I did not hear about McCain’s pick for VP until Friday afternoon when I was having lunch with a friend, and she told me who he picked. I had seen earlier that morning that some governor, Sarah Palin, was a good possibility…but nothing had been confirmed then. As my friend told me about Gov. Palin, I was intrigued and read up on her when I got back later that afternoon.

Late in that afternoon, I noticed that my good friend from college, Aaron Blake Huddleston, wrote up a great article detailing strengths and weaknesses regarding McCain’s pick of Gov. Sarah Palin for VP on a note on Facebook. He did a great job on the research and explaining a few not easily understood topics. With his permission, I am posting it here on my blog for anyone who is interested, or not interested since it should not be confined to those on Facebook. Give it a read, even if you don’t really care.

I think that Gov. Sarah Palin was an excellent choice for Senator McCain. (True, I would have preferred he choose Huckabee, but that’s beside the point.)

Strengths

Gov. Palin is a woman which will help Senator McCain go after some of the swing votes who liked Senator Clinton but don’t like Senator Obama. This is not to suggest that Hillary supporters would vote for anything in a skirt, but simply that (in some cases) the fact that she is a woman will help get their attention so they’ll hear what McCain/Palin have to say.

Gov. Palin is a TRUE conservative. Sen. McCain needs to earn the trust of right wingers. He’s a self-described Maverick. He’s considered moderate, and slightly left of where most conservative voters are comfortable placing their votes. Having a TRUE conservative on the ticket with him will help bring him back into favor with those who were concerned about this (and about his ability to appoint the right kind of justices).

Gov. Palin is STRONGLY pro-life. She is a part of the group Feminists for Life. This will help Sen. McCain secure the pro-life vote (a large group who were on the fence about him because of some of the people on his VP short-list).

Gov. Palin is a bit of a maverick herself. While staying true to conservative values and platform, Gov. Palin has spent her time in office digging out corruption, throwing out old policy (set in place by republicans) that just wasn’t working, and “cleaning house” of appointed officials who were either corrupt or just not doing their jobs well. This will take the wind out of the sails of Sen. Obama’s “Agent of Change” campaign. Sen. Obama has no record to support his claims to be an agent of change, and his VP pick CERTAINLY is not an agent of change. Meanwhile, Sen. McCain has proven he can go against President Bush’s policies and incite change where it is needed (the Surge, for example), and Gov. Palin’s entire time in office has been about changing what was wrong with the previous administration.

More on Gov. Palin’s maverickhood….This will also help Sen. McCain fight the attacks from Sen. Obama that he will be “a third term for Bush.” By pointing out Gov. Palin’s history of digging out what was wrong with the previous republican administration and fixing it, Sen. McCain can argue that he intends to do the same with the White House.

Gov. Palin can win votes and trust. Gov. Palin’s approval rating has never been under 80%, and, in fact, has been over 90% for much of her time in office. This shows that she is able to win people over, that she is good at what she does, and that she will be able to help secure votes.

She’s a surprise! Weird that it’s a strength, but it is. Nobody had even considered her an option until they found out that it WAS her. People were surprised, almost shocked, when they heard. This is good for the campaign because it keeps it in the news. She’s such a surprise and such a shock, that the media will want to pay a lot of attention to her in the coming weeks and months (especially because they missed her in the coverage leading up to her selection when they were focussed on Gov. Romney and Gov. Ridge). This continued media coverage will help the McCain campaign get face time in what has (thus far) been dominated by Sen. Obama.

Weaknesses

Inexperience. Sen. Obama’s campaign has tried to argue that Gov. Palin doesn’t have enough experience to be “a heartbeat away from the presidency.” However, Gov. Palin’s experience makes Sen. Obama look like a school boy in some ways. While she is only a 1-term governor of a smaller state, her time there has done well to prepare her for this office. She is one of few governors who can boast foreign policy experience. Because of Alaska’s location, she has had to work out foreign policy with both Canada and Russia. Being governor has given her administrative and executive experience. She has accomplished more for the state in her 1 term as governor than Sen. Obama has done in his time as a Senator from Illinois. (Where he passed no legislation, and missed most of his votes).

