I can’t believe it’s not Butters

I’m really, really suprised by McCain’s pick for Vice-President, as is everyone else in the world — even the people who were running the grass-roots movement to get her selected.  Sarah Palin.  Hockey-mom.  Mayor of a 7000 person town until elected Governor or Alaska less than two years ago.  Wow.

Playing on a lightbeam

OK, we just got Verizon Fios installed and it’s awesome.  We got the package deal with Internet, TV and phone all for less than what we were paying to Comcast, local phone service, and ATT long distance.  Everything comes into the house on a fiber-optic cable and is converted to run on the existing wiring for the phone, and on coax cable for the internet and TV.

Western Hypocrites

South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgia during civil wars in the 1990s. Russia strengthened ties with them after the U.S. and much of Europe recognized the independence of the Serbian province of Kosovo earlier this year, a move that Moscow had warned against.

Russia condemned for recognizing rebel regions – CNN.com.

And now the US and EU and UN are all mad that Russia has recognized S.Ossetia

Cold War V2.0

So many things going on in The Republic of Georgia now.  Russia is maintaining Peacekeeping Checkpoints, and The West says that’s against the cease-fire agreement.  Russia says otherwise, referring to an earlier agreement from 1992.  You’d think that the people who write these cease-fires would make the details clear, but alas, politicians are always involved and they can’t seem to do much right.

Brad Warner to appear on CNN Aug 24

Writer Brad Warner will appear on CNN Sunday Morning Aug 24, 2008, 7am Eastern Time, 4am Pacific Time.  Looks like it might be replayed at 9am ET, 6am PT, but I’m not sure.

Brad Warner wrote Hardcore Zen and has a new book coming out Feb 2009.

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Gorbachev blames Georgia for provoking war, West for backing it

WASHINGTON, August 15 (RIA Novosti) – Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has blamed Georgia for provoking hostilities in its breakaway region of South Ossetia and criticized Western states for backing Tbilisi.

Appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Thursday, Gorbachev said Russia had moved additional forces into South Ossetia in response to the “devastation” in the South Ossetia capital of Tskhinvali.

“This was the use of sophisticated weapons against a small town, against a sleeping people. This was a barbaric assault,” Gorbachev told CNN.

RIA Novosti – World – Gorbachev blames Georgia for provoking war, West for backing it.

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I just found this.  Gorbachev goes on to say that it appears the US had prior knowledge of the attack against South Ossetia.  To date, more than 1400 South Ossetians have been killed in the conflict.

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Further Thoughts on South Ossetia

Apparently, my patriotism has come into question since writing my last thoughts on Georgia attacking South Ossetia.  That’s a small joke I suppose (is it?), but I think that I need to evaluate my opinion, and while I’ve kept an open mind while reading other sources, I keep finding more and more to bolster my opinion.

You know, just because I live in the US, I don’t have to believe everything our President says (especially Bush), and I don’t have to believe everything I see on the news either.  There’s no question

South Ossetia planned by America?

This blog claims that America actually supported and planned Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia.  It doesn’t seem at all far-fetched to me.  I support Russia’s defense of the region.

There’s all these reports of Russia attacking civilians, and now I read that Georgia was attacking civilians too. Is any of it true? How can we know unless we personally know someone who was eyewitness to the thing? It seems strange that we didn’t hear anything of Georgia’s attack until Russia attacked them back, then it was all over the news here in the US of how brutal the Russian army is.

I keep seeing the leader of Georgia on news shows. He’s an excellent speaker, but all he talks about is how Georgia is being victimized. I’d like to hear why they attacked South Ossetia in the first place. The linked blogger makes another good point that had NATO been hooked up, as is planned, all of Europe would have been involved in this fiasco.

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Discovery of Soto Zen

Buddhism is a religion / philosophy developed by Siddhartha Gautama in India about 500BC.

Mahayana is a classification of Buddhism.

Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism.

Soto is a sect of Zen.

I guess everybody goes through at least part of their life wondering if God exists,

Steam Unable to Connect

08/05/2008

Stupid Steam (from Valve [it's for games]).

Said it “appears that you have no connection to the internet,” even though I did. That started two days ago. I thought surely it was my Comcast connection, but everything else appeared fine. Worked on it a couple of hours a day. Looked for Spyware, Adware, Viruses, even uninstalled AVG anti-virus on the advice of Valve (even though Steam worked fine with AVG before).

Finally, I came across this advice: delete clientregistry.blob, steam.dll and steamclient.dll from the steam folder and restart Steam. It worked! Just make sure you have your password, because it will download and update and ask for your username and password again.

Hallelulah!

Forum Post with solution

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