Let's have a common sense excercise:
Wilson, a civilian, is sent over to African to find out about the yellow cake claims.
He comes back and not only reports that that the story was unfounded but writes op-eds to the New York Times blasting the Bush administration.
Either:
a) Wilson was stupid for not thinking that people would want to find out how the hell he got the job to go to Africa.
His wife was stupid for pulling strings to get him the assignment since inevitably, questions would be raised as to how in the world this guy got this assignment.
c) The CIA was stupid for sending a Bush critic over to Africa on this assignment without thinking that people would ask how he got the job in the first place.
As soon as he started slamming Bush publicly, his wife's career was over. Not as some sort of revenge but basic investigative reporting -- HOW did a Bush critic get such an important assignment in the first place? Answer: His wife, who works at the CIA, set it up.
George W. Bush is on the brink of having his presidency remembered as a failure. His poll numbers are very low -- less than 40%. That's worse that Reagan's at the height of Iran-Contra and Clinton's during impeachment. How did it come to this?
Simply put, Bush's character flaws and poor judgment finally passed an unspoken threshold in which people, even those inclined to support his policies, have concluded that Bush is a lost cause.
The straw that broke the camel's back was Hariet Miers. His nomination of her to the supreme court might as well have been a confession that Bush's detractors were right on some of their points: Bush is a shallow, unintelligent, old rich boy who is so far removed from ordinary people that he has few of their values. That nomination demonstrated croneyism at its worse and given how much under the microscope modern presidents are, it revealed a mind boggling arrogance.
Sure, Miers is no longer in the running. But it doesn't matter. The damage is done. We no longer know whether Bush is driven by what is best for the country instead of doing favors for his friends. The reason things like Halliburton never stuck the the President (other than in the minds of the whacko left) is because it was unimaginable that the administration would be so stupid and corrupt to send deals to their friends so brazenly. There's so many other reasonable and more likely explanations about Halliburton that the charges of excess make no sense. But yet...now...there's that tingling of doubt. Anyone who would appoint their own personal attorney to the supreme court...you never know...
Then there's the botching of fiscal policy. Conservates like tax cuts because A) the government is too inept to really help people effectively (Katrina kind of sent that message home) and hence people are better off having as much of their money as possible to spend more wisely. And In theory, tax cuts force the government to become smaller.
But look out, here comes Bush. He'll cut taxes and have party. With Republican control of both houses and the Presidency, the conservatives should be able to institute their long-claimed desire of smaller government and effective fiscal policy. Instead, we have deficits that bordering on insulting in that congress and the President want to throw money at everything.
Then there's the war in Iraq. I supported the invasion. I am glad we went in there. I am still glad we toppled Saddam. The idea in a post 9/11 world that we'd allow a guy like Saddam to stay in power in a strategically vital region is nuts. He had to go. But he's gone now. And over two years have passed and it's still a mess over there. Yes yes, we're still over in Korea, Japan, and Germany and pretty much everywhere else we've ever fought a war. But we're not having to keep 150,000 combat troops those places. We're not having to suck down the National guard in those places. At some point, Iraq is going to have to sink or swim on its own. If their people don't care enough about freedom and keeping themselves from becoming a terrorist state, then there's nothing we can do about that. Not to make too fine a point on it but it was relativley cheap to deal with Afghanistan and Iraq the first time. The rehabilitation of Iraq is proving to be far more costly.
Until recently, I had hoped that the administration had quietly let the Iraqi's know that they have until say next May to get their act together because at that point we would declare victory and start to bring troops back (not all of course, 10,000 here, 10,000 there). I just don't have the confidence that Bush's team knows what they're doing over there.
If there's any "anti-war" people reading this, don't get your hopes up that I'm coming on your side. My complaint is that we're not being tougher. I would have the "glass surface nation" policy if I were emperor. Deterrence may not work on terrorists but you can bet your ass that it would motivate the host countries of these terrorists to weed them out.
But on this and many other policies Bush wants to have it both ways. Sometimes you have to make a tough decision and go all the way. Half-way usually fails and satisfies neither contingent.
It's not so much that any of these things on its own is enough to cause me to lose faith in Bush. It's the combination. When put together (particularly the Miers nomination) it gives credence to the belief that Bush really is just a pampered good old boy of sub-normal intelligence who really has no business being President but is only President because the left-wing of American politics took a sanity vacation (which they're still on) and gave us no viable alternative (I mean what the hell were you left wingers thinking? Michael Moore sitting next to Carter at the DNC?? Hello! Goddam nutballs need to take your noses out of Cindy Sheehan's rear end and get your act together and realize how pathetic your party is when you can't beat someone like Bush).
American politics has to be near the bottom it's ever been. You have the Republicans in full corruption croney-loving mode. And the Democrats are taking pride in their new status of being the party of victims and losers (as if that's a good thing).
We need a viable third-party.
Last night we updated to beta 4A.
