McCain just doesn’t strike me as having a good mental grip.
I know that politicans have to remember a lot of things. A ton of things. So many people, and facts, and a lot of the information they get, because they are so busy, is being fed to them by people–who, in fairness, are usually people picked by the candidate himself or herself, so the candidate bears a lot of culpability if they are being fed mis-information or spun information.
But McCain just doesn’t seem to me to have the mental sharpness to process, internalize, and communicate. Whether it is the gaffe over the Iraq-Pakistan border, Czechoslovakia, whether al-Qaeda is Sunni or Shia, how safe it is in any specific place in Iraq, or whatever, I know these all can be classified as just “verbal slip-ups”, but I’ll be damned if they don’t remind me way too much of George Bush. Maybe for some people that’s a good thing, but it isn’t for me. I want to have confidence that a presidential candidate really has a good grasp on issues they consider important, and if McCain is running on a platform as being the better man to tackle terrorism and terrorists, then he damn well better know what Muslim faction al-Qaeda belongs to. So far he has not demonstrated to me that he has a significant and comprehensive knowledge on even the topics he holds himself out as being knolwedgeable about, much less topics he doesn’t even pretend to know a lot about, such as economics. Given how much traditional conservatives used to care about economics, it just boggles the mind that you would have a Republican presidential candidate that isn’t extremely well versed in economics and economic policy. Of course, that would have required Ron Paul to get the nomination, and that did not happen.
My alternative is Obama, a candidate who suddenly decided that citizen rights really aren’t that important after all, and retroactive immunity is okey-dokey. Fight for the people dammit!! Give me some reason to believe you’re actually going to stand up for citizens, and not just for big government power. No?
Crap, time to “waste my vote” again on the Libertarian candidate. Maybe next election . . .
You want financial responsibility in a nutshell?
Air Force Officer Nick breaks it down for you.
Nick’s blog is worth a thorough read. He’s got a good head on his shoulders (volunteering for a tour in Iraq notwithstanding), and writes in easy-to-digest entries. And while it is true that not everyone is in a position to do what he did in order to reduce his debt load–reduce his expenses significantly and simultaneously increase his income, his fortitude should serve as an example to all of us still in the rat race.
I got to Nick through Mint.com’s blog, which I got to through Lifehack.org (I also recommend lifehacker.com, where I usually find something useful at least once a week). It’s amazing what you find when you click through a few pages and see where you end up–and I recommend all of the above. Make sure to give Nick an encouraging word when you get a chance.
Testing, and you should read it anyway.
I’m testing my Digg hookup to the blog, and luckily one of the dugg stories today links to a short story that is perhaps just as much my favorite as it was Asimov’s. I couldn’t tell you when I first read it, it seems like ages ago, but as a boy or young man I remember that in the span of a few pages it changed the way I approached thinking about the Universe.
I have two girls, the oldest being 3 1/2, and I fervently hope that as they get older that each at least reads a little bit in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. I hope that it would help them be able to think creatively, or at least that then we would have something to share.
Testing . . . testing.
Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
I participate in a local forum with a fair degree of frequency. Unlike blogs there is less control and the discussion tends to be much more fluid. But what I really find fascinating about it is that because people tend to post anonymously they will put down whatever crazy-ass, unresearched conclusion they’ve come to as if it’s solid fact. I thought I would take an opportunity to pull some gems from this local forum (actually no longer local to me since I’ve moved elsewhere in the state) that will make you say . . . . WTF!?!
Regarding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:
I thought it was great too. Did you hear that the Iranian “president” was not in the room for Bush’s speech? That man is not for peace. I can see the next war coming. I bet he’s getting ready to nuke us soon.
Here’s our local racist on how many Muslims are extremists as a percentage of the total world Muslim population:
And are these the same barbaric savages that can butcher and kill nuns with impunity in the name of a half-baked pedophile “prophet” fresh out of the most backward looking/living 6th century “culture” of death the world has ever seen while the dims expect us to look for “common ground” as we slowly sinks into a cesspool of islamic bullsht….
Yep…the bad ones give the other .0000000000000000000000001% a bad rap…..
Our resident Democrat antagonist (praising Hugo Chavez):
Huge Chavez, the champion of the poor in his country and all over the world, in his dramatic speech at the UN, called Bush a devil! This sure is a man who knows how to call a spade a spade!
(Don’t worry, there are also dedicated Republican antagonists, too)
We’ve got some tinfoil hattery about Bush making some shadowy allusion to demolition of the WTC towers:
Yea, they were flown in…and according the BUSH HIMSELF explosives were present as well…
Then of course there are the various board bombers that post nothing but copied and pasted articles en masse. I know all of this stuff exists in the blogosphere, but really some days there is no substitute for getting down and rolling in common forum crazy, which I do almost every day. Sometimes it can be a real chore to fire up a blog you know is just going to post ridiculousness, even though in order to stay on top of the game you have to know what the other side is arguing. With forums you get most of that without having to trudge all over the damn Internet, plus because it is one place to interact there is a great deal of convenience. As long as you get some regular new blood, it’s a great way to keep current, especially on what the partisan talking points are.
At the end of the day, though, it’s always hard to tell whether your voice has made any difference, right? The racist gets up the next day and is still a racist. The tinfoil hattery just gets tinfoilier. The partisans inch further towards the edges in reaction to each other. Some days you feel like no one is interested in having actual conversation. So you get a place where you can just set up your soap box and start to yammer, even if no one is in the forest to hear you. Local forum crazy, I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn’t have it as part of their standard Internet addiction.
