swfong

1. Dick Cheney's upcoming autobio justifying his misdeeds 2. Sarah Palin's ghost-written biography (do you think a person who doesn't read newspapers wrote a book all by herself?) which will be an unquestioned tome of her rants and raves.

I noticed a facebook friend took "What kind of wife you would make?", and based on her comment of "Gross" (she got the result of "Loving"), I couldn't resist. The facebook quiz is based on a graded answer scale. Each answer has an assigned value towards a certain result, and at the end of the quiz, the values are added together and whichever result total is higher, that's your answer. Anyone who has taken one of these quizzes knows its limitations. The worst question is "what's your favorite kind of music?" The five or six choices rarely encompass most people's music tastes ("Why can't I choose Norwegian Black Metal?") These quizzes reveal the travails of any programmer, specifically for games. A programmer anticipates the most likely outcomes and prepares appropriate responses, covered by all-inclusive "ELSE" statement. However, the QA repetition testing done by your typical twelve year-old will reveal any...

I thought about Joe Wilson some more. There are accusations that his outburst is related to racism, and that much of the "nazi-socialist" comments are based in racism. Of course, there was nothing he said, during the Obama's speech or afterwards, that was even remotely racist. However, it would be very easy for me to believe that a South Carolina Republican is racist to some extent. And when I see pictures of 9/12, teabagging, Obama-haters; I see older, blustery white people whose veins are popping with anger. On a personal level, it is easy to accuse any white person of being racist, or rather, it is particularly hard for whites to defend that they are not. Most people tend to spend time with their own racial group, black, white, Asian or Latino. There is nothing racist about that, but for whites, there is the idea that they are exclusionary towards minorities, which is racist. I also think it is hard to be conservative and be open minded to other races. By definitio...

I was watching a MSNBC discussion between two women from Texas but from opposite sides of the political spectrum. The topic was Obama's speech to schoolchildren. The conservative woman had no issues with the text of the speech but she was concerned about the "real message" Obama was sending. She also criticized how popular Obama is right now. Most of the anti-Obama speakers this morning complained that he was such a talented orator, we need to pay close attention to his speeches for the "real message". I am reminded about the popularity Reagan had when he was President. As skillful of a speaker as Obama is, he is no match for a professional actor. Reagan was vastly more popular than Obama, based on the electoral vote in 1984, where he carried all but one state. However, Reagan was demonized in much of the same way Obama is now. Reagan's grinning face was an icon for many radical and anarchistic movements, particularly punk rock. Statements like Morning in Am...