So guess what? The composer of this legendary JRPG-esque song for The Weather Channel actually came forward recently, having learned about the song’s quasi-meme status. His name is Chris Kennedy.
Because it sounds like Kingdom Hearts battle music, that's why. It just sounds like something Yoko Shimomura threw together for a later world in KH2 or one of the side games. It doesn't sound like one particular track from any of them, but it just sounds like it fits.
i'm conducting an experiment. everyone who's from an english speaking country state your country, regional area and what you call the following images. i need to see something
I’m reminded of the “Supporters aren’t healers!” controversy in the City of Heroes MMORPG. The class was about keeping allies alive, and only one build did that reactively through healing while the others did it proactively through damage mitigation.
Overwatch kinda had this going, except they started with 4 supports and only one of them didn't have any skill for healing. She used to have something to give shield HP to allies but that's it, she was mostly there for a teleport and to set up multiple turrets. They kept messing with her kit while also adding more supports, all of which were focused on healing.
Eventually they just moved her to the damage role, but they kept calling healers "support" when they could just as well change the name to "healer" by that point
Imagine if an alchemist in 2025 discovered the legendary Philosopher's Stone that turns lead into gold, and mainstream chemists reacted in the manner of "your use of cheetah semen did not have IRB approval and your lead exposure is above the XYZ threshold, this is dangerous and illegal!" and snubbing the whole topic, while the alchemist became a billionaire and was showing off his gem-encrusted golden throne on Twitter. Gold prices stayed the same because the alchemist was still only making a personal-scale amount, while big name clout havers and prestigious institutions denied there was anything to be learned here, denouncing the alchemist for trafficking in illegal substances or ignoring him entirely.
This is sort of how I view the El Salvador situation.
El Salvador used to have an overall homicide rate of about 60 per 100K people per year. (2000-2010 average, the individual years are spiky.) Another way of framing this stat is that with 6 million people, the small country saw about 10 homicides per day. It was a stock example of a dangerous Central American country plagued by drugs, gangs, and drug gangs, with a long history of coups to boot.
Nayib Bukele's administration has brought the homicides per capita rate down over several years, falling to about 2 per 100K per year in 2023 and 2024. This puts it on par with nice quiet European countries like Estonia. The average homicides per day in El Salvador is now less than one, and the country can now count days since last homicide instead. In 2024 they got to 14 days as their best streak, according to Google. Bukele's administration has saved thousands of lives, in large part by throwing criminals in prison, and the Salvadorans love it.
There is an obvious success here. It made things much better. It should be learned from and copied and iterated on. Even if the 30x improvement doesn't fully generalize, 5x would still be great, or bringing down to 2 per 100K would improve a lot of places.
This applies to violent crime more generally. Homicide stats are used partly because homicide is a good index crime. The stats on homicide are less fudged than other crime stats, because a homicide is harder to obfuscate than a robbery or rape, but many of these are committed by the same sort of people and will decrease together.
There are concerns about Bukele's approach having significant downsides: torturous conditions in prisons, collateral damage to innocents, reduced due process, militarization of the state, et cetera.
I contend that these concerns are non-central. The torturous conditions reflect Bukele's lack of care for prisoners perceived as hardened criminals, and play little or no causal role in the crime reduction. The absence of these factors would not significantly attenuate the overall effectiveness of a similar approach. To put that in less technical language: If a genie granted a wish for every Salvadoran prisoner to have a roomy cell and good food, this would not send the homicide rate back up to 60, nor even to 10.
Reasonable people wishing to learn from Bukele's reduction of the homicide rate from 60 to 2 while also considering these concerns might make a "good parts" plan along the lines of: hire more police to find and arrest criminals more often, put bodycams on the police for transparency, hire more judges to sentence criminals faster while preserving due process, build more prisons to hold these criminals, reduce the thresholds for sentencing repeat offenders to prison, et cetera. Reducing America's homicide rate to 2 per 100K per year would save thousands of lives a year, and looks achievable given El Salvador's example.
Prestigious people are frequently not reasonable about it. They respond like for example Carlos Dada of the Harvard Review, in his piece "Lessons from El Salvador":
Gang members were treated as bloodthirsty monsters as if they had landed from outer space, and not as what they were: the most violent and cruel expression of our society, a consequence, rather than a cause, of our dysfunctional social and economic structures.
Carlos Dada repeatedly goes on about social and economic structures, political and economic problems, the inequality gap, the minimum wage, privatization, neoliberalism, and so on. He is passionate about denying the agency and responsibility of violent criminals, because the economy made them do it. He offers no such excuse to Bukele, of course.
But the accord had a couple of mayor [sic] flaws—easy to say now that we know the consequences. One was the lack of socio-economic measures to reduce the scandalous inequality gap and commit to a much wider distribution of national wealth.
The accord in question being the 1992 peace treaty which ended the twelve-year Salvadoran Civil War. The man looks at a peace treaty and complains it wasn't doing wealth redistribution.
History has shown us one and again that repression by itself can never bring peace anywhere. Bukele’s repression and massive incarcerations strategy has been tried before, although arguably never with such results. But where there is no independent judicial system, where security forces act with impunity and where the poor and marginalized have no agency, peacebuilding is an impossible task.
Dada titles his piece "Lessons from El Salvador", but he has learned nothing. He is, in a word, prejudiced. Dada is ideologically committed to believing that Bukele's very old-fashioned strategy of imprisoning violent criminals can't succeed, so he puts a lot of fine words into redefining success and peace, selectively assigning agency, and playing word games. It's a well-written polemic against Bukele, and a very bad response to improvements in El Salvador.
