This is why America scares me sometimes

In a recent poll it seems that 3 of 4 Bush supporters still thought that pre-War Iraq had WMD’s, despite all the well publicized evidence to the contrary. The article goes on to show a few more differences in opinion in the views of the supporters and the actual policies of Bush. Somehow, and I wish I knew how, they all buy into this view that Bush is good for our country.

You know, I voted for him in 2000. Why? Because I belived in what he said, he would unite the country, bring back respect for America in the world and generaly be someone who would be a moderate in a country of extremes. He had his chance after 9/11, I worried but was generally supportive when we went in and took on the Taliban and Al-Quida. What happened from there was an intense and sickening display of deception and misdirection for all of America. With the war in reguards to Iraq, Bush and his advisiors made the country divided in such a way as to make you feel that if you didn’t support the unprovoked and unnessicary war on Iraq you were un-patriotic. Now in a country that was riding a wave of patriotism after 9/11, I have to give it to him that he played his cards well, giving him support with the most flimsy reasons, and complete lack of evidence.

In retrospect, I’m unhappy that I voted for Bush, who has divided, sperated and isolated me from other Americans, America from the world (and yes I know Poland supports us), and the entire politial system. I see him as dishonest, or maybe not even that, but so focused on creating his own reality, where he is never wrong, and that scares me. I want a leader who is willing to say, “After recieving more information, I discovered that we were wrong, sorry,” not, “I would have gone in anyways and taken out Saddam.” What does this show us? That Bush wanted to change the view of America in the World forever. Thanks, glad you asked me if I wanted to go along with it. I know there are Americans out there who say, “who cares what the world thinks of us?” Good question, easy answer. This is a world we live on. We cannot continue to be an island and piss off the rest of the world. Sorry, but everyone is conected, and if your neighbor isn’t fond of you, then don’t expect to be invited to the block party or have them help you out when you need to borrow something, or keep an eye out for you. Sorry but it’s common sense.

Look, I don’t claim to have all the answers, and even I wasn’t sold on Kerry until recently. Before that it was because I just knew I didn’t want Bush, now I believe that Kerry might just be the chance we need.

I know, I said no politics, but when your country is on the line and you can’t see four more years of what it’s turned into, you can’t sit silent. As an American I feel I must say something.

Busy – But links to make up for it!

So I havn’t been trying to negelect the site. Though life has been a busy mess it seems. Good things: Red Sox’s are in the ALCS, but are down 0-2 as of today (Thursday).

William Gibson is back and blogging. For those who don’t know who he is, I posted about him a couple of months ago. He used to blog and stopped because it interfered with his writing process. Apparently he’s back at it though.

– Here we have a comparison of all of the changes Lucas made to the new versions of Star Wars on DVD. Some I’m happy with, but still I’ll never believe that Greedo shot first. Read the article for insite.

– Now this is good: supposed query letters from actuall scriptwriters looking to get their “idea” made. Priceless.

Craziest – A VidLit

Through more random wandering I found Craziest – A short story by Liz Dubelman. It’s a flash short story, narrated by the author. It’s an interesting way to tell a story, and I enjoyed it. It’s a Scrabble related story. (Gotta love Scrabble) But, it made me think, that the story worked very well told in this way with pictures that helped tell the story. Almost a cross between a comic and a written story it tells it and takes something good from both worlds and does it well. Anyways, it’s about 8 min long, but worth the watch. I’m going to have to watch more from this VidLit site and see what else they’ve done with the form.

Random Links – Again!

– A history of Mario Sprites, from his Donkey Kong roots to his more ugly pixelated recent Mario vs. Donkey Kong game. Some good commentary, but just fun to see all the different versions of our favorite plumber.

– SpaceShipOne made it up and back safely. This is great to watch. Their next flight is scheduled for October 4th and then the X-Prize will be theirs. Fun part is, a friend of mine works for Dynon Avionics, who has some of their systems in the SpaceShipOne.

– Here’s an excellent guide to where trojans and malware hide on you system. Pretty much I’m going to check my system when I get the chance. AdAware on gets so much of the junk.

– From RandomURL, comes this link to a electoral vote predictor based upon how the polls are in the different states. I see this changing as the debates go on, but time will tell. Breaking my own rule on not talking about politics, when is middle America going to realize that our president lied to them so he could go to war and change American foriegn policy and the world view of us forever? On another note, this guy makes arguments against the electoral college. He’s got some points, but then everyone has their arguments.

Summer Darling

An old friend of mine is in a band. I’ve watched him from his days as a drummer who couldn’t keep time to being a stunning lyricist and songwriter. His band, Summer Darling has just released their new album.

On the website they have a couple of songs available for listen as well as a couple here on Pure Volume. It’s your indie rock music, but not as whiny as some of it tends to be. Listen. Enjoy.

Links again.

Curmudgeon Gamer has posted the final article in their series covering the Midway Arcade Treasures Vol. 1. The author has gone and covered in depth each of the games in the collection, and presents relevent strategy.

– As if India’s software growth continuing wasn’t completely obvious.

– Apperently Intel think’s the the Interweb is dying and can only be saved by them!

Even better, a new self-propogating computer “Worm now installs a packet sniffer so it can send back information, like passwords and logins. Great.

Game commercials from the 80’s on for practicaly everything! Fun for nostalgia and more.

Google’s GMAIL

I recently got an invite from someone to Google’s Gmail service. It might have been hard to miss some of the hype surrounding it, but basically think of Hotmail, but with 1 gigabyte of storage, and not controlled by the Bill Gates empire. It’s web based, and the theory is that you won’t have to delete all your old e-mails, but since you have all that room you can store them and search them out later and keep all your old favorites around.

Anyways, since I have it now, I’ve also been given some extra invites to give to others. So… If you want one, e-mail me at nixon66 at gmail.com or leave a comment.

Coffee Roasting – Victrola Style

I saw a coffee related article on Gizmodo and I knew I had to click it.

The article linked was from Tonx of Victrola Coffee. It’s a local shop up in Seattle, just down the street from where my wife works. They used to use beans from Vivace, a local Seattle coffee institution. Their shop has great ambiance, though I never felt as a barista that I’d ever be hip enough to work there, but besides that they had a nice comfortable setup. I’m glad to see they’ve got a guy tracking his coffee and communicating it to the wide world.

Also fun is that he’s a Word Press user, and he’s using the same template as me for his site. Quality.

Why Blog – Part 2

I’ve already written about this “blog” personally a few times. I thought to write again, as I’m still finding my voice for it and figuring out what the focus or concentration of the blog should be.

Already I’ve determined to myself that there would be two subjects that I would try and avoid as much as possible: religion and politics. I don’t think I need to explain, but if you really want me to I will. I also didn’t really want to go much into my personal life. People generally don’t care that I went grocery shopping last night and got some lunch meat to make sandwhiches for work. Trivial details suck. You’ll hear personal stories when they have relavence to what I want to discuss, and not for much else hopefully.

As for the focus of what I want to do? Who knows. It’s still a work in progress, and I’d like to experiment with a few other ideas: reviewing/commenting on what I’ve been reading book wise, retrospectives on older games (like this one) and more commentary on technology, old and new. We’ll see.

Bitnami