Speaking ability. This is a big one (and one of the reasons I would have preferred Huckabee). While the text of her speech today was good, her delivery left something to be desired. She didn’t know how to handle a crowd that big and often found herself stuttering and seeming very awkward whenever the crowd would erupt into cheers. With a weak public speaking ability like that, I fear she will not be able to hold her own against the very experienced Sen. Biden.

The controversy. Okay, it had to be mentioned (even though it’s pathetic)…There IS a slight controversy surrounding her in Alaska right now. It seems she fired the Public Safety Commissioner in Alaska. She says that she did this because there were State Trooper vacancies that were not being filled (in other words, he wasn’t doing his job). The former commissioner claimed that it was because he didn’t fire her sister’s ex-husband (a state trooper) who was engaged in a bitter custody battle with Gov. Palin’s sister. Apparently a member of Gov. Palin’s administration had contacted him to discuss the issue of firing this state trooper without Gov. Palin’s knowledge. When she found out, she placed this member of her administration on a 2 month suspension for acting outside of the scope of his authority. An investigation was later launched, which Gov. Palin welcomed, opening up her files and saying she had nothing to hide. Those conducting the investigation have not had to subpoena anything because she has given full cooperation, and they’ve come up with nothing on her. Also, before we get carried away with the man asking that this state trooper be fired, let’s look at why he was making the request. It was not because he had divorced Gov. Palin’s sister. It was because he had threatened to kill his father-in-law (yes, the Governor’s father, but that doesn’t matter…he threatened to kill an innocent civilian…), he had tasered his 11-year-old step-son (at the boy’s request, but it’s still not allowed), and he had broken gaming laws. To me, that’s 3 strikes you’re out. Those were the reasons that a member of the administration asked about firing the state trooper, it had nothing to do with the Governor’s sister, and it was done without Gov. Palen’s knowledge. All that said, as much BS as the controversy is, it is possible that Sen. Obama and his campaign will attempt to exploit it to deceive voters into thinking Gov. Palin is corrupt (although certainly voters are smart enough to see Sen. Biden’s corruption…).

She’s a surprise. Yes, I listed this as a strength as well. For all of those reasons it’s a good thing. But for this reason it’s a bad thing: Nobody knows much about her. All that I know I found out through researching her extensively today, but the average voter doesn’t know much about her. That’s bad on 2 levels. First of all, it’s bad because she doesn’t have a name recognition that will automatically bring some voters over…she’ll have to work hard for all the votes she gets. The second reason it’s bad is because, sadly, most voters aren’t as responsible as me. Rather than dig and search and do their own research on Gov. Palin, they will wait and listen to what sources like CNN and MSNBC have to say about her. Which means they will get all of their information about her from sources with a definite bias. This could definitely hurt the McCain/Palin campaign.

In all, I think she was a very wise choice, but they will have a few bullets to dodge. Hopefully Sen. McCain’s campaign advisors are up to the challenge. I just thank the Lord that Sen. McCain picked a true conservative running mate instead of somebody like Gov. Ridge…I wasn’t sure what I would do if he’d picked Gov. Ridge or Sen. Lieberman.

posted from http://www.new.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=38317098696&ref=mf

I knew most of the points that he made already, but Aaron did a great job summarizing them and showing how each point could go one way or the other.

Thanks Aaron for clearing up the “controversial” issue with Sarah Palin…The news tried to explain it, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t get “the controversy” totally until reading his post.

Yep, I agree, she’s not Huckabee, but she’s still a great choice.

P.S. I did think it was amuzing that a search for Sarah Palin on Facebook already results in precisely 480 groups (at this moment) dedicated to loving her, hating her, or hitting on her. Check it out.

Soldier, prisoner, writer, and philosopher Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died Sunday evening, August 3rd, 2008. Growing up in the Soviet Union, he served as a decorated commander for the Red Army, yet he was arrested for an anti-Soviet comment made in a personal letter in early 1945. He was promptly placed in a labor camp called Ekibastuz, which gave him the foundational experiences to write One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a complete account of a real life day under Stalinist repression. Throughout the rest of his life, Alexandr continued to write, despite Soviet/Russian efforts to censor his works. In 1970, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but had to wait to accept the award because he was unsure if the Soviet Union would allow him to return at that time. By 1974, he had been deported, and accepted the award at that time.

