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The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

The word "Internet" was uttered precisely once in last night's presidential debate, and I don't have to tell you the context. You already know the topic was Columbine, and you already know the Net was being blamed for mass murder. What our Republican candidate failed to mention is that his party's bogeymen, the evil Internet and its evil twin violent entertainment, have brought about a new era of peace. If we really want less violence in our schools, we obviously need more violence on our Internet.

"Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet, and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life."
- George W. Bush, presidential debate, October 11, 2000

The term we're looking for is "manufactured crisis." That's what we need to start calling it, this supposed violence in our schools.

I don't need to provide you with more quotes from Bush, Gore, Cheney and especially Lieberman about how disgustingly violent our culture has become. You can't pick up a paper without seeing at least three people moaning about violent movies, the violent internet, and worst of all violent video games. They're infecting the minds of our children, don't'cha know. It'd be the new national pastime if it weren't 200 years old: grumping about those damn kids.

Let's counter disinformation with some real numbers. Here's an annotated timeline showing the increase in violent imagery, and the corresponding decrease in actual violence.

1993
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,438,200.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 49.1.

Let's consider 1993 our baseline year, the pre-Doom year. That blockbuster was not released until December 1993, so I think we are safe to assume that it did not begin darkening hearts until 1994 or later. By the end of 1993, the internet's two million host machines include 500 webservers.

Demolition Man, Kalifornia and Falling Down are in the theaters.

1994
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,424,200: a 1% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 51.2: a 4% increase from the previous year.

In 1994, shareware Doom, downloadable from the evil internet, shatters existing gaming records. Its bloody graphics and Satanic imagery shock and offend many who are easily shocked and offended. In an era where 200,000 is a great-selling title, 1994 sees the first of fifteen million gamers who download and play Doom.

Meanwhile, the web grows at an annual rate of 341,000%, becoming the 2nd-most popular type of data; among the three million machines on the net, there are too many webservers to count.

The movies Pulp Fiction, Timecop, True Lies, Children of the CornIII, and the politicans' favorite Natural Born Killers are all released in 1994.

1995
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,290,000: a 9% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 2,169.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 46.1: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

In 1995, the web becomes the most popular internet service among the net's four million machines. Shareware Doom continues to rack up downloads. Doom II: Hell On Earth, released last October, takes over as the violentest game ever, with an initial release of half a million units.

The Basketball Diaries, Braveheart, Se7en, and Die Hard3 are released.

1996
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,134,400: a 12% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,683: a 22% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 41.6: a 10% decrease from the previous year.

1996 is a banner year for violent images. Doom II continues on its track to eventually sell two million copies. Duke Nukem 3D, aimed at the young teenage male market, gives our nation's young boys a healthy mix of strippers, jokes, and mass slaughter with machine guns. Soon after, the breakthrough title Quake offers unprecedented visual accuracy: blood, gore, and murder are now illustrated with detail that makes Doom and Duke Nukem look cartoony.

Scream is released in theaters to tremendous success, along with Broken Arrow, CrowII, Sling Blade, and the excellent Fargo. Meanwhile, there are now 9 million hosts on the net.

The effects of all that horrible media violence in 1996 appear in 1997's statistics...

1997
Students' nonfatal violent crimes: 1,055,200: a 7% decrease from the previous year.
Total under-18 murderers: 1,457: a 13% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 38.8: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1997, there are 16 million hosts on the net. At year's end, QuakeII is released, and is quickly banned in Germany for its even-more-realistic violence. And Con Air, Face/Off, Starship Troopers, and Scream2 are released in theaters.

1998
Total under-18 murderers: 1,169: a 20% decrease from the previous year.
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 36.0: a 7% decrease from the previous year.

In 1998, Quake II hits its sales stride and begins corrupting young minds. Grand Theft Auto, one of the more vilified and censored video games, is released. The web crosses the 300-million-page mark.

Brace yourself for the movie list: Lethal Weapon4, Saving Private Ryan, American HistoryX, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Ronin, Urban Legend, Blade, and the crappy remake of Psycho hit the theaters.

The result?

1999
Victims of violent crime per 1,000 population, all ages: 32.1: an 11% decrease from the previous year.

There it is. In the four years between the release of Doom and Quake II, the number of killers under the age of 18 in this country plummeted. A drop of 46% in just four years is nothing short of astonishing.

Long-term graphs are even more valuable. Click through to these, they're small and quick:

• The homicide rate, 1900-1998. We are experiencing the longest and steepest sustained dropoff in violence since the Great Depression.
• Homicide offenders grouped by age, 1976-1998. The number of teenage killers is steadily falling.
• Average age of homicide offenders, 1976-1998. The average age of the American killer has been rising since 1993.

Last month, I watched CNN as my friend Bennett Haselton got grilled opposite Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). After CNN's introduction telling us what to think - cutting straight from footage of Doom to footage of crying Columbine students - the Senator explained how violent games cause children to commit violent actions. He wants to keep dangerous weapons like Quake away from our kids.

That's how the Senator - who voted against secure handgun storage, and twice against child safety locks - positioned himself as our noble defender of children.

How do the posturing panderers justify their crisis-du-jour? How'd we end up with the phantom of media-created child violence as a major election issue, while violence plummets?

The facts speak for themselves. If seeing violence has any effect on children's actions, it obviously makes them calm and peaceful.

So here's the slogan for my campaign: our kids deserve the best in first-person shooters. In my America, every family will have free movie tickets, 300 megatexels, and low-ping broadband. Let's put an end to frame rates under 30Hz. For our country - for our safety - we can leave no child behind.

(Sources: US DOJ 1, 2, 3; OJJDP 1, 2, 3; FBI UCR; Blues News; crime.org; poynter.org.)