Perhaps you object that Carlos Dada is not representative of proper expertise, he's merely a VIP backed by Harvard, international press awards, and other high-status pageantry that tells people he should be listened to. Well; consider the Annual Review of Criminology for more formal expertise, which "provides comprehensive reviews of significant developments in the multidisciplinary field of criminology".
The 2024 and 2025 issues of the A.R.C. have no mention of El Salvador nor Bukele in their article titles, nor summaries. (I have not read every word to check for a passing mention buried somewhere on page 43.) I don't see any optimistic title like "A Tenfold Reduction In Homicide Is Possible" which might be trying to get the good parts.
What I do find that might vaguely be near the topic is "Crime and Governance in the Global South", which opens like this:
This article considers the relationship between crime and governance on the peripheries of the Global North. It draws on examples from across the Global South to show how conceptualizations of crimes are impacted by history, politics, and socio-economic contexts and how crime is influenced by, and in turn influences, governance practices. The review centers on four arguments: Western ideologies and epistemologies are inadequate for conceptualizing the nexus between crime and governance in the Global South; understandings of crime must be informed by knowledge of contextual harmscapes; models of crime control and policing do not always capture the hybridity and plurality of everyday governing practices in the Global South; and crime dynamics intersect with governance structures to create complex challenges for state control.
Then they start reflecting on their own unpacking of the concept of the "Global South", with stuff like:
a knowledge reclamation movement (Carrington et al. 2018) that recognizes diverse political, social, and economic realities that differ from the metropoles of Western Europe and North America while also rectifying knowledge omissions borne of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and Western capitalists’ false universal knowledge claims (Connell 2007).
These are unserious people. A year of Bukele and friends describing how they carried out their crackdown and suggestions for replicating it elsewhere would be a better use of the A.R.C. than this.
El Salvador has shown that a better way is possible, and the A.R.C. is busy with "but have you considered the viewpoint of Muslim Feminists in the Global South?" self-caricatures of intersectionality, thinking the developments in El Salvador aren't significant.
Something that needs to be considered here is that El Salvador's crime was mostly driven by tattooed gangs who wore their membership on their sleeve, and their chest, and their forehead, and so on. You could round up everyone with gang tattoos and lock them up to achieve a remarkably good specificity and sensitivity for the intervention. And if, unlike Bukele, you cared enough about human rights to desire to filter out the false positives you could provide people a proper due process in a segregated detainment environment (i.e. you only lock up gang members with each others, and people who might have been confused for gang members are not locked up with gang members until the matter has been resolved) without fundamentally compromising the effectiveness of the intervention.
However, that factor which made the "lock up all the criminals" so effective in El Salvador also makes it significantly more troublesome and less straightforward to implement something like it in most other countries. In some cases you could e.g. round up everyone with gang tattoos, or biker gang vests, and so on, but any gangs without such obvious signifiers of membership would be at a competitive advantage. Scouring through social media to track the connections and associations of known gang members would work to an extent until everyone learns opsec. IRL surveillance and physical observation would eventually teach people to ostracise gangsters if you're willing to make "is friends with criminals and hangs out with them" an imprisonable crime in itself. All of this is vastly less convenient and precise than rounding up the people who have helpfully labeled themselves for your benefit.
This doesn't mean that getting rid of the people who do most of the crimes is not worth pursuing (the anecdote of some part of the UK having something like a 75-90% fall in burglaries once a couple of specific guys died in a car crash comes to mind), but it does mean that naively importing the methods El Salvador used is unlikely to work as effectively when most of the bad guys don't put up a blatant "I'm a bad guy, lock me up!" sign on their skin.
the gang violence problem in El Salvador was so pervasive it kind of wasn't a crime problem any more, it was a civil war. in that case, yeah, you militarize the police or policifize the military because what you are looking at is a military problem.
The thing is, you can spend a lot of time looking for structural solutions to structural problems, and design plans to solve those structural inequalities...
And the plans, once implemented, will take GENERATIONS to lead to a positive effect. Because, and this is an important element here...
The present status does not go away. The people damaged by structural inequalities? Do not just go 'oh they stopped the things that caused my terrible upbringing, I'll give up crime and be a normal person now!'
It just doesn't work that way. Long term problems require long term solutions, and cause short term problems. And those short-term problems? Will continue being problems unless you ALSO resolve them, and get in the way of you solving the long term ones!
Gang members were treated as bloodthirsty monsters as if they had landed from outer space, and not as what they were: the most violent and cruel expression of our society, a consequence, rather than a cause, of our dysfunctional social and economic structures.
…Did he unironically go "Come and see the violence inherent in the system!"
But the accord had a couple of mayor [sic] flaws—easy to say now that we know the consequences. One was the lack of socio-economic measures to reduce the scandalous inequality gap and commit to a much wider distribution of national wealth.
As a general rule, when someone starts talking about "inequality", I immediately move their opinion closer to the circular file.
Following it up with wealth redistribution covers the rest of the distance.
Until I actually got to play Sonic Adventure 2 Battle on the GameCube, I thought Rouge's name was actually Rogue. I'd seen people online talk about the game from Dreamcast, and also about her because she debuted in that game, but it took them saying her name for me to notice how it was actually spelled.
In Super Mario 64 DS, it is possible to enter the volcano in Lethal Lava Land while it is erupting, causing the character to take damage while entering it.
If the character had 1 segment of health left before this, he will be already dead when entering the volcano, so that he will instantly die when control is granted to the player.
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