If you would like to learn more about his life and struggles, you can learn more about him, or read a speech he gave to Harvard classes in 1970.

Alexandr lived a full life, experiencing the depravity that exists, and the atrocities that are committed every day. He rightly states the reason for all of this, our rejection of God most high:

Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life.

Solzhenitsyn had a good head on his shoulders. He seems to have understood the essence of human nature, and how it can drive mad people to do heart wrenching things. He also understood that it wasn’t just certain people, like Stalin, or Hitler, or the Red Army soldiers who rape a Polish woman just because she looked German. No, he says it best in one of my favorite quotes:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? -Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

You will be missed, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Thank you for your legacy, your compassion, and your hard words courageously expressed amidst a fallen world.

Microsoft just decided to pull off a ridiculous PR stunt with their “Mojave Experiment” this past week.

Apparently the word-of-mouth campaign that us techie people have initiated without any real organization has informed all of our non-geek friends of our innate dislike of Vista. Yeah, everyone knows that Vista is crappy, from the media, from us IT people, from actual users.

Microsoft decided that our friends needed a second opinion.

Their answer was the “Mojave Experiment” where they talked to 140 non-Vista users about their thoughts on Vista, and then had them “test-drive” the “newest” version of Windows, Windows Mojave. I’m guessing that Microsoft hacked their own system to replace all occurrences of “Vista” with “Mojave” for these purposes.

After watching the intro video, click on some of the other faces to get different *select* reactions. Also, be sure to check out the “facts” where Microsoft propagates what a truly awesome product Vista is, and tells us *some* of the stats and methods used in this experiment.

According to the site, they used an HP Pavillion DV2000, with 2GB of RAM…that is all the info given about the computer used. Let it be known that base model specs only come with 1GB of RAM, and use integrated graphics card, but I would bet that they upgraded to the Nvidia GeForce Go 7200 for this model, if not a higher end card. But you don’t get the kind of hardware you need to run Vista on a brand new computer. You know they probably maxed out the notebook as much as possible, installed the O/S without all the extra junk you get on a new computer these days, ensure that all the correct drivers were working before allowing the users to test spin it.

Tell me, do you really think they would let the test users experience awful tasks such as hooking up external devices to the computer for the first time, trying to configure a network, installing new software (thank you UAC!), or try to run multiple high performance programs (i.e. Firefox…or, ahem, I mean, IE7 and Adobe Photoshop and AIM, er, I mean, Windows Messenger, and Outlook, etc) all at the same time. See if there is no slow down there.

According to the site, which you can verify for yourself, most of the users were completely surprised that what they were being showed was actually Vista. I am guessing that like I said, these users were probably allowed to do simple tasks one at a time like play a card game of Spider Solitaire, check their Hotmail email, and type up a simple document, without any heavy duty testing that might happen in a real world environment.

But this guy, though the site calls him a skeptic, probably shows these true colors of this PR stunt.

Claim: “Windows Mojave really is Windows Vista.”

Response: “But why is it faster?”

He saw through these phonies. Obviously, these experimenters weren’t playing quite fair as I have stated.

UPDATE:
A couple of other thoughts I had: Why is the site created in Adobe Flash? Why not use their own Silverlight? I’ll tell you why. Because they want people to actually see the videos and people don’t want to have to download another plugin to view the website. I don’t have Silverlight.
Also, which version of Vista did they actually show users? I guarantee you it wasn’t Vista Basic, even though that is the prime operating system that comes on new computers now.

About half a year ago I learned that Facebook had a new look in the mix. Today, that look has been gradually released to its users a little at a time. I did not know about this (as I have not been asked to change over as of yet) until I read a few friend’s status updates commenting on the new look. Therefore, I checked the Facebook blog, and sure enough there was a post about the new look. There was also a link to check it out if we had not seen the new site yet. So I clicked it.

Go ahead an follow through the image gallery to learn about the New Facebook look, and my thoughts on it.

[Show as slideshow]

The Classic Crime presents their fans with their full length sophomore effort The Silver Chord on Tuesday, July 22^nd. Four days before the release, the band made public the full album in conjunction with Myspace Music. On the heels of their Seattle EP released last fall, The Silver Chord offers fans a harder and darker work, slightly tainted by repeating lyrics.