Decibel writes: "It seems that Mir's fungal infection is soon to be the least of its problems. Unless $7-10 million can be raised in the next few days, Mir will be de-orbited some time after its 15-year anniversary in February 2001. MirCorp has been financing the operation of the outpost since the Russian government abandoned it last year, but they've run out of money as well. To make matters worse, unless the russian government (or someone else) comes up with $60 million to make two final missions to Mir, it will be an uncontrolled reentry. Of course, if any of that fungus survives reentry, it could be a moot point anyway. :)" But what about the Destination Mir teevee show?! Surely NBC has 7 or 10 million to toss in the pot, considering they've already paid more than that for rights to the show.

[Updated 3 Oct 2000 21:30 GMT by timothy] funk_phenomenon writes: "To add another story to the Mir fire, James Cameron (the man who directed Terminator 2 and Titanic) is planning to stay on the space station. He has already undergone medical tests at the Russian Institute for Medical and Biological Problems and received a go ahead. Cameron went to see the Titanic and he made a movie; maybe he plans the same?"

tregoweth writes: "Variety is reporting that Darren Aronofsky, director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream,' will be directing the next Batman movie (the one after 'Batman and Robin,' not the 'Batman Beyond' movie). He'll co-write it with Frank Miller, and it will be based on 'Batman: Year One.'" Pi was amazing, so it'll be cool to see where Aronofsky takes the Dark Knight.

tregoweth writes: "Variety is reporting that Darren Aronofsky, director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream,' will be directing the next Batman movie (the one after 'Batman and Robin,' not the 'Batman Beyond' movie). He'll co-write it with Frank Miller, and it will be based on 'Batman: Year One.'" Pi was amazing, so it'll be cool to see where Aronofsky takes the Dark Knight.

BirdTor writes: "Kenny Baker, the diminutive actor who played R2D2 in all of the Star Wars up until now has been dumped. George Lucas plans to use a computer-generated R2D2 instead. I don't know, there's just something charming about the Kenny-driven R2D2 bumbling along that I doubt the new 3D-generated R2D2 will be able to capture."

Alex T-B writes "Matt Groening in a news conference revealed that a film based on The Simpsons is planned [Woo-hoo!], although no deals have been struck yet [D'oh!]. (WARNING, geeky Simpsons reference: A film about The Simpsons? That is unpossible!)"

Alex T-B writes "Matt Groening in a news conference revealed that a film based on The Simpsons is planned [Woo-hoo!], although no deals have been struck yet [D'oh!]. (WARNING, geeky Simpsons reference: A film about The Simpsons? That is unpossible!)"

Alex T-B writes "Matt Groening in a news conference revealed that a film based on The Simpsons is planned [Woo-hoo!], although no deals have been struck yet [D'oh!]. (WARNING, geeky Simpsons reference: A film about The Simpsons? That is unpossible!)"

Gord writes: "The BBC is reporting (at least on the radio, can't see it on the Web site yet), that Sir Alec Guinness passed away Saturday night (9:50pm GMT) after been taken to hospital last Thursday. He will be most remembered by me as Obi-Wan in the original Star Wars movies, but he also acted in many other movies and he will be sorely missed." Update: 08/07 11:26 AM by E : Here's the story from BBC online.

IntelliTubbie writes: "In an 'unorthodox form of brand sponsorship,' RadioShack is teaming up with LunaCorp, a Virginia-based space exploration startup. The goal: put a robotic rover on the moon featuring the RadioShack logo. Artist's renderings of the monstrosity can be seen at LunaCorp's web site. We're one step closer to the eerie predictions in 'Fight Club': The IBM Stellar Sphere. Planet Starbucks. Yikes." Unfortunately the robot will be powered by a TRS-80 ModelII, requiring 14 extra tons of propellant (grin). More coverage can be found at Yahoo! and discovery.com; CMU is creating the H₂O-seeking robot for the mission. (More.)

And on a related note for anyone interested in going to the moon in the relatively near future, MrScience writes: "I just received a link for this job in my mailbox from Guru.com, a pretty decent headhunter website. They are looking for a Financial Analyst to evaluate the NASA Academy, and "The end result will be a recommendation that the program either *is* or *is not* beneficial, and the specific reasons to justify such a conclusion. This report will then go before the NASA Administrator to justify the existence (or removal) of the program." I grew up dreaming of going to this, who wouldn't after seeing SpaceCamp?" Pound foolish, anyone?

frinsore writes "Hubble turns 10! Seems like just yesterday that there was a flaw in the mirror, and it couldn't see. Now it's seen black holes, birth of stars, shoemaker-levy and the surface of Pluto. NASA can come back from mistakes." Not only that, but it survived a crash with the Satellite of Love in Mystery Science Theater 3000 : The Movie. Update: 04/25 01:30 by E : Hey, check out HubbleSite, too.

The great thing about new media is the ability to bend the rules. Hundreds of movies that have been around for years are being released on DVD with new material. So, we get to take some of our favorite movies and 'review' them in their new format. This particular film is a wonderful excuse. 'Read More' for a review of Terry Gilliam's Brazil by Jamie and Emmett.

Brazil is a beautiful picture about the hacker ethic.

The protagonist, Sam Lowry, is trapped in an evil system, a world of senseless, crushing bureaucracy interrupted only by human vanity, sloth, impatience, and idiocy. The plot is too convoluted to explain (and a lot more fun to watch) -- it'll suffice to say that Sam's life is turned upside-down when a bug in the system brings him to meet a woman he falls obsessively in love with.

One of the genius visions of this film is its depiction of the crazy patchwork of technology that runs our civilization. Ducts are everywhere; wires and cables lurk behind every wall and make frequent appearances. The incongruous combination of bizarrely unusable computers, pneumatic tubes, and even the retro-style elevators is a modernized version of a Kafka fever-dream.

