomber formations multiple tries to hit those same four targets. In essence, although our aircraft inventory has gone down numerically, our ability to strike a certain amount of targets in a certain amount of time has increased exponentially with precision guided munitions and modern targeting capabilities. As such, comparing the size on an air force by simple
“then and now” metrics does not adequately reflect its capability. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-bolt117-pa...

The naval side of this occasion is no different. In 1917 naval warfare was about ship-to-ship within line of sight combat and shelling shore targets. Today, a single Arleigh Burke Class destroyer sports 96 vertical launch tubes capable of carrying a wide variety of anti-air as well as anti-submarine weaponry and Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. It also carries a pair of multi-role MH-60R helicopters, a 5-inch deck gun and other smaller armaments. In other words, using the simple number of ships to compare our naval capabilities then and now is an absurd metric. What is more valid is the force structure, as in the types of ships you have and their capabilities, balanced against their readiness levels and their number in inventory. So yes, while quantity has a quality all of its own, when it comes to modern naval combat, you balance capabilities for production numbers based on a finite budget.

Simply put, comparing our air force to the one we had in 1940 and or our Navy to the one we have in 1917 on numbers of airframes or hulls alone in order to rationalize the need to increase those inventories is highly misleading.

As far as Carson’s statement that Ukraine gave up their arms as part of an agreement that we would defend them if their borders were threatened, he is referring to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. This agreement is much more murky than a clear pledge or treaty stating that we would defend Ukraine’s borders against external attack. Furthermore, since Russia was once a partner in it this agreement, and seeing that the new government in Kiev came to power through revolution, it makes its validity even more questionable. As such, the decision to provide Ukraine’s military with conventional arms, such as advanced anti-tank missiles, is largely a political one, and it is a decision that some see as a sure way to escalate the the already highly volatile situation. Meanwhile, others see arming Ukraine as backing an ally up. Either way, the decision is not driven by a formal treaty or international agreement.

Carson was also asked about Obama’s signing of a law that banned waterboarding and about America’s need to fight “politically correct wars.” This was his response:

Carson- “You know, what we do in order to get the information that we need is our business, and I wouldn’t necessarily be broadcasting what we’re going to do. We’ve gotten into this — this mindset of fighting politically correct wars. There is no such thing as a politically correct war.

The left, of course, will say Carson doesn’t believe in the Geneva Convention, Carson doesn’t believe in fighting stupid wars. And — and what we have to remember is we want to utilize the tremendous intellect that we have in the military to win wars.

And I’ve talked to a lot of the generals, a lot of our advanced people. And believe me, if we gave them the mission, which is what the commander-in-chief does, they would be able to carry it out.

And if we don’t tie their hands behind their back, they will do it…

The use of torture, including waterboarding, for interrogations of prisoners at the hands of U.S. counter-terror agents remains a hot topic today, even though it remains unclear if any information was ever gained from these tactics that garnered actionable intelligence. We do know that these techniques have provided our enemies with an incredible recruitment tool and is a central theme whenever American hypocrisy comes up in conversation in relation to the Global War on Terror.

As for tying the Generals hands behind their back, this too is a controversial issue. If civilian leadership just gave the military a blank check, nuclear Armageddon would have occurred long ago. At the same time, when you look at Vietnam and even the bombing campaign on ISIS today, it is clear that too much political interference can greatly handicap the military’s ability to realize any true goals on the battlefield. As such, there may not be any reason to risk American lives and treasure in the first place.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was asked about Russia and what he would do if Putin began an offensive against Baltic NATO members, here is his response:

Walker- “Well first off, for the cyber attack with Russia the other day, it’s sad to think right now, but probably the Russian and Chinese government know more about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server than do the members of the United States Congress.

And — and that has put our national security at risk. If I am president, he won’t think about that. You know, Putin believes in the old Lenin adage: you probe with bayonets. When you find mush, you push. When you find steel, you stop.

Under Obama and Clinton, we found a lot of mush over the last two years. We need to have a national security that puts steel in front of our enemies. I would send weapons to Ukraine. I would work with NATO to put forces on the eastern border of Poland and the Baltic nations, and I would reinstate, put in place back in the missile defense system that we had in Poland and in the Czech Republic.”

Beyond the hit against Hillary’s basement email server, and the potentially valid Lenin reference, he makes it clear that he would arm Ukraine with weaponry, although exactly to what extent we don’t know. As far as putting forces on the eastern border of Poland and the Baltic nations, this is already occurring and enhancing the size of such a static deployment would require a long-term investment in expanding our Army’s force structure. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/russia-warns-o...

When it comes to the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic Scott refers to, it was not so much cancelled but restructured to employ more mature and affordable technology based on the Navy’s cruiser and destroyer deployed AEGIS combat system. As such, it is intended for medium and short range ballistic missiles. Also, remember that this system was never really aimed at Russia but at Iran. Meaning Russia could just launch more ballistic missiles than there were long-range interceptors available if it wanted to. Also, AEGIS Ashore is a more scalable option than its longer-range and more complex cousin, relying on multiple missiles being packed in vertical launch containers instead of underground silos holding a single interceptor each. Keep in mind that the U.S. also has AEGIS ballistic missile defense ships that are forward deployed to Europe with largely redundant capability. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/these-are-the-...

When asked about what ties in the middle east need to bolstered, Walker replied:

Walker- “What about then (ph), we need to focus on the ones we have. You look at Egypt, probably the best relationship we’ve had in Israel, at least in my lifetime, incredibly important.

You look at the Saudis — in fact, earlier this year, I met with Saudi leaders, and leaders from the United Arab Emirates, and I asked them what’s the greatest challenge in the world today? Set aside the Iran deal. They said it’s the disengagement of America. We are leading from behind under the Obama-Clinton doctrine — America’s a great country. We need to stand up and start leading again, and we need to have allies, not just in Israel, but throughout the Persian Gulf.”

Walker is widely wrong on both accounts. The U.S.-Egyptian relationship in very chilly right now after the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown in a quasi-military coup. This is true even though the El Sisi Government has taken an absolutely hard-core line on terrorism and Islamic Extremism. As a result, Egypt has since turned largely to Russia and France for weapons imports and for future economic and energy developmenthttp://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/rafale-has-gon...

As for our relationship with Israel, it is very clear that it is at its lowest point in decades due to the tense relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. A condition that has since been greatly exacerbated by the Iranian nuclear deal which the sitting Israeli Government greatly opposes.

As for leading from the behind, that is a widely held opinion by many who have seen the Obama Administration as weak, especially since not fulfilling its “red line” promise when it came to the Al Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. The Arab Gulf States also widely oppose the Iranian nuclear deal, including Saudi Arabia, although they remain close allies with the U.S.

Governor Mike Huckabee was asked about his thoughts on the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, women moving into more combat roles in the military and the eroding barriers to transgender people serving openly. In his response he addressed these issues and continued into other military topics, including the age of our bomber fleet. Here is his response:

Huckabee- “The military is not a social experiment. The purpose of the military is kill people and break things.

It’s not to transform the culture by trying out some ideas that some people think would make us a different country and more diverse. The purpose is to protect America. I’m not sure how paying for transgender surgery for soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines makes our country safer.

We’ve reduced the military by 25 percent under President Obama. The disaster is that we’ve forgotten why we have a military. The purpose of it is to make sure that we protect every American, wherever that American is, and if an American is calling out for help, whether it’s in Benghazi or at the border, then we ought to be able to answer it.

We’ve not done that because we’ve decimated our military. We’re flying B-52s. The most recent one that was put in service was November of 1962. A lot of the B-52s we’re flying, we’ve only got 44 that are in service combat ready, and the fact is, most of them are older than me. And that’s pretty scary.”

As far as his opening statement about how the military is not there to transform the culture by “trying out some ideas people think would make us a different country and more diverse.” This is a pretty narrow and historically troubling point of view. Just read about these guys whose level of service was also seen as a “social experiment” by many.

