Barry Goldwater, where are you?

Barry Morris Goldwater

(January 1, 1909 – May 29, 1998) was a five-term United States Senator from Arizona (1953–1965, 1969–1987) and the Republican Party's nominee for President in the 1964 election. He was also a Major General in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He was frequently referred to as "Mr. Conservative" in numerous media articles.

Or... How I became a democrat without changing parties...

I mean it, Barry, what happened to our party?  I know you’re spinning in your grave as we speak, and I for one, would like to apologize.  You see, I’m a republican.  Well, not really, anymore.  I’m a fiscal conservative, small government, less entitlement, social moderate.  That USED to be a republican, but guess what, now it’s a moderate democrat.  See?  I changed parties and never went down to update my voter ID card.

I really did like being a republican, the Reagan years were a heady time for me.  The problem is, Ron started something kinda bad for the party.  This year, 2008, the slippery slope that he started down has reached the bottom, and poor old McCain is paying the price for it.  I kinda feel bad for him, he could have been a republican, but he had (or felt he had) to sell out and hire the likes of Sarah Palin.

Yep, Reagan started the courting of the religious fringe of the right wing republican party and since that time, no serious republican has been able to move without giving in more and more to the fringe.  No talent hacks like our current presi-dictator have relied on the cash cow that is the religious right and gotten elected.  More and more they pander to the likes of Pat Robertson and James Dobson and more and more the Republican Party loses it’s esteem and history.  And yes, I’m to blame, it’s my fault.  I didn’t see the handwriting on the wall and I didn’t stand up for the Republican values that were established with the party.  So now, I’m a democrat and lumped in with all the rest.

With the current president, I find myself embarrassed to say I’m a republican.  I staunchly maintain that I am a conservative.   I have searched my mind and history to find something, anything he might have done that was either worthy of the title Republican or at least, conservative.  Try as I might, I fail.  This jackass has destroyed my party and taken down a pretty decent guy like John McCain with him.  Poor John was a moderate conservative and his own party, my party, disowned him.  These fucking neo-cons tried to tear down a guy that had more in common with republican values than any of them ever  has ever known.  He was forced to pick the mouthpiece of the Religious fringe wackos as a running mate to solidify a base of foaming, power-hungry mongrels who think that the Ten Commandments are in the Bill of Rights.

NEWSFLASH - ATTENTION NEOCONS - Hey assholes - if you want a theocracy, move to fucking Iran, they have it there, and how is it working??

Don’t Romney, Paul and Huckabee look good now?

Come Tuesday, who knows.  I may just vote for McCain, knowing that I’m in the fringe 33% of the people who will do the same.  Barack Obama is the next President of the United States, get over it, NeoCons.  You built this debacle, and now you get to stew in it for at LEAST 4 years.  And dear god I hope you roast, I hope you burn in the very fires of hell that you try to scare the shit out of everyone with.  You pathetic fucktards deserve nothing less for destroying my party and taking away from me my right to vote for a republican.  Obama will tear down every pillar that you have built in the last 8 years and laugh at you while he does it.

Well, Mr. Duncan and Ms. Davidson, you brought this all down on your heads, and for the love of god, RESIGN!  Leave the leadership of the Republican Party to republicans.  Do you think it was odd that a JUNIOR senator from Illinois could spank the living shit out of you?  Does it bother you that Joe Biden, the doormat of the Senate is going to be bitch slapping you around the beltway?  Do you honestly think that this country SUDDENLY all decided to vote democrat?  No piss-brains, when you traded conservatism for cash, you did this.  You screwed us all and I’m going to do more than withhold my RNC dues.  I’m going to actively campaign to make sure you and your ilk are turned out from the leadership of MY party.  I’m going to find every way I can to make you look like the stupid whores that you are.  Don’t think for a moment that this loss is John McCain’s fault.  It’s yours you fascist fucktards, you and everyone else who thinks like you.

Yep, my party may have left me, and I was floundering there for a while, but guess what.

DAMNIT, I’M A FREAKING REPUBLICAN!!!!!!!!

I’m going to take this damned party back from you, you pathetic excuses for conservatives.

So NO, I’m not a moderate democrat anymore, I’m a damned republican.  I’m tired of hanging my head in shame, looking back at the “good old days”.  I may not vote like it this time, but I swear to you I’ll get this party back.  I may live in the backwater bullshit state of New Mexico, but this is your notice, NeoCons, Bush apologists and all you freaked out fanatics of the right wing...