This system, presumably built by Central Services (a government or a corporation? it could be either), is constantly on the verge of falling apart. Nobody but the competent but unambitious Sam seems to know how to operate a computer. The breakfast machine pours the coffee onto the burnt toast. And the telephones should be Exhibit A in a gallery of poor user-interface design. Meanwhile, Central Services runs ads telling us to upgrade our "out of date ducts" with new designer colors. It's a hilarious parody of the situation that most of us find ourselves in today, with our Rube Goldberg, barely-functioning technology constructed by colossal, faceless bureaucracies -- moreso now than in 1985 when the film was made.

But it's not just forms, malfunction, and evil. The one hero of the film is the hacker. Robert de Niro plays the untouchable outlaw Harry Tuttle, who intercepts Sam's call for help with his broken air conditioner, and comes to fix it. He used to work with Central Services but now works freelance, for the love of the job.

This is a real hacker, even the archetype of the hacker. I'm not sure how it happened -- the writer/director, TerryGilliam, wasn't in tune with the computer underground that I know of -- but the character, in a few short minutes onscreen, captures the universal essence of hacking.

Tuttle isn't the dangerous criminal that the media wants to pin the word "hacker" on even to this day; he doesn't break things or work to disable the system. Much like the real-world media demonization of "hackers" as electronic graffiti-artists and ping-flooders, the movie's Central Services blames terrorists for the bombings which recur throughout the film. We're led to believe these may be staged incidents, or at least unorganized -- one character asks another near the end: "have you ever seen a real terrorist?"

But neither is Tuttle a squeaky-clean navel-gazer. Some people want to sanitize the word "hacker" (usually the same people who noisily point out the distinction between "hacker" and "cracker"). Tuttle's work is illegal; he wears black, defends himself with a gun, and escapes under cover of darkness.

It's too easy to forget that, back in the day, the only way for a brilliant, motivated computer geek to learn about computers was to work the system at a more or less unauthorized level. To name just one example, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the founders of the personal computer revolution, built illegal blue boxes and sold them. I wish someone had had a camera at the moment when the phone system first shed its secrets to them -- when they first got a taste of look at this huge computer system. Look what it can do.

The hacker ethic that played such a large part in advancing computer science, building gcc, building Linux, indeed building the world's computer systems and engineering the biggest peaceful economic boom in history, is more than just a thirst for knowledge about computers. It's the obsessive belief that knowledge exists to be shared, that helping someone by making their computer run better (or their air conditioner) is one of life's joys, and that the rules that prevent sharing and helping exist to be broken.

And poor Sam Lowry pays the price for the hacker's work, for his fixing something without authorization. When I see this movie, I can't help but think of Randal Schwartz, prosecuted vigorously by Intel for running a diagnostic with the best of intentions, but without the proper paperwork. We live in a world where insane things like that can and do happen.

Somehow, 15 years ago, Terry Gilliam got in his head the same glimpse of underlying reality that Woz got when he learned about how the phone system works -- and it's all on film. The hero is the one who repeats the Central Services slogan, "We're all in this together," and makes it unironic (or at least differently ironic). The hero is the one who knows how to fix things, and fixes them -- despite not being "authorized." The evil is the paperwork we construct around ourselves, the forms and regulations that take the place of people freely helping each other. Everyone into open source should see this film.

Poor Sam Lowry's plight becomes a real-life horror for Brazil director Terry Gilliam, who faced red tape and monolithic Hollywood studios to release his picture. In addition to the full-length film with director's commentary, the three-DVD set of Brazil also includes the short film The Battle of Brazil, which chronicles Gilliam's fight to release the film he created. The third DVD consists of the 'Love Conquers All' version of Brazil, a 90-minute version that was edited down from the original picture by Sid Sheinberg and his team of hack-and-slash artists at Universal. Terry Gilliam refers to this movie as 'Sid Sheinberg's Brazil,' and it's just plain horrible. The 'Love Conquers All' version is a standing memorial to all films that have been cut to pieces by the studios. This version of Brazil was only released to the television market, and was previously unavailable to the public on VHS.

Terry Gilliam was a hacker in his own right. After a long, involved battle over release rights, he promised Universal that he would only show clips of the film to film students in California, and they capitulated and let him show brief passages from the film. In the end, he only showed one clip. It was only two hours and twenty minutes long. In other words, the whole thing.

The full DVD set of Brazil is a massive package of content, from film commentary to press photos to trailers to alternate versions of the film. Surprise, surprise, it's part of the Criterion Collection of films, which also gave us fantastic DVD versions of Robocop, Time Bandits, and Monty Python's Life of Brian. Here are the contents (as listed by the film packaging):

Disc One
New pristine widescreen transfer of Terry Gilliam's 142-minute final cut
Remastered Dolby stereo surround soundtrack
Audio commentary by Terry Gilliam
English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired

Disc Two
What is Brazil?, Rob Hedden's 30-minute on-set documentary
The Battle of Brazil: A Video History, an original 60-minute Criterion documentary by Jack Mathews
Screenwriters Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown on the script
Production designer Norman Garwood on the look of Brazil
Costume designer James Acheson on the couture of fantasy and fascism
Storyboards for Gilliam's original dream sequences, many of which didn't make it into the film
Composer Michael Kamen unveils the sources of his score
A study of the special effects includes raw footage of unfinished effects
Theatrical trailer, plus publicity and production stills

Disc Three
The 94-minute cut of Brazil includes all of the changes that Gilliam refused to make, from the alternate opening to the controversial happy ending
Audio commentary by Gilliam expert David Morgan.

This three-DVD set is a lot of material. I ended up taking two days to get through all of it, and every second of it is worth it. From the beautiful new transfer of Brazil to the interviews and specials to the hacked-up 90-minute version of the film, the set stays consistent in packaging and iconography, and you'll be humming the main theme for a week. Brazil is a fantastic film, and the Criterion Collection DVD set does it justice.