The silver chord is a term directly taken from the Bible. Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 says just before the well known Meaningless passage,

“Remember [your Creator]-before the silver chord is severed…and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.”

The silver chord is a representation of life, a life given by the Creator just once to every man. And likewise, The Silver Cord album is a representation of the ups and downs of life, a searching for that one thing, that longing.

Before I talk more in depth about the songs themselves, there is one thing that brings the album as a whole down. This is the fact that certain terms and phrases are repeated over and over and over again in most songs. However, the vocalist does use different pitches and volumes and melodies during the ad naseum that follows the changing of the beat, melody and tempo of the song.

The CD begins with a track called “The End,” and ends with a track called “The Beginning.” “The End” is a sorrowful song about a hard fought battle and leading followers into an ambush. Shame is present, and leads into the next song, “Just A Man”, which deals with regrets. Choices were made because they were the easy thing to do instead of the right thing to do (especially as a leader). (”I’m just a man” ad naseum.)

One of the first singles from this CD, “Gravedigging” is about a man’s struggle with suicide…resorting to digging his own grave because things in life are useless…leading others to follow (the last line exclaims, “We’re digging our own grave!”).

“The Way That You Are” is a song directed towards a guy and a girl in separate verses (makes me think of TFK’s “This Is A Call”). Ultimately they are both discouraged by their life, and the song encourages them not to let what others think become what they really are or could be. (”This is the way that you are” ad naseum.)

The next song, “5805″ begins by reminding me of the music of a modern waltz with vocals. The lyrics are a reminiscence and longing for the good times gone by growing up, spending time with our friends and listening to concerts shouting at the top of our lungs. (”Like that” ad naseum.)

“Salt in the Snow” is a look at where the singer is right now in life, how “like salt in the snow / I’m melted and left on the side of the road.” He is not pleased or happy with where he is, and so he is looking to the hope that “winter’s cold will give way to summer’s warmth.” Powerfully, he cries out to someone bigger than himself (God?), “I took you for granted again….I was wrong again / are you listening?” (”Woah…” ad nauseum.)

The first single released last month, “Abracadavers”, is a rant against vanity and selfishness. “We’re all the same, made of hair and bones and water and blood cells / We’re all to blame for spending way too much time on ourselves.” We’re all human but we think we can make ourselves look better than any other human, but in reality the way we really grow and become a true hero is through suffering.

“R and R” is a regret of choosing to run away and a longing for home. Like the title implies, the seeker is looking for true Rest and Relaxation where he belongs. (”How long, how long?” and “Woah” ad naseum.)

“God and Drugs” acknowledges that God won’t go away, even while we look elsewhere for Him through our own efforts. (”Oh oh oh oh” ad naseum.) Similar to it, “Medisin” is an interesting twist on a common concept. Usually, we take medicine to help our bodies stay alive. But this song acknowledges that we also indulge in sin in the same way, to try and stay alive. However, the singer knows that “there is more to life” than taking the tranquilizing medicine of sin to keep him asleep and in oblivious slavery.

“The Ascent” is a voiceless track 1:54 long, with an upbeat and hopeful feel. This is immediately followed by “Sing,” which is a synthetically accented song calling for the singer himself to sing, to lift spirits, and change things for the better

The next track, “Everything” is a song about the pleasures of intimacy of the singer with his girl, and his love and longing for her.

“Closer Than We Think” reveals that in spite of the downs in life, “I am true and I am living” An attention-grabbing play on a line in the well known 23^rd Psalm says that “We will walk through the valley of the shadow of the boring and we will burn it all. We will not go quietly” But this is all because of the hope that “that despite what we’ve done, we’re closer than we think to home.” (”To home…” ad naseum.)

The last song, called “The Beginning” feels hopeful, as the singer is finally coming home (which could be symbolized as his homeland, his girl, and/or his God, maybe all three) and the revelation hits him that God has taken his life, through the ups and downs, and continues to make him a beautiful thing. (”The sea…” and “I’d let her go” ad naseum.)

Ultimately, The Silver Chord is a stirring account of life’s experiences. The Classic Crime was not afraid to be truthful and honest about these experiences and feelings, which is evident in the various struggles each song exemplifies. Life is a journey, and the only thing you can do is press on through the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, searching and longing for something else. That something else is home. That is The Silver Chord.

My Rating: