Posted 7:49 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

A year of war in Iraq

My headline is undoubtedly inaccurate; the Bush administration would say that the WAR was over long ago, and that the death and destruction since then is "something else"... skirmishes, maybe. Those of us who predicted that there would be nothing simple or quick about it have long ago been shown correct. I don't need to be proven correct any longer... I want this damned war to become history.

The only way this stupid war could have been more disastrous is if it had been fought on U.S. soil. We still have no "proof" that the administration's WMD claims were deliberately false, although an Australian journalist claims to have such proof now.

A little over a year ago, I offered my own "proof": When Daddy Bush invaded Iraq about 13 years ago, there were no claims of Saddam having WMD, and Saddam responded only with short-range missiles. That means that the Junior Bush administration must have been claiming that Saddam developed WMD during the 12 years following, while he was under severe U.S. sanctions and was being watched carefully. Remember, U.S. planes were patrolling the "no-fly" zones all that time.

So... Saddam didn't develop WMD while we were more or less ignoring him... he did it while we were watching carefully? Oh sure, you betcha... that's believable.

Despite justification that made no sense whatever, and was certainly deliberate deception, there is STILL a significant percentage of the American people that stupidly buy into it. THAT is the scariest part of all. That "don't try to confuse me with facts while I have my head buried in the sand" attitude is precisely the attitude that allowed Hitler to lead the German people into creating a world at war.

Posted 11:58 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

A bit of normalcy (finally)
I'm obviously back on line again, and working my way back toward normalcy. I'm using a PC from a friend who got a new one, and it was quite easy getting it operating with my peripherals. I don't have some of the software I'm used to using, but getting closer. This morning I did something that took considerable courage... I installed the virus software and firewall that caused my good computer to fail to start these problems. This time, the installation went well, and I should be well-protected from hackers.

I ran across an interesting bit of TV trivia this morning... an old TV show from 71-72 that I barely remember... The Smith Family, starring Henry Fonda as Detective Chad Smith, and his family, which included Ron Howard playing son Bob Smith. Henry Fonda lowering himself from movie stardom to play on TV caused a stir, as did the Jimmy Stewart show, another series during the same period. "The Smith Family" ran weekly for 39 episodes without great ratings, and was dropped in June of 1972.

Young Ron Howard played a teen son a little on the rebellious side, with long hair. For Howard, this was between playing Opie on the "Andy Griffith show" and Richie on "Happy Days".

I've added Howard, as Bob Smith, to the "World of Bob Smiths" on my website.

Posted 6:52 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

just when I thought it was over...

My last entry was about the woes of computer usage on a shoestring. It got worse. Last Thursday evening, my old computer simply stopped working... unable to open anything from within Windows, including 2 articles I had written for No Force, No Fraud, including one for the Friday series I had just started a week before. No number of reboots made any difference, nor did swearing or kicking the CPU. The next day I went to another computer and sheepishly posted about the episode.

Eventually, I was able to access the 2 articles from within DOS. Some of you won't have even heard of DOS, but it runs underneath Windows. Prior to Windows, we used DOS for everything. I could only display the articles on-screen... couldn't write them to diskette, couldn't even print them. So... using my old laptop that I can't get online with, I re-typed both articles, and saved them to diskette.

A good friend phoned, wondering why I wasn't responding to emails, and offered her older PC, which I accepted. The next day, I plugged her PC in, using my keyboard, mouse, printer, monitor, and even plugged it into my Roadrunner service. I really expected a great deal of trouble combining all those disparate pieces. I turned it on, and amazingly, EVERYTHING worked, which is a tribute to the Plug'n Play technology and compatability Microsoft's Bill Gates "forced" on the PC industry.

So, I'm back online. Since that time, I've been making this PC "mine", installing software I need to do what I do... moving email addresses, web shortcuts, etc. In the process, I've lost a lot of past work, but that's happened before and I've discovered that I save a lot of things I really will never use again.

So... the saga continues... hopefully with little change for some time now.


Eventually