The great thing about new media is the ability to bend the rules. Hundreds of movies that have been around for years are being released on DVD with new material. So, we get to take some of our favorite movies and 'review' them in their new format. This particular film is a wonderful excuse. 'Read More' for a review of Terry Gilliam's Brazil by Jamie and Emmett.

Brazil is a beautiful picture about the hacker ethic.

The protagonist, Sam Lowry, is trapped in an evil system, a world of senseless, crushing bureaucracy interrupted only by human vanity, sloth, impatience, and idiocy. The plot is too convoluted to explain (and a lot more fun to watch) -- it'll suffice to say that Sam's life is turned upside-down when a bug in the system brings him to meet a woman he falls obsessively in love with.

One of the genius visions of this film is its depiction of the crazy patchwork of technology that runs our civilization. Ducts are everywhere; wires and cables lurk behind every wall and make frequent appearances. The incongruous combination of bizarrely unusable computers, pneumatic tubes, and even the retro-style elevators is a modernized version of a Kafka fever-dream.

This system, presumably built by Central Services (a government or a corporation? it could be either), is constantly on the verge of falling apart. Nobody but the competent but unambitious Sam seems to know how to operate a computer. The breakfast machine pours the coffee onto the burnt toast. And the telephones should be Exhibit A in a gallery of poor user-interface design. Meanwhile, Central Services runs ads telling us to upgrade our "out of date ducts" with new designer colors. It's a hilarious parody of the situation that most of us find ourselves in today, with our Rube Goldberg, barely-functioning technology constructed by colossal, faceless bureaucracies -- moreso now than in 1985 when the film was made.

But it's not just forms, malfunction, and evil. The one hero of the film is the hacker. Robert de Niro plays the untouchable outlaw Harry Tuttle, who intercepts Sam's call for help with his broken air conditioner, and comes to fix it. He used to work with Central Services but now works freelance, for the love of the job.

This is a real hacker, even the archetype of the hacker. I'm not sure how it happened -- the writer/director, TerryGilliam, wasn't in tune with the computer underground that I know of -- but the character, in a few short minutes onscreen, captures the universal essence of hacking.

Tuttle isn't the dangerous criminal that the media wants to pin the word "hacker" on even to this day; he doesn't break things or work to disable the system. Much like the real-world media demonization of "hackers" as electronic graffiti-artists and ping-flooders, the movie's Central Services blames terrorists for the bombings which recur throughout the film. We're led to believe these may be staged incidents, or at least unorganized -- one character asks another near the end: "have you ever seen a real terrorist?"

But neither is Tuttle a squeaky-clean navel-gazer. Some people want to sanitize the word "hacker" (usually the same people who noisily point out the distinction between "hacker" and "cracker"). Tuttle's work is illegal; he wears black, defends himself with a gun, and escapes under cover of darkness.

It's too easy to forget that, back in the day, the only way for a brilliant, motivated computer geek to learn about computers was to work the system at a more or less unauthorized level. To name just one example, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the founders of the personal computer revolution, built illegal blue boxes and sold them. I wish someone had had a camera at the moment when the phone system first shed its secrets to them -- when they first got a taste of look at this huge computer system. Look what it can do.

The hacker ethic that played such a large part in advancing computer science, building gcc, building Linux, indeed building the world's computer systems and engineering the biggest peaceful economic boom in history, is more than just a thirst for knowledge about computers. It's the obsessive belief that knowledge exists to be shared, that helping someone by making their computer run better (or their air conditioner) is one of life's joys, and that the rules that prevent sharing and helping exist to be broken.

And poor Sam Lowry pays the price for the hacker's work, for his fixing something without authorization. When I see this movie, I can't help but think of Randal Schwartz, prosecuted vigorously by Intel for running a diagnostic with the best of intentions, but without the proper paperwork. We live in a world where insane things like that can and do happen.

Somehow, 15 years ago, Terry Gilliam got in his head the same glimpse of underlying reality that Woz got when he learned about how the phone system works -- and it's all on film. The hero is the one who repeats the Central Services slogan, "We're all in this together," and makes it unironic (or at least differently ironic). The hero is the one who knows how to fix things, and fixes them -- despite not being "authorized." The evil is the paperwork we construct around ourselves, the forms and regulations that take the place of people freely helping each other. Everyone into open source should see this film.

Poor Sam Lowry's plight becomes a real-life horror for Brazil director Terry Gilliam, who faced red tape and monolithic Hollywood studios to release his picture. In addition to the full-length film with director's commentary, the three-DVD set of Brazil also includes the short film The Battle of Brazil, which chronicles Gilliam's fight to release the film he created. The third DVD consists of the 'Love Conquers All' version of Brazil, a 90-minute version that was edited down from the original picture by Sid Sheinberg and his team of hack-and-slash artists at Universal. Terry Gilliam refers to this movie as 'Sid Sheinberg's Brazil,' and it's just plain horrible. The 'Love Conquers All' version is a standing memorial to all films that have been cut to pieces by the studios. This version of Brazil was only released to the television market, and was previously unavailable to the public on VHS.

Terry Gilliam was a hacker in his own right. After a long, involved battle over release rights, he promised Universal that he would only show clips of the film to film students in California, and they capitulated and let him show brief passages from the film. In the end, he only showed one clip. It was only two hours and twenty minutes long. In other words, the whole thing.