Isn’t a country’s fighting force at its best when as many areas of that country’s cultural and ethnic makeup are represented within that force? It is not about making exceptions, a person’s love interests, or how individuals see themselves within society, it is about getting the best people possible to take the fight to the enemy. Take this top Air Force pilot for instance who was kicked out of the USAF for being gay. This man was a top professional in his field and was highly regarded in his squadron, but because of an archaic Pentagon policy America lost a deadly asset. In the end, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and what went on before it, will be looked at as a result of a dark age in America’s history and I doubt transgender discrimination within the services will be regarded any different.

Additionally, one’s personal or religious views on homosexuality or transgender people are protected, but the Pentagon is not a religious institution. As such, repealing sexual orientation restrictions is an exercise in the separation between church and state at its most basic level more than anything else.

When it comes to the Governor’s statement that the military has been reduced by 25 percent under President Obama, it is unclear exactly what he is referring to. When it comes to baseline defense budgets, minus the supplemental budgets for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the has been little change since the Bush years. Even at the height of the both wars, the decrease in spending compared to today is still well below a consistent change of 25 percent. So with this in mind, Huckabee’s 25 percent number could be just something anecdotal to underline the large cuts in force structure over the last decade, including combat vehicles, but that would make it once again misleading.

Then there was the Governors quip about how the how the military has been decimated and used the B-52’s age as an example. As for 44 combat capable B-52s, I am not certain where Huckabee gets this number. I can find this source from 20 years ago stating it under one plan, but the reality is that 76 B-52s are slated for inventory, and yes a portion of those are used for training and are in heavy maintenance at any given time. Under those circumstances, are there 44 B-52s available to fly at all times? Possibly, although the same math can be applied to any aircraft fleet out there, even America’s newest aircraft like the F-22. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-ghost-ride...

Of the 186 F-22 Raptors in its inventory, 123 are frontline combat aircraft, 20 are reserve aircraft, and the rest are used for training and development. This does not take into account the aircraft’s availability rate or those down for deep maintenance and upgrade. When you factor in those circumstances, the number probably drops well below 100 airframes available to fly combat missions at any given time with any confidence.

As for the B-52s being old, and as such they need immediate replacement, Huckabee was far off mark. The B-52 is an ever more capable and reliable weapons and sensor truck that has a relevant place in the U.S. arsenal. Currently, the airframe is stated to be in service till 2040, although it will likely serve well beyond this mark. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-b-52-is-be...

The only thing the aircraft lacks when it comes to flight systems and structure are newer, more powerful and fuel efficient engines that would increase the B-52s range and allow it to operate from smaller runways and at lower costs per flight hour. The option of re-engining the B-52H force has been kicked around for many decades, and it, along with many other weapon system upgrades, are being looked at once again as a possibilities to make the B-52 better, not to replace it. If anything, such investments into the 50+ year old bomber are a testament to its longevity and relevance, not the other way around.http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/once-again-the...

Finally, a replacement multi-role sensor node and bomber is already in the works under the Long Range Strike Bomber program, which the Obama Administration has decided to fund developmentally so far, with a winning bidder being selected within weeks. This program can be accelerated, and its funding can be made a priority to realize the maximum 120 stealthy bombers asked for by the USAF, but that number, along with the B-2 force, will still be smaller than our bomber inventory today which is made up of the B-1B, B-2 and B-52 fleets. As such, the B-52 will likely soldier on alongside even the latest and greatest bomber for decades to come. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/why-northrop-g...

Chris Christie was also asked about the state of our military, and in his answer he seemed to float at least some specifics, although how he came up with those specifics remains unclear. Additionally, his comment about the Ohio Class nuclear ballistic missile submarines seems to be outright inaccurate:

Christie- “You know, if we want to deal with these issues, we have to deal with them in a way that makes sense.

I agree with what Dr. Carson said earlier. The first thing we need to do to make America stronger is to strengthen our military, and I put out a really specific plan: no less than 500,000 active duty soldiers in the Army. No less than 185,000 active duty marines in the Marine Corps. Bring us to a 350 ship Navy again, and modernize the Ohio class of submarines, and bring our Air Force back to 2,600 aircraft that are ready to go.

