At the risk of turning this blog into an endless list of political essays you should read elsewhere, here are a couple more:

High plains grifter: The life and crimes of George W. Bush is sort of a Cliff’s notes version of Molly Ivins’ excellent Shrub for people who don’t have time to read that. Incidentally, everyone who didn’t already read Shrub years ago should really do so.

The Great Divide offers a new approach to dividing the American nation into two: Instead of republican vs. democrat, it’s “metro vs. retro”. I haven’t read this yet, but it seems interesting, not least because in addition to being able to buy it from Amazon, you can also download the whole thing for free, which I heartily applaud.

In democratic circles, John McCain is often considered to be fairly tolerable (for a republican), and is sometimes thought to be somewhat “like us”, since he has had some public disagreements with Bush’s policies.

At the RNC yesterday, however, most of this went out the window, at least as far as I’m concerned. McCain made a clear jab at Michael Moore (which Moore seemed to take pretty well) in the midst of his praise of the Bush regime’s foreign policy mess:

“Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise — not our political opponents, and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker […] who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when, in fact, it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.”

Frankly, I’m beginning to get pretty tired of this sort of straw-man argument where the liars of the right claim that anyone who questions Bush’s policies is actually a big Saddam supporter. When has Moore, or any liberal for that matter, ever claimed that “Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace” or anything similar? On the contrary, well-informed liberals have been critical of Saddam since the 70’s and 80’s, since even before the time when the Gipper sent Rummy to shake the old bastard’s hand and sell him some weapons.

Garrison Keiller wrote a nice essay with the incredibly long title "We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore: How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk? — In These Times" which everybody should read. A choice quote:

[…] angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is another term of date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

An interesting but huge article explains what conservatism really boils down to (maintaining a ruling aristocracy) and the tricks used to keep this antiquated world-view in power. Check it out if you’ve got a half-hour to burn.

Check out William Rivers Pitt’s excellent open letter to George W. Bush. Good stuff from truthout.

OK, things have been pretty quiet around here. I’ve been busy with traveling and ongoing parental leave, but at some point soon I’ll get back on track with the nuthole, and hopefully post a new version of spinvaders soon.

A few small steps forward in the life of spinvaders:

• Monsters killed with the “super gun” now fall burning from the sky! Prepare to be terrified.


• New sound effects, in stereo! Crank it up!


• Changed player death behavior: If monsters reach bottom, restart level. If player is hit by a bullet, just lose a life and continue the level in progress.


• Gameplay and speeds tweaked to maximize your Fahrvergnügen.


• While the game is paused or switching screen modes, audio output is paused.


• Mac version now has a reasonable (but somewhat incomplete) menu thanks to PyObjC and a proper nib file.


• Windows version now has an icon.


• Internal code reorganisation to make my life easier.


• Added CHANGES.txt and README.txt to distribution.

And here’s where to get it:

• spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)


• spinvaders for Windows (95/98/ME/W2K/XP)

Installation is the same as before: The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting “spinvaders.exe” from within the directory.

Go nuts.

Hmmm. For a long time, I’ve consistently held the opinion that even though the U.S invasion of Iraq is wrong-headed, that the troops who are stuck in the mess over there are worthy of support, since none of them created this war and are presumably trying to make the best of a tough situation.

But then again, there are things like this
Don’t Loot
video that are just scary as all get-out. For those who haven’t/can’t/won’t view that clip, here’s an executive summary of this brief clip from frontline:

• Somewhere in Iraq, looting is occurring. Reporters arrive on the scene.


• U.S. soldiers are there, and have arrested some men for looting. The men have apparently taken a couple armloads of lumber and stacked it on top of their car.


• One soldier explains for the camera that “We tried to stop them from looting, they don’t understand, so we’ll take their car and we’ll crush it.”


• A couple of soldiers shoot at the car with pistols a bit.


• The soldiers crush the car by driving a tank over it.

I think that the mental exercise of reversing roles can be a useful thing to do here. What if my country was on the verge of civil war after an invading army had removed a brutal dictator but simultaneously destroyed much of my country’s infrastructure? Perhaps lumber would be hard to come by. Perhaps I might take advantage of available resources, particularly if it seemed like they were going unused. I sure don’t that that punishing me for this “crime” by crushing my only means of transportation would be a noble endeavor on the invading army’s part.

In my copious amounts of spare time (ha), I’ve recently been teaching myself both python and game programming using a fine cross-platform library called pygame. I have some results!

spinvaders is a direct descendant of the old “Space Invaders” type of game. This first public test release, version 0.0.1, is fully playable and may even be fun! The controls for the game are described at the startup screen, everything should be pretty obvious. One undocumented feature of this test version is that pressing “J” will let you jump to any level.

• spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)


• spinvaders for Windows (95/98/ME/W2K/XP)

The Mac version is in a disk image; you can copy the enclosed application and run it from wherever you like. The Windows version is a zip file containing a directory; unpack the directory wherever you like, and run it by starting “spinvaders.exe” from within the directory.

Please try it out and let me know what you think by adding a comment below.

In Swedish, slutspurt means roughly “final push” and can be applied to almost anything: the conclusion of a sporting event, the final stages of a project, etc.

In English, Slutspurt just sounds like the name of a porn flick. Perhaps even a whole series!