The full DVD set of Brazil is a massive package of content, from film commentary to press photos to trailers to alternate versions of the film. Surprise, surprise, it's part of the Criterion Collection of films, which also gave us fantastic DVD versions of Robocop, Time Bandits, and Monty Python's Life of Brian. Here are the contents (as listed by the film packaging):

Disc One
New pristine widescreen transfer of Terry Gilliam's 142-minute final cut
Remastered Dolby stereo surround soundtrack
Audio commentary by Terry Gilliam
English subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired

Disc Two
What is Brazil?, Rob Hedden's 30-minute on-set documentary
The Battle of Brazil: A Video History, an original 60-minute Criterion documentary by Jack Mathews
Screenwriters Tom Stoppard and Charles McKeown on the script
Production designer Norman Garwood on the look of Brazil
Costume designer James Acheson on the couture of fantasy and fascism
Storyboards for Gilliam's original dream sequences, many of which didn't make it into the film
Composer Michael Kamen unveils the sources of his score
A study of the special effects includes raw footage of unfinished effects
Theatrical trailer, plus publicity and production stills

Disc Three
The 94-minute cut of Brazil includes all of the changes that Gilliam refused to make, from the alternate opening to the controversial happy ending
Audio commentary by Gilliam expert David Morgan.

This three-DVD set is a lot of material. I ended up taking two days to get through all of it, and every second of it is worth it. From the beautiful new transfer of Brazil to the interviews and specials to the hacked-up 90-minute version of the film, the set stays consistent in packaging and iconography, and you'll be humming the main theme for a week. Brazil is a fantastic film, and the Criterion Collection DVD set does it justice.

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

Brian De Palma can direct fun movies, even good movies, but never go into one of his movies expecting too much. Written by the brothers who gave us Predator and Wild Wild West, his awful latest Mission to Mars opened this weekend. YRO authors Michael and Jamie were so appalled by this piece of work that they insisted on panning it together, and Jon Katz added his own, slightly hopeful voice to the flaying. Read more for serious spoilers ...

Review 1: Jamie and Michael

Michael: I don't want to keep you in suspense here: movies just don't get much worse than this. And I've seen both Waterworld and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes , so I think I know what I'm talking about. When Brian De Palma says on the movie's official site, "I tried to avoid all the cliches of science fiction movies and to give a whole new look and approach to this fantastic story," all I can think of is that someone needs to call the FBI because the movie he made was obviously switched with someone else's fifth or sixth-rate NYU-film-school production before it reached the theaters.

Jamie: People are going to say we're taking this too seriously, and maybe I did expect too much going in. But I really hate seeing wasted potential.

Michael: The whole premise of the film is based upon a scene where one astronaut makes a zero-gee sculpture of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies rotating freely and circularly in the shape of a DNA helix. Newton's first law? Anyone? Anyone? Brian De Palma was a physics major? I can see why he switched careers.

Jamie: Thanks for pointing out that URL, Michael. When I read this, I don't feel so bad for slamming the film:

"The various things that happen to the Mars One and Two crews in this film all come out of the physics of what could happen in the situations presented in the story. So, it is realistic and extremely authentic."

Ha. The scriptwriters must have had a quota of a scientific impossibility every ten minutes, and they made their quota easily. Spacesuit thrust jets at shoulder-level. A plot device that depends on the concept of inertia, followed by an attempted rescue that defies the law of inertia.

This was kind of like watching The Poseidon Adventure, and then suddenly halfway through the movie everyone discovers that they can breathe water and eat plankton. No explanation, that's just the way it is. They all swim out of the ship into the Pacific and then climb ashore, wading up onto the Chicago beach.

Michael: We are of course treated to many close-up shots of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies along the way, including several gratuitous close-up and pan shots where we focus in on the "m"'s and the bag to make sure that we do, indeed, realize that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies and not some inferior brand X chocolate candies, but real, honest-to-god, M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies. If you didn't realize they were M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies, we'll later spill them all over the floor and stare at them for about 20 seconds straight, with a statistically unlikely distribution where the vast majority of the candies land with the "m" up, just to make sure that we notice that these are M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Also plugged: Isuzu, Pennzoil, SGI, Barq's Root Beer, Dr. Pepper, several others that I don't recall just now. The product placement was offensive enough that if I was writing this review I'd make a really big deal of it. Oh, I guess I am. Like watching two hours of commercials.

The "plot," if one must call it that, was as exciting as watching paint dry. Or maybe watching a "cinematic blend of texture and movement" as your clothes whirl around in the dryer. There's a lot of stilted acting, some manufactured crises, and a mysterious alien thing. "Hey look! I can spin the camera around so it looks like I'm in a rotating ring! Let's just spin! For about 3 minutes! We're spinning! Whoo-hoo! Just like a dryer!"

Jamie: Yes; there's homage to 2001 , and then there's a dull recycling of a special effect that was cool 30 years ago.

Michael: Finally we meet an alien. It's glowing, it's got baby blue eyes, it smiles at us, some beatific music swells, and then it hands us some M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies to munch on while it explains, with a handy diorama, just why it has been living in a big human face on Mars for the last few hundred million years.

Jamie: Don't forget the tear. The big sad crystal tear dangling sadly from the sad, sad alien eye. Did I mention it was sad? It was crying, it was so sad. You could tell it was sad because it was crying a big crystal tear. Also the fact that we'd just watched its entire planet destroyed in a fiery cataclysm. So there were two ways you could tell the alien was sad: the tear, and the incineration of its homeworld.

I had thought at first that the alien was a hologram, but later, it takes the humans' hands and it looks awfully real. Except for the fact that it looks awfully fake and computer-generated. Or maybe this alien race just happens to look like big nine-foot fake computer-generated holograms.

Inside, by the way, the Cydonia "face on Mars." This is the structure photographed in 1976 by the Viking probe, which caused wild speculation that it was an artificial construct. Unfortunately for De Palma, it was almost two years ago that high-resolution photos from the Mars Global Surveyor showed it was just another rocky plateau.

