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"ESRB ABOUT TO BE JUNKED
As you delightful pixelante thugs know, I prepped Senatory Hillary Clinton for her July 2005 news conference on "Hot Coffee." Prepped Best Buy's lapdog, Dr. David Walsh, who stood at her side, for it, too.
At that news conference, which I made possible, Senator Clinton stated "the video game ratings system is broken."
She was correct, and here is the latest proof how thoroughly it is broken, coming out of liberal beehive Harvard, no less.
The ESA's and the ESRB's self-policing house of cards has rested upon the demonstrably false assumption that the game ratings are a) accurate, and b) that mature-rated games will not be sold to kids with no parents in sight.
Now we know that both a) and b) are totally false, as the Federal Trade Commission study last week found that roughly 40% of the time retailers of video games will sell mature-rated games to kids under the age of 17. You can't warn a parent as to content when the parent is not there, and now we know, thanks to Harvard, that even if they were there the descriptors on the back are phony. What a freaking surprise! People have been saying this for years, including Leeland Yee.
In fact, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas ought to be AO-rated, not M. Yee has been saying that, and I have been saying that, and now Harvard proves we are right. Vice City was one of the games Harvard studied in coming to this obvious conclusion.
What Dennis McCauley here will not report is an even more damning study that came out of Harvard yesterday! It finds that the Grand Theft Auto games do in fact cause harm to adult males, between the ages of 18 and 21, who play them.
All of you know-nothing obscurantists here whose frontal lobes have been immobilized by obsessive game play (you don't know who you are, obviously, because your powers of self-reflection are gone as well) need to deal with the FACT that yet another peer-reviewed medical journal states, as of yesterday, that these violent games cause HARM.
 :You will continue to bleat like little sheep that the proof is not out there. It is out there, at Harvard no less.
You all can't handle the truth. You can't handle the fact that God is in control of this debate, not bought clowns like Doug Lowenstein who is paid to say whatever the industry wants him to say.
The evidence is in. The Grand Theft Auto games cause harm. This is the core of our case in Alabama. We could not have paid $500,000 and gotten a better medical study showing the harmful effects of GTA on teens. But now Harvard, wholly independent of our case in Alabama, has found as a scientific fact that GTA harms those who play it.
This finding is a gift from God that has fallen into our laps in the Alabama case, one week after the Alabama Supreme Court agrees with me that these games are not First Amendment protected speech for minors.
Hooah indeed! Jack Thompson, Your Video Game Industry's Worst Nightmare
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[not in citation given]

 

Jack Thompson

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This finding at Harvard by Kimberly Thompson... enhances even more our case in Alabama. This shows the broad deception by the industry in marketing and selling harmful video games to kids. Note also that Vice City, which is the game the killer in Alabama played, is one of the games studied at Harvard. Hooah! Life is good. My future is so bright I've got to wear shades. Jack Thompson PS: I understand the First Amendment, and you don't.

 

Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson on Kansas Television This Evening
Pixelantes and Hal Halpin, Who Is Just a Highly Paid Pixelante Lobbyist:
I am on Kansas television tonight and your're not. I'll be explaining to folks in Senator Brownback's homestate that some of the perps involved in the "Kansas Columbine" incited were found to be gamers by virtue of my close work with the law enforcement community there.
On the other side of the ledger, you have Hal Halpin, who spends days and nights doing whatever he can to make sure other parents' kids have access to violent video games that are mature-rated. If Hal Halpin really wanted to stop the sale of mature-rated games to kids he would stop agitating against legislation that requires a parent to make the purchasing choice.
See, Hal Halpin can't have it both ways, and maintain to the public that he is an honest individual. If the industry acknowledges that the mature-rated games are inappropriate for minors, then you can't also be for a scheme, as is Hal Halpin, that allows the sale of a mature-rated game to a kid with no parent in sight.
Either prohibit the sale of these games to kids, or stop pretending to want to stop the sales. The Federal Trade Commission repeatedly states that 35% or more of the kids who got to major retailers are able to buy these mature games. A kid who goes to two retailers has a better than 50% chance of getting the game. Hal opposes doing anything to stop the totally unregulated sale of mature games to kids of any age via the Internet.
Hal Halpin assists, daily, the video game industry's mental molestation of minors for money. Hal, get an honest job, please. Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson

 

Let's Arrest Patricia Vance for... conspiring to distribute material harmful to minors.
Patty, pay attention: Your organization puts phony ratings and descriptors, according to Harvard, on the games. That's fraud.
Secondly, you recite, like a mantra, the usefulness of the ESRB ratings in "helping parents make educated pruchase decisions." This is the biggest crock of all. Your organization fights the passage of laws that require A PARENT TO BE THERE AT THE POINT OF SALE, PATTY!
There is no parent involved in the sale when a 15-year-old, and in some instances a 9-year-old, as Lieberman has proven, presents to a cash register at Target and is able to buy GTA: SA, with no parent in site.
The ESRB does not want parents making these decision. The ESRB, and the ESA, want the retail industry to sell mature games to kids with no parents in sight, as proven by their efforts in courts to knock down laws that simply say: A parent must be there.
Patricia Vance is a liar. Hal Halpin is a liar. Doug Lowenstein is a liar. The entire video game industry is involved in a sham use of ESRB ratings to distribute sexual and violent material harmful to minors.
Yee is right. Clinton is right. David Walsh is right. All of you are wrong.
Repent of your sin, kiddies. Patricia Vance, I've given up on you.
Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson

 

Unfortunately, the "games aren't speech" comments attributed to me at the Delaware House Judiciary Committee hearing were not fully reported. I went on to note that the controller's use as a data input device as well as the means by which the Dual Shock controller gives biofeedback renders the entire mechanism a device, which of course it is.
It is this argument that carried the day at our November 3 hearing in Alabama on the First Amendment, which I alone argued, against the mighty and unethical Blank Rome, and we won the hearing on my argument. So, kids, you can fuss and fume all you want, and the guy who showed up in a T-shirt at the hearing can be as upset as he wants, but nobody but an extremist ideologue thinks that mature-rated games whose "M" label is an admission of the harm to minors of the games thinks that a video game is "political speech" under any sane reading of the First Amendment.
If you all don't know what "political speech" is, then you need to review some court cases on the subject. As to whether games are speech of any kind, please note that "speech" doesn't cause hand injuries which are warned of on the Dual Shock Controller.
A video game isn't any more "speech" than a gun is. Both are devices.
And for all of you who think that the First Amendment protects everything, tell Dennis McCauley to stop acting like a child and preventing me from posting here through Live Journal. You all have missed a ton of bad news for the video game industry simply because Dennis McCauley can't, as a journalist wannabe, handle the truth.
Jack Thompson

 

Jack Thompson