Those are the kind of things that are going to send a clear message around the world. Those are the things that we need to start working on immediately to make our country stronger and make it better. Those are the things that we need to be able to be doing. And as we move towards dealing with foreign aid, I don’t disagree with Senator Paul’s position that we shouldn’t be funding our enemies. But I absolutely believe that Israel is a priority to be able to fund and keep them strong and safe after eight years of this administration.”

The numbers Christie states for force levels within the USMC and the Army are very similar to the force levels we have today. Currently, there are 490,000 soldiers in the Army, just 10,000 shy of his 500,000 goal. By 2017, under Obama’s current plans, that number will drop to 450,000 soldiers. This is down from a peak war-time number of 570,000 in 2012.

The same can be said for the USMC when it comes to force levels. Today, the USMC has 184,000 Marines, just 1,000 short of Christie’s goal. Under current plans, this number will drop to 174,000 by 2017. This drop is relevant in size, but under Christie’s plan, the USMC is only 6 percent larger than what Obama has in mind.

Christie, pulls from Reagan’s playbook by touting a goal for the U.S. Navy based of hull numbers, not capabilities. In this case he says his plans shoot for a 350 ship Navy. Currently, the Navy is working towards fielding 308 ships by 2020, 42 ships short of Christie’s goal. Today there are roughly 288 ships in the U.S. naval combat fleet.

Although building up America’s Naval force may be a good idea, the goal of an X number of ships in the Navy is totally antiquated. In an age when you can bolt fairly advanced missile systems to any sea going vessel, or punch out Littoral Combat Ships by the dozen that have questionable combat capability, even the densest plans for reinvigorating the Navy’s hull numbers can be totally hollow. In fact, by not building a proper force mix, for instance building to many ships that are largely defenseless when it comes to aerial attack, without either upgrading their anti-air capabilities or building more guided missile cruisers and destroyers to protect them, can actually leave a force burdened by unneeded fat in a time of peace and vulnerable to disaster during a time of war.http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/us-navy-lookin...

A better way to approach such an answer would be for a candidate to state how much of the cruiser, destroyer, carrier, littoral combat, submarine and amphibious force they are looking to increase or decrease instead of making blanket hull number promises.

Christie’s comment about modernizing the Ohio Class nuclear ballistic submarine force seems to be inaccurate. The Ohio Class needs replacement, not modernization, as they are approaching the end of the serviceable lives and must be replaced to remain survivable against emerging enemy capabilities and to continue for decades as a reliable second strike nuclear deterrent. An upgrade to the Ohio class SSBN force would be seen by many in defense community as a monumental step back, even from budgetarily tight current plan to replace them.http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-ohio-class...

As far as building the air force back into a force of 2,600 aircraft, we can assume he is talking about “shooters,” or combat aircraft that employ ordinance as a major part of their mission set. Today, the USAF has about 2,283 of these aircraft, which include fighters, gunships, bombers and unmanned aircraft capable of attack such as the Predator and Reaper. Without the unmanned systems, this number sits at 2025.

Fielding an extra 317 combat aircraft is doable, but it will mean certain legacy systems, such as a portion of the F-16 force, will need structural and avionics upgrades to remain viable. Additionally, Christie’s plan will almost have to include retaining the A-10 Warthog fleet in order to meet its lofty inventory goals. http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/at-what-point-...

When asked the sensitive question about how hard it must be to look at the families of those who died in Operation Iraqi Freedom now that he admits his brother’s war was a mistake, Jeb Bush answered:

Bush- “Knowing what we know now, with faulty intelligence, and not having security be the first priority when — when we invaded, it was a mistake. I wouldn’t have gone in, however, for the people that did lose their lives, and the families that suffer because of it — I know this full well because as governor of the state of Florida, I called every one of them. Every one of them that I could find to tell them that I was praying for them, that I cared about them, and it was really hard to do.

And, every one of them said that their child did not die in vain, or their wife, of their husband did not die in vain.