Let me spoil the big secret: the aliens are us. We're them. Obviously the scriptwriters graduated from a Kansas high school, because it turns out that the Precambrian explosion was actually seeded by DNA from Mars, thereby producing fish, alligators, brontosauruses, woolly mammoths, and (six hundred million years later) humans. But meanwhile, apparently, the Martians are us. We're them.

So there's a big weird mystery that the astronauts have to solve, which they do by looking at a rotating computerized graphic of a DNA molecule on a spacecraft that can't take off because all its computers are fried.

Michael: The electromagnetic pulse was selective, you see. Important things like wave analyzers and radar guns and remote-controlled toy cars were EMP-protected, while unimportant things like navigation computers were not.

Jamie: Right. Anyway, in the future, all astronauts are required to memorize the entire human genome, because they can look at the graphic which shows human DNA at the atomic level, recognize that two chromosomes [sic] are missing, and (I'm not making this up) enter the missing atomic structure of the chromosomes that were left out. They complete the graphic picture and open up the door to the giant white room which ripped off both 2001 and THX-1138 .

How did the Martians know what the proper DNA sequencing for those two chromosomes were? How did they know how many chromosomes humans have?

Because they're us, we're them. They created multicellular life, and apparently evolution is not random natural selection at all because this weird holographic Martian DNA doesn't change in 600 million years.

I can't stand movies that go back and forth between hard science and the worst kind of pseudoscience. Give me one or the other, OK? But don't base the plot around science and then expect me to suspend scientific disbelief every ten minutes.

One more example. There's a tense moment inside the THX-1138-style white room where Gary Sinese takes off his spacesuit. But he knows it's OK because he watched the air pressure rise: 6psi, 7psi, etc., and as he cracks his gloves off, another character is saying excitedly "12psi, 13psi." So they know that 14psi is Earth normal and we're expected to keep in mind the difference between Mars air pressure and Earth air pressure.

But for the last hour, the plot has hinged on this guy stranded on Mars for a year, who has stayed alive and healthy by growing plants in a canvas greenhouse.

OK, forget the fact that there's no water in the Martian atmosphere - none. Forget the sunlight being half Earth's and filtered through canvas. Forget canvas not producing a greenhouse effect by any stretch of the imagination. Forget all that; he has some magic beans that let him grow a splashy leafy warm wet jungle inside a canvas greenhouse. OK.

This canvas greenhouse is tethered to the Martian dirt by ropes. It flaps in the Martian wind. It looks about as airtight as, well, a Boy Scout tent. And everyone inside it gets to take their helmets off because it is an Earth-pressure atmosphere. Inside the canvas tent. Mars-pressure outside. Earth-pressure inside. Pressure differential between the two: one ton per square foot. Canvas and rope are going to (a) hold down a thousand tons of force and (b) flap in the breeze. Right!

Michael: Don't forget the temperature differential: Mars' average temperature is something like -70 Fahrenheit. Much colder at night, of course. But I guess the magic greenhouse can fend off -70 degree temperatures too. I wish my military-issue shelter half had been made of that material!

Jamie: And finally, at the end of the film, the astronauts climb into the return vehicle and blast off for Earth. As the credits roll they begin starving to death, because it's a six-month minimum journey and it's already been established they have no food. What a happy ending.

Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars , was an advisor to this film and he must have held his nose all the way through it. Zubrin is a rocket scientist who has spent the last ten years telling anyone who would listen about a very realistic, practical system for getting people to Mars within ten years. I know he must have had his reasons for signing on but he must be a little embarrassed now that he's seen the finished product.

The reason this movie offends me so much is because it treats the red planet, and space travel in general, with disrespect. It tries to be realistic, but whenever the science gets in the way of Hollywood, Hollywood wins. It did have some powerful moments, true, and they were especially moving if you believe (as I do) that space exploration is important. But when a science-fiction film jettisons the science, it turns into campy space opera - which makes the good parts just that much harder to take.

Michael: This movie looks like it was stitched together from a couple of thoughts the director had and thought were cool. (The studio probably thought they were being slick, capitalizing on Mars enthusiasm generated by NASA missions, so they rushed it through production, never figuring NASA would just hurl probes at the planet like a bunch of lawn darts.) There's zero consistency between those parts, not even hand-waving, you just jump from one to the next with no explanation whatsoever.

Maybe you could justify spending $2 on a non-new-release movie rental of Mission to Mars, assuming it's even released on video, which I honestly think would be a sick joke. But $30, which is what it costs for two people to attend a movie and buy a soda in Manhattan? I'd rather gouge my eyes out. This one definitely gets two thumbs down, and if I had more thumbs, they'd be down too, unless they were holding a bag of M&M (tm) brand chocolate candies.

Other Reviews:

• Salon: Disney, We Have a Problem
• Rotten Tomatoes has a great pick of choice quotes from dozens of reviewers around the U.S.

Review 2: JonKatz

I had two primary responses to Mission. The first was disbelief that Brian De Palma -- the same man who made Wiseguy, and Scarface, among others -- could have made it. The second was awe at the impact of sophisticated animation on movies. It's now possible for a movie to be beautiful, even awe-inspiring and touching at times, and still be a lousy movie. To me, that was the real fate of Mission To Mars.

The characters were so noble, self-sacrificing and one-dimensional, they were practically cartoons. And what Kubrick and Lucas have done so brilliantly -- remember that space and sci-fi ultimately revolve around very human people and stories -- DePalma forgot. He was so busy evoking awe that any sense of humanity was drowned out.

In fact, DePalma's efforts made me appreciate Lucas especially, who I was beginning to resent for all of his mega-hyping. Whatever Lucas's failings, in all of his movies, you're occasionally blown away by the idea of what might be out there, while still identifying with the hapless humans who are trying to sort it out. DePalma gives us instead some God-like alien life force powerful enough to run the universe, but too dumb to figure out the motives of the encroaching humans. And not a single line of dialogue uttered by any star in this movie made them appear real or relevant. Still, the movie was gorgeous, which is why it will sharply disappoint some people. Three or four space scenes, and some of the scenes on Mars, were really jaw-dropping, and made the movie quite worth seeing.