Here's what's new:
1) Added some new music -- different races start with their own sound track.
2) Initial race theme music lasts first year, then changes to a broader sound track.
3) Clicking on an uncolonized planet to look at the planet closer won't crash anymore.
4) The technology rate slider at the start of the game has been hooked up, balanced and tested. At "Very fast" techs are a little more than half as much as normal. At very long they are over twice as long to get.
5) Fixed a low level math function that a lot of things counted on that will likely cause things to work more like they were designed.
6) Tweaked the habitable planet slider. Too many good planets in all settings before, now more varied. No more class 1, 2, 3, 4 planets (they're just useless other than as outposts and that's what starbases are for -- the micro management involved in dealing with them wasn't worth their value as outposts. Class 1 planets may return later.).
On the Stardock Central front:
Installation is still a pain. SDC is a great technology for delivering final product.s But it is less well suited to very large things that are being updated regularly. Last night we switched it to sending the finals individulaly rather than sending single large compressed SDC files. The old SDC client is a bit slow downloading the individual files, the new client that we hope to release next week is much MUCH faster. But this way, downloading should become a lot more reliable and doing updates a lot less painful.
Stardock has released WindowBlinds 5 beta 2 this week. WindowBlinds 5 is designed to customize the look & feel of the Windows GUI. The new version has been completely re-architected to be significantly faster, have more features, and provide new effects for skinners.
Beta 2 includes a host of bug fixes, performance optimizations, and more. Here are some highlights:
The beta is currently only available for Object Desktop users (www.objectdesktop.com). WindowBlinds 5 should be publicly available before the end of the year.
Galactic Civilizations II: BETA 4 has arrived to beta testers. User who pre-ordered after Beta 3 was released should be able to get it tomorrow. Which should work out as we will be releasing Beta 3A tomorrow which will have some fixes based on whatever gets reported tonight.
There are so many new features in Beta 4 that it's hard to itemize them. There's a post in the forum that does it to a very weak degree. Beta 4 is the first beta that could be described as letting players actually play a "game".
Here are some of my personal opinions on what's the "big" stuff in beta 4:
Now, all that said, the game is still no where near done. There are a lot of unimplemented features. We have until the end of November to get all the basic features in. Then after that it's two months of polishing, playtesting, bug fixing and tweaking. Then it's off to manufacturing and translation into German, French, etc. to go for a late February retail release at your local store.
For anyone having any problems or who just wants to talk to the dev team, some of us are on #galciv.
You can reach that through Stardock Central in the chat area. Just type /join #galciv once you're on.
Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords
v0.75 BETA 4 Release (November 3, 2005)
------------------------------------
Notes for v0.75 BETA Release
+ LOTS OF STUFF
+ Fleets
+ New Options Screen
+ Fleet Battles
+ Detailed ship battles
+ Metaverse Basics
+ Custom Map support (2 maps included)
+ Custom Scenario support (no scenarios included yet)
+ Technology Research rate (not hooked up yet)
+ New alien portratis
+ New choose your race screen
+ Civilizations have unique traits
+ 3 new types of ship styles
+ Robot girl in
+ Updated technology tree -- LOTS of new techs
+ New Research screen
+ Earth is in
+ New Improvement icons
+ Colonies can focus their production
+ Every race has their own unique star system (Earth, Mars, Jupiter, saturn, etc.)
+ Main screen displays the power bar
+ Rally Points in (though buggy)
+ Mini-map zoom button
+ Approval rating displayed on main screen
+ General UI clean-up across game
+ Rename Object icon (more apparent to rename ships)
+ Planetary Improvement governor in (ship governor NOT in yet)
+ Gov can automate planetary improvement upgrades
+ Gov can automate terraforming
+ Assgn Rally points from star port
+ New music in game (Yes, we are going to add a lot mroe background music)
+ New sound effects
+ Effects based on ethical alignment
+ Starting funds increased
+ GNN news inserted
+ Hot keys in
+ Bar graph in domestic policy
+ Foreign policy screen in
+ Governments in
+ Election window in (But buggy)
+ Goto button on ships
+ LOTS of other things.
Tomorrow beta 4 will be released to the Galactic Civilizations II beta team. Users who have pre-ordered the game will be able to download the game from Stardock Central.
This will be the first build in which the basic game mechanics of the game will be somewhat implemented (i.e. the first beta that actually includes real game play as opposed to engine testing).
We are particularly looking for players who have Windows 98, ME, and 2000 to give feedback so that we know how well we're performing on those systems (we have machines in our lab but real world users are always preferred).
This version will also have the ship textures in. We're still holding out on a lot of graphics and multimedia (and the campaign of course) so that the final game has plenty new in it. Like last time, Stardock will be making a BonusPak that will be available on ship day that will include some extra goodies and a few new features as a way of thanking users for purchasing the game.
There will be two additional beta builds in November and at least one in December. After that, only those users with Ambassador access will be able to get into the gamma (release candidate) builds.