So, why it was difficult for me to do it was based on that. Here’s the lesson that we should take from this, which relates to this whole subject, Barack Obama became president, and he abandoned Iraq. He left, and when he left Al Qaida was done for. ISIS was created because of the void that we left, and that void now exists as a caliphate the size of Indiana.

To honor the people that died, we need to — we need to — stop the — Iran agreement, for sure, because the Iranian mullahs have their blood on their hands, and we need to take out ISIS with every tool at our disposal.”

This statement has some disjointed cause and effect clauses in it that are hard to unpack. In the end Bush is right that leaving Iraq created the vacuum that allowed ISIS to expand to the degree it has, but then again we would never have been there at all if his brother’s Administration had not pushed so hard to make the case to invade. A case that was made almost solely on the idea that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. This turned out to be largely untrue. Undoubtedly, the Bush name is Jeb’s biggest handicap in getting elected in the long term as Operation Iraqi Freedom, including Obama’s blundering exit strategy, will go down as one of the worst military failures in modern history.

Senator Ted Cruz was asked about a question he himself asked the Chairman Joints Chiefs of Staff regarding if there was a way that ISIS could be beat in 90 days. The Chairman replied that ISIS will only be truly destroyed once they are rejected by the populations in which they hide. Cruz then went on during the hearing accusing the Chairman of wanting to metaphorically push entitlements to the Iraqis to keep them from becoming terrorists. As such, in the debate he was asked how he would destroy ISIS in 90 days? Here is his reply:

Cruz- “We need a commander in chief that speaks the truth. We will not defeat radical Islamic terrorism so long as we have a president unwilling to utter the words, radical Islamic terrorism. When I asked General Dempsey, the chairman of the joint chiefs, what would be required militarily to destroy ISIS, he said there is no military solution. We need to change the conditions on the ground so that young men are not in poverty and susceptible to radicalization. That, with all due respect, is nonsense.

It’s the same answer the State Department gave that we need to give them jobs. What we need is a commander in chief that makes — clear, if you join ISIS, if you wage jihad on America, then you are signing your death warrant... Of course it’s an ideological problem, that’s one of the reasons I introduce the Expatriate Terrorist Act in the Senate that said if any American travels to the Middle East and joining ISIS, that he or she forfeits their citizenship so they don’t use a passport to come back and wage jihad on Americans. Yes, it is ideological, and let me contrast President Obama, who at the prayer breakfast, essentially acted as an apologist. He said, “Well, gosh, the crusades, the inquisitions...” We need a president that shows the courage that Egypt’s President al-Sisi, a Muslim, when he called out the radical Islamic terrorists who are threatening the world.”

Denying that hopelessness, lack of purpose and poverty are not key conditions where everything from gangs to ISIS easily grows is absurd. Obviously, America cannot put anyone at risk of joining a terrorist outfit on welfare or give them a job, but working to change these conditions with local players is certainly a key part of any useful counter-terrorism strategy. At the same time, the frustration with this Administration’s lack of a true plan to at least remove ISIS from Iraq has become maddening for many. A stronger will to get the job done, along with a clear set of achievable military goals and allowing the military to decide how it will achieve those goals without heavy White House interference are absolutely needed in the near term to change the tide of the anti-ISIS fight.

In the end, it was amazing just how little the candidates had to say that was substantially different than the others when it came to military topics and foreign policy. Veterans were mentioned on a few occasions, Rubio touting a bill he had something to do with, but no real clear plan was articulated how we could fix the absolutely dismal way we treat our soldiers returning from the battlefield with psychological issues and horrific wounds. There was also a lot of talk about “Christians heads being cut off” and “horrors” occurring at an alarming rate around the globe, yet very little in the way of even anecdotal ideas on how to stop it were fielded.

Sadly, the details that were put forward, most of which are outlined above, are fragmented, and many are just inaccurate. There appears to be no real candidate that has a strong handle on military affairs, at least in the top 10 debate last night. In fact, seeing that ISIS is largely a high priority issue with the American voter, you would think these candidates would all have come up with some idea of how they would approach the situation aside positing that they must be defeated.