But DePalma seemed way over his head with the subject matter. High-class science fiction isn't all that easily to replicate, it turns out. In terms of character and narrative, Mission to Mars was a stinker. But I won't be surprised if people with imagination and heart will go see it and be touched.

ahassel writes, "The IMDB has a an update on the controversy regarding the profanity in the song from South Park. It seems that Trey Parker, et al will not censor their own song; they will leave that task to ABC. They also comment on the irony that they are asked to censor a song from a movie about censorship. There are now three words on the chopping block, including "fart," of all things. The original article from today's Washington Post"

Snaller writes, "Quoting USAToday, The Internet Movie Database reports that Trey Parker will rewrite the lyrics for "Blame Canada," the Oscar-nominated song from the South Park movie. The co-producer of the telecast is quoted as saying that Parker 'will come up with some funny solutions to his own problems.'" Leave it alone, I say. The original got the Oscar nod, not the one they'll perform at the awards.

No Such Agency writes "Wired News reports that Hedy Lamarr has died at the age of 86. Lamarr was not only a sex symbol and film star in the 30's-40's but also invented 'spread-spectrum' or frequency-hopping radio (with composer George Antheil). Originally intended to provide jamming-proof communications and remote torpedo control, the technology is one of the foundations of modern wireless communications, including wireless internet connections and GPS. Unfortunately their innovation was not appreciated until after their patent had expired. You can read more about Lamarr and spread-spectrum radio here."

ChrisCrosby was the first to notice that Hollywood Reporter has a story about our own Jon Katz' soon-to-be-released book "Geeks" being picked up by New Line Cinema for a feature film. Lawrence Bender (producer of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Good Will Hunting and more) and Laurie Bickford are producing. I'm really excited for Jon, and I just wanted to congratulate him: He's been working so hard on this, and the parts of the story that I've read have been really wonderful. And Hemos and I get cameos! Now since Bender has produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films, wouldn't it be fabulous if he directed this?Update: 01/14 04:09 by H : BTW, the actual book is available for pre-order through ThinkGeek. Check it out.

ChrisCrosby was the first to notice that Hollywood Reporter has a story about our own Jon Katz' soon-to-be-released book "Geeks" being picked up by New Line Cinema for a feature film. Lawrence Bender (producer of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Good Will Hunting and more) and Laurie Bickford are producing. I'm really excited for Jon, and I just wanted to congratulate him: He's been working so hard on this, and the parts of the story that I've read have been really wonderful. And Hemos and I get cameos! Now since Bender has produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films, wouldn't it be fabulous if he directed this?Update: 01/14 04:09 by H : BTW, the actual book is available for pre-order through ThinkGeek. Check it out.

ChrisCrosby was the first to notice that Hollywood Reporter has a story about our own Jon Katz' soon-to-be-released book "Geeks" being picked up by New Line Cinema for a feature film. Lawrence Bender (producer of Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Good Will Hunting and more) and Laurie Bickford are producing. I'm really excited for Jon, and I just wanted to congratulate him: He's been working so hard on this, and the parts of the story that I've read have been really wonderful. And Hemos and I get cameos! Now since Bender has produced all of Quentin Tarantino's films, wouldn't it be fabulous if he directed this?Update: 01/14 04:09 by H : BTW, the actual book is available for pre-order through ThinkGeek. Check it out.

martial writes "The book 'Good Omens' is in the process to be adapted for the big screen. The book was reviewed on Slashdot before. The book was written by Terry Pratchett (Discworld) and Neil Gaiman and speaks about the apocalypse in a pretty funny way. For the movie version, little is known other than Terry Gilliam (Monty Python member and director of 12 Monkeys and Brazil) is going to be the director. The information about the movie is available at the Internet Movie Database." Until this goes into something other than pre-production, it is a rumor and should be treated as such.

martial writes "The book 'Good Omens' is in the process to be adapted for the big screen. The book was reviewed on Slashdot before. The book was written by Terry Pratchett (Discworld) and Neil Gaiman and speaks about the apocalypse in a pretty funny way. For the movie version, little is known other than Terry Gilliam (Monty Python member and director of 12 Monkeys and Brazil) is going to be the director. The information about the movie is available at the Internet Movie Database." Until this goes into something other than pre-production, it is a rumor and should be treated as such.

Because you're reading Slashdot, you probably know that client-side cookies are perfectly safe. They don't contain any code that gets executed by your computer, and there are limits to keep them from filling up your hard drive. Just as importantly, no server can read another server's data, each site reads only its own cookies, and you don't have to worry about privacy. If you don't want a site to know anything about you, you don't tell that site anything. Simple. Or is it?

When Netscape embraced-and-extended the HTTP spec in 1995, it was really just trying to digitize the shopping cart. Allowing a server to store just a few bits on the client added almost no overhead and it made many applications, such as shopping carts, very convenient.

Maybe it was deliberate; maybe nobody really cared; or maybe it was an engineer's simple distaste for tweaking a spec too much: but they allowed cookies to hang off GIFs as well as HTML, and that changed everything. There were probably ten people in the: world at that point who could have foreseen the explosion in banner ad traffic, yielding a multi-billion-dollar industry in less than five years.

Yes, billion -- the large banner-ad company DoubleClick merged with database firm Abacus Direct last year in a billion-dollar stock swap. How much is a billion dollars worth of advertising revenue on the net? At DoubleClick's current rate, it's about 750 billion banner ads. Think of it as four petabytes of GIFs.