Republicans are coming, and hell’s coming with us!!

My friend Tony provided a counter-rant... or a support-o-rant, you decide...

Tony

NEWSFLASH - Goldwater's granddaughter is supporting Obama.  She also says that if her grandfather were alive he would vote for Obama as well.

Barry Goldwater?  The man accused the National Education Association of being a communist front.

As much as I found most of John McCain's politics reprehensible, at least he seemed to be an honest man.  That man disappeared after 2000.  No one forced him to suck up to the Christian right.  Do you remember Bill Keating and the Savings and Loan scandal?  Right in the middle of it all, there was John McCain's ass hanging in the breeze.

Small government?
The Wall Street debacle (prior to the bail out) - small government.
Privatization of intelligence and the military - small government.
Over 40 million people with no health insurance - small government.
Predatory lending practices and sub-prime mortgages - small government.
And last but not least, that giant, bloated, festering, Sun blotched elephant in the middle of the room, the defense budget - small government?

Less entitlements?  Christ, that empty-piñata-of-in-issue has been dangled for decades.  "Hey look?  I just found 10 people manipulating the welfare system.  Therefore a thousand others must be manipulating it too and the whole system is bad."  The federal poverty level for individuals (one eligibility requirement for entitlement) is around $15,000 a year.  Try living on that.  I don't know what the poverty level for families is.  However, while you're looking that up, look up the demographics of the primary recipients of welfare.  Hell, if you look at presidential records on welfare gutting in the last 20 years, Clinton is on the top of that list.  Unless, of course, by entitlements you are including corporate welfare in which case both parties have been breast-feeding that for long as I can remember.

Speaking of neocons and theocracies, if you haven't already you should read the book Blackwater.  Jeremy Scahill interviews countless old-money Christian fundamentalists in positions of high influence.  They are quoted as saying that they're especially qualified to counter Islamic fundamentalists because they understand how the mind of a zealot works.  Of all the depressingly disturbing things Scahill wrote about, that rings in my head as one of the worst.

I truly do look forward to you taking on the Christian right.  I'll even help.  Of course, once the subject of religious faith comes up, EVERYONE gets scrutinized. But hey, I don't mind being on the hot seat if you don't.

Anyway, Joe Biden is the MasterCard Senator.  Everyone seems to have forgotten that he was instrumental in gutting the bankruptcy laws during Bush's first term.  Everyone except those with catastrophic medical bills they can't pay or whose homes are being auctioned off as we speak.  As far as Wall Street goes, lest we forget that Obama has obliterated campaign fund-raising records, much of which Wall Street bankrolled.

Even if Barak Obama was willing to make the very hard choices necessary to fix the economy, deal with global warming, and put out the fire that we've lit in the Middle East, neither party would back him: "that would be political suicide."

Now how's that for a rant?

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 - 10:55 PM

Print is dead!

Dr. Egon Spengler... a modern prophet.  (For the, hopefully, few of you who do not know the works of Dr. Spengler - go here)

Print is officially dead, long live the electron!  I just celebrated my 24th anniversary, and my wife got me a Kindle for a gift.  Wow!!!  I have had many a cool gadget in my day, it’s kind of my schtick, but this is the coolest of them all (until the iPhone 2.0).  But beyond being cool, I think this is the beginning of something big.

Now, I have had many e-book readers in the past, and all of them have sucked ass in one way or another.  The Kindle??  definitely does not suck ass!  While this bit of prose will be a semi-review of the Kindle, keep in mind that I am also talking about the future here, and it may not be the Kindle itself that drives the nail in the coffin of the printing presses.  But the coffin is closing, and things like the Kindle are doing it.

I toyed around with the Sony E-book reader a while, at the Borders store in town and I found it to be cumbersome, fuzzy and generally a joke.  Coupled with the paltry selection of books they have and it’s a dead product.  (And that is not just my pure hatred of Sony coming through, they can’t give them things away.)  I also used every version of my PDA with MS-Reader installed.  Too small for most books.

Well, in walks the Kindle, with it’s gorgeous screen, luscious lines and smoooooth buttons. (Ok the buttons aren’t smooth, but that line was getting kind sexy, no?)  It looks at you, with those little “read me” eyes and says - “I’ll even play your MP3s while you read, baby”.  Face it, you’re doing the reading rumba with this thing before you know it.  Best part is... in the morning, it’s still there, ready for the newspaper and a good comedy.