As always, the discussion on force structure, and America’s aging fleet of ships and aircraft, was only addressed superficially. How these Presidential nominees plan on rebuilding the force while also cutting taxes and doing so many other things remains largely a mystery. As of now, Rand Paul is the only candidate who has put forward a budget, and we will be lucky to ever see any detailed plans out of the rest of them as they fear cuts here and gains there will alienate potential voters.

Donald Trump, who has been skewered by the other candidates for his lack of details on claims and proclamations he makes, is really no worse in this matter than any other. Talk is cheap, building a military for the coming decades that can confront so many disparate threats is not.

In the end, the only candidate I have heard that can even talk clearly about defense spending and war planning is Lindsay Graham. Hopefully this will change drastically as the campaigns rages on and the field shrinks. As without clarity and proof that the candidate has a handle on the material, we could very well end up with a President who is largely unprepared to face the complex threats that tomorrow is sure to hold.

Contact the author at Tyler@jalopnik.com.

In the immortal words of “The Trump” himself, “The professional relationship between you and I has ended!”

According to Washington Post reporter Roberta Costa, Donald Trump said in an interview on Saturday that he has fired top political advisor and Richard Nixon-themed body mod enthusiast Roger Stone.

“We have a tremendously successful campaign and Roger wanted to use the campaign for his own personal publicity,” a campaign spokesperson later told CNN. “He has had a number of articles about him recently and Mr. Trump wants to keep the focus of the campaign on how to Make America Great Again.”

Stone, however, contends that he actually quit the campaign, releasing what he says is his resignation letter to the media. From Politico:

“I was proud to have played a role in the launch of your presidential campaign. Your message of ‘Make America Great Again’ harkened back to the Reagan era. Restoring national pride and bringing jobs back to America - your initial and still underlying message - is a solid conservative message. In fact, it catapulted you instantly into a commanding lead in the race,” Stone’s email said.

“Unfortunately, the current controversies involving personalities and provocative media fights have reached such a high volume that it has distracted attention from your platform and overwhelmed your core message,” Stone wrote. “With this current direction of the candidacy, I no longer can remain involved in your campaign.”

Which one of these belligerent weirdos is telling the truth? Who knows! Both agree, however, that the whole affair is a distraction from important policy issues:

Sorry @realDonaldTrump didn't fire me- I fired Trump. Diasagree with diversion to food fight with @megynkelly away core issue messages

August 8, 2015

[Image via AP Images]

On Friday, police in Long Beach, California killed a knife-wielding man believed to have stabbed his wife and five other people, including three inside a convalescent home, the Associated Press reports.

Authorities say officers responding to a stabbing in progress shot 28-year-old Derrick Lee Hunt, who was pronounced dead at the scene, where a 7-inch kitchen knife was recovered. From the L.A. Times:

The stabbing rampage started at an apartment complex on Artesia Boulevard, authorities said. The suspect stabbed his 29-year-old wife, her 25-year-old brother and a 24-year-old male neighbor.

The man then walked across the street and entered a convalescent home, where he stabbed three female employees, ranging in age from 23 to 33.

Five of the six victims were transported to local hospitals, police said. All are in stable condition.

According to police, the suspect’s motive is not currently known.

[Image via AP Images]

Authorities say the bodies of eight people, including five children, were found inside a Houston-area home Saturday night after an hour-long standoff with a man who shot at police, the Associated Press reports.

According to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were called to the house to perform a welfare check at around 9 p.m. when they spotted a dead child through a window and decided to enter the residence. From NBC News:

“A sergeant and three deputies made entry into the house and at that point the 49-year-old subject began to shoot a weapon in the house. Our deputies pulled back and formed a perimeter,” [Deputy Thomas] Gilliland said.

The negotiator was called in and the suspect was arrested without incident about an hour later, Gilliland said.

Officers were then able to enter the house, at which point they discovered the eight bodies.

CNN reports that it is not currently known how the victims were killed or what their relationship to the suspect might have been.

“Homicide detectives have taken over the operation along with our crime scene unit,” said Deputy Thomas Gilliland. “Due to the amount of victims and the proximity to the people in the house, it’ll be a scene that’s going on for a while.”

[Image via KHOU]