And the vast majority of those GIFs just get ignored. When's the last time you clicked a banner? There aren't any precise figures, but the consensus is that the average click-through rate is dropping. Three percent click-through used to be good. Now a well-targeted ad will be happy to get one or two percent. It's hard work to make money from banners, and getting harder every day.

That's why DoubleClick, and firms like it, need to maximize their efficiency. Their income ends up depending on that click-through rate. The higher they can raise that number, the more they can justify charging their clients. Sending targeted ads becomes critical. And the only way to target you is to learn more about you.

The GIF cookie loophole makes this pretty easy. The first banner ad that your browser requested from a banner-ad company got a user ID cookie sent back with it. And - here's the key - since so many banner GIFs all come from the same company's domain name, your browser sends back the same user ID no matter which website you're viewing the banner on. Your user ID is being tracked all over the web.

In the case of DoubleClick, that's a fair number of sites. They won't talk to you unless you serve a million impressions a month - and their network includes 651 publishers which translates to who-knows how many websites. All told, they deliver a billion ads every two days.

Though the Internet Movie Database can't tell where else you've been on the web today, the company delivering its banners knows. That same company knows if you read National Review, TeenMag, or Dilbert. It knows if you're into professional wrestling or what cruises you were looking at on Travelocity. It even has some of your click history through WebMD.com.

The comforting thing has always been that, while the corporation may be able to follow your footprints around the web, at least they haven't known it's you who's making them. The disconcerting thing is, that's about to change.

Remember that billion-dollar merger between DoubleClick and the database company? This database company doesn't sell software. Abacus Direct uses databases to store names, addresses, and other information about people. In offices across the country, their computers have information on two billion purchases made from 1,100 separate consumer catalogs over the years, "representing virtually all U.S. consumer catalog buying households." Their CEO brags,

"Through the sophisticated use of state-of-the-art technologies and modeling techniques, Abacus' outstanding ability to synthesize vast amounts of data into valuable insights about individual consumer buying behaviors has proven itself to be an important marketing tool for our age."

That's why it's very interesting that DoubleClick's privacy policy changed earlier this month. Its text used to read:

"DoubleClick does not know the name, email address, phone number, or home address of anybody who visits a site in the DoubleClick Network. All users who receive an ad targeted by DoubleClick's technology remain completely anonymous."

That promise is gone without a trace from the new policy. The new policy reads:

"In the course of delivering an ad to you, DoubleClick does not collect any personally-identifiable information about you, such as your name, address, phone number or email address."

Of course not. In delivering the ad, DoubleClick just collects your user ID. It probably already has your name, address, phone number and email address, somewhere in the Abacus database.

A little further down is the portent of things to come. There is "one particular Web publisher" in their network which collects a "log-in name and demographic data about users." Which publisher is that? They don't say.

Whoever it is, you may already have given it your name and address, perhaps to register for a contest, or maybe in exchange for reading its free content. Everyone does it; it's a small price to pay. DoubleClick is already combining their demographic data (your name and address) with its own database (your viewing and clicking habits) in order to deliver more-targeted ads on this one website.

And if their programmers do their jobs right, it'll end up being a simple SQL query to join up your user ID, the name you gave the mysterious web publisher, your Abacus demographic data and catalog purchases, and the footprints you've left all over the net for the past two years, into a single big lump of your online/offline data.

To be fair, their privacy policy promises they won't start doing this without, er, changing their privacy policy:

"...should DoubleClick ever match the non-personally-identifiable information collected by DoubleClick with Abacus database information, DoubleClick will revise this Privacy Statement to accurately reflect its modified data collection and data use policies and ensure that you have adequate notice of any changes and a choice to participate."

Aren't you glad that, when DoubleClick revised its privacy statement on October13,1999, you were given adequate notice of how you were being tracked across the internet? (They've sent out 46 press releases so far this year. Informing you about weakening your privacy wasn't one of them.)

Things aren't as bad as they could be. One fortunate thing is that the banner-ad market isn't a monopoly yet. Not even close. Adbility lists over fifty ad networks, of which DoubleClick is just one of the larger ones (probably the largest).

But, when any rapidly expanding market starts to level off, the smaller and less-efficient companies get eaten. Nobody knows when the internet's growth curve will hit that point, but exponential expansion can't continue forever. At some point, the companies that can't send banner ads targeted to your community will get left behind. We'll end up with two, maybe three, meganetworks that deliver a large majority of the world's banner ads.

What can you do about it? To protect your own personal privacy, opt out of DoubleClick's cookies. Of course, this doesn't affect other banner-ad companies, who may or may not even offer this solution once they get as big as DoubleClick. It also doesn't help novice websurfers like your grandmother, who doesn't understand why she should refuse free cookies. More importantly, it can't ever be a real answer - if more than a tiny percentage of their audience ever opted out, DoubleClick would see the competitive advantage of their billion-dollar merger start to erode, and that'd be the end of that option.

What makes more sense is to close the cookie loophole. DoubleClick isn't the real problem; the HTTP spec is the problem. The browsers should change their implementation of cookies so that, by default, foreign sites can't send me cookies along with their GIFs. Why should cookies be allowed onto my hard drive if they aren't attached to the page I'm viewing?

Since DoubleClick's privacy policy claims that cookies "are not essential for us to continue our leadership," they should have no problem supporting this as the default behavior of every major web browser.

InitZero writes "The journal Nature reports that the web is only 19 clicks wide. What it fails to mention is that a least one of those must be through Kevin Bacon. " The graphic at the beginning of the article is gorgeous in a Mandelbrot style-now if I could just have it in a 24 x 30 print.

IMDB (I love this site) has an article on how the South Park movie escaped an NC-17 rating. Comments on editing, and featuring the most amusing quote " As with the comparatively harmless Big Daddy (1999), the comic premise of South Park is based on the hilarity ensuing from the corruption of children." This and Austin Powers were the 2 comedies I was looking forward to this summer.