Truly, the screen on this thing is better than white paper.  It has just the right contrast for me, and the print font is perfect.  Of course, the font is scalable, so you can have teensy print or really big print, your choice.  It does everything a book will do an alot more.  You can dog-ear pages, annotate passages and even look up the really big words in the built in dictionary.

Truly, this thing is a wonder.  But beyond that, I think it is ushering in a new era.  Imagine if you will, an 8th grader on the first day of school.  Rather than getting a ton of books to lug around all year, he gets his Kindle (or similar) device with all the years books already loaded on it.  And not the old books that alot of our school systems are struggling along with, revised updated editions.  All the handouts that teachers would give out are now just uploaded to the classes Kindle’s and assignments are handed in the same way.  Even better, spin this up to the same kid in college.  Same device, just has to get the book(s) for each class uploaded at the beginning of the semester.  The cost savings to the school system are immense, as it is to the publishers and teachers.

Obviously, this is a few years down the road, but even now, I get the New York Times delivered to my Kindle every night, ready to read in the morning.  Time Magazine, same deal.  More are coming all the time.  Granted, Amazon is making money with the Kindle now, selling books and their selection is a tad bit limited.  But I have gone to a bunch of sites that offer many books free, all the great classics are totally free.

While I will not say that the Kindle or it’s progeny will kill print media, a device like it will.  A full blown laptop PC (Macbook Air?) with this screen, in this format is coming soon, and you will see it take the world like the iPod did.  Mark my words.

As to reviewing the Kindle itself, I have a hard time doing it fairly.  The thing is just about perfect.  I’m not sure if I am just so enamored with it, or if it is really this good.  I have thirty books on it right now, and I am finding myself staying up WAY too late reading.  What a joy that is!  The controls are intuitive and VERY easy to use, the management of the device is made incredibly easy by Amazon.  Maybe in a future blog I’ll have some things to say against it, but for now, I can’t give it up.

If you decide to get one, please use my store link to get it so I can buy some good books :)

E. Gary Gygax. Farewell, and thank you!

E.Gary Gygax - July 27, 1938 - May 4, 2008

I know, I know, he died in May and here it’s June before I get around to this.  Well, let me explain.  For a long time, I thought this guy was one of the bad guys.  Stealing the original D&D game from Dave Arneson and going on to make a bundle of $$ off someone else’s work.  Well, time and age make one do research and it turns out that my youthful derision of EGG was pretty much based in bullshit and here-say.  So, my apologies.  The delay, therefore comes from not really knowing what to say about a guy who changed your life, but you never met him.

Some folks relax by knitting, working on cars, gardening or whatever.  My particular, and favorite method, is Role Playing Games.  When not in one, I like to think about and modify the things that are going on in my world.  Not every waking moment, mind you, but my free time.  I find the mental challenge, the creative expression and the pure satisfaction of creating something to be very relaxing and enjoyable.  I wouldn’t have that were it not for EGG.  Surely, someone else would have done it, maybe better, maybe worse, but in this dimension, it was EGG who did it, and there ya go.  Thanks EGG!

He went through alot of crap in his life, especially when he was in charge of TSR.  He did manage to weather it all and kept doing RPG stuff through his whole life.  In 2007 he was publishing source books for the D20 system.  Pretty cool.

Now, here is a stretch for you.  Do we owe modern pop culture to E. Gary Gygax?  Let me explain.  Gygax makes a game called D&D.  It’s a pen and paper RPG, but then they come out with the Personal Computers (Apple II, Commodore 64 etc).  What games are pushing well on these?  Computerized RPGs.  Yes, there are a bunch more games and software than RPGs, but the D&D type games are a huge push in the industry.  Video technology is pushed by the needs of the game industry.  Some of the BIGGEST selling games ever, on any system, are RPGs.  Final Fantasy, NeverWinter Nights, Oblivion, Daggerfall and a host of other games are all computer RPGs.  I won’t even mention EverCrack, and World of Warcrack.  All this industy, all this development to perfect a system that was originally printed in a chainmail magazine...

Makes you wonder... maybe... a little.

I’d love to ruminate more, but I have to work on Pam’s character a bit so we can play a bit of 4E tonight :)