Brian's Blog

The Big Guys

2011-08-11T06:28:00.000-07:00

I've been obsessed with computer games for as long as I can remember. Eventually, I progressed to MMOs, or Massive Multi Online games where players can meet others online and play together. These games became legends and I dreamed about one day making a game of my own.

I go to the websites of these big games and listen to what other players had to say about them. Many of them were negative. Many complained about the tiniest detail, and rarely did any of the complainers do it politely. I went to a BBQ for a game company called Cryptic Studios. I asked one of their main designers how he could stand to have kids constantly insulting him and his work. He said you just had to have thick skin and roll with it.

So I was going for a second BA degree--something more game related than Anthropology, when in October of last year, I decided to start looking for gaming projects. I found a lot on gamedev.net. I figured out most of them were kids with huge dreams and little to no skills to be able to make it happen. But out of all of them, there was one that was a lot more organized. They weren't looking for a writer, but I replied to them anyways. I talked my way into the job. After all, I'm a good writer and was willing to work for free. How could they say no to that?

It seemed so promising, that I dropped out of my programming classes. Well, I already had a BA in something. I decided that I made no money going to college. So why not make no money working on a game instead? I want to be a game writer. So instead of spending 4 years in school to get a job that I didn't really want in the first place, I could spend that time working for free as a game writer getting experience. Made sense to me.

So, for almost a year now, I've been writing lore and creative fiction for the game. My Anthropology degree turned out to be really, really helpful in designing an alien eco system based on unique science fiction elements. Because I understand culture like I do, I'm able to make really weird alien civilizations that make sense without being Earth Culture rip offs.

A couple weeks ago, I designed a few monsters and how they fit in nicely with the eco system. One of the very talented artists on the team created concept art for it. It's going to be then modeled, rigged, animated, textured, and put into the game. It's really exciting to see something that came purely out of my brain and put into a game.

Speaking of the team, we have several people that have worked in professional studios in the past. And as we get closer and closer to getting funding, we're getting a lot more attention from talent wanting to jump on board. Now we don't have funding yet, but we passed a lesser, but still important milestone tonight. We got our first bit of press.

Joystiq wrote a very vague article on us. http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/08/10/origins-website-hints-at-lofty-sandbox-goals/ Joystiq is a very popular gaming website. As a result of this article, over a 12 hour period, the number of our Facebook fans have doubled. We'd been getting a thousand unique hits to our website a day, but that's greatly increased with this article.

Immediately after, several other gaming websites have been talking about our game on their forums. Much of what's being said about the incredibly vague and limited information that people have on the game to form their opinions have been really negative. One guy said that if the high number of typos on the site was any indication, the game probably sucks. Maybe others had negative things to say about the game mechanics.

But you know, all that made me really happy. I feel like we're being insulted by whiney little kids just like all the other big companies get insulted. It makes me feel like we've made it.

Next stop--funding so we can get paid and I can relocate to where ever we're relocating to.

August Frustration

2011-08-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

So I'm 38 and still trying to figure out life in a civilized society. I've always been as much introspective as I have been an observer of human behavior. But sometimes my introspection has hampered my ability to understand people. Case in point, the idea of leadership.

I've always thought that leadership meant that one person establishes a frame work to keep everyone on the same page so that the team can grow and create. Essentially, this is what I need from a leader. I need to know what needs to be done and what are the ways I can and cannot use to achieve it. As I struggle in leadership positions, it becomes more and more obvious to me that this is not what a leader should do.

Most people are not like me. Most people do not have big dreams or seek out challenges. Most people are content to just be--work some crappy job with no creativity or purpose. Now, I realize that my life would probably be easier if I was like most people. And instead of trying to break into the highly competitive and low paying gaming industry, I would go out and get a conventional job, buy a house, and raise a family. Those are good goal too and ones I aspire to. But I'm determined to do something big with my life or fail trying even if that means I accomplish nothing with my life.

Anyways, my point is that in leadership positions, I always assume other people are like me--need to be told what the end goal is and to be left alone to do it. But that's not what most people want in a leader. Most people want to be told what to do at the base level and ordered around like sheep. Most people don't care why they need to do something a certain way, needing only a general understanding that their efforts accomplish... something important. Most people are stressed out with big concepts and become easily overwhelmed, needing to be hand held through every step or they get frustrated and don't even try. As a leader, I frustrate people that need this kind of attention.

As a teacher, which is another type of leader, I'm always saddened by music students that pay to learn from me, but don't actually want to learn. As musicians go, there's a lot of kids that want to be rock stars, but don't want to do the hard work.

It's strange how people strive to be leaders and bosses despite the frustration of it. Why do we do it? We do it because we know that if we set the rules, things will get done correctly. The frustrating part is when people with less experience than us argue with us or refuse to do what you tell them to, or worse, do it their way when you're not around and end up breaking something that you didn't foresee or plan a fix for. I want to be the kind of boss that respects people and values my team. That gets to be really hard when some people want to make that as difficult as possible, and you just want to start yelling at people. Then you become that asshole boss that no one likes. I'm starting to figure out that it's easier, maybe even desirable to be an asshole boss. People complain about assholes, but maybe this is exactly what they want. If your boss is a jerk, you have stability. You know exactly what to expect. You know you're be told to do certain tasks and chewed out when you don't do them the way they're supposed to be done. If your boss is nice, you don't always know what's important because they don't yell at you when things go wrong. It's left sort of ambiguous. The nice boss will explain the good and bad of different things, leaving on you to figure out what you need to do. From my experiences, people don't like nice bosses. People feel lost with nice bosses.

I dunno. I'm just really frustrated right now.

There's no "i" in Teen

2011-07-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

I'm really swamped with teaching the Stairway to Stardom program that I've been involved with since 1991. It's interesting to me on several levels. I connect with teenagers really well. Being a teenager is really difficult, and us adults miss the point of it, not despite the fact that we lived through it, but because we lived through it.

Essentially, it boils down to fear. To give an example, this was many years ago, but while driving down the twisty Highway 1 over the cliffs of the Pacific coastline with my girlfriend at the time, I thought it would be funny to drive a little faster than I should be going. The car skid on a turn, fish tailing right towards a cliff with the ocean directly below us. She screamed and I laughed. I've driven that car for years. I knew exactly how to make it fish tail, exactly how fast it could break, accelerate, and turn. *I* knew we were completely safe. Now, I wasn't actually trying to make it fish tail and scare her, but I did think it was funny that it did. It was immature that I was driving fast and that I laughed--not one of the high points in my life. But my point being, I wasn't scared because I was in control and I knew I was safe.

But teenagers don't know that. Teenagers have lots of pressure on them to be what their parents, friends, and society wants them to be. They have no idea if they actually want to be any of those things. As we get older, we figure out what of those things actually ended up being important. Pay more attention in class... that one turned out to be true. Follow clothing trends so you fit in... not important in the least. Kids don't have hindsight / live experiences to fall back on. They have to make decisions on what activities and pursuits to invest in or not. They know that they can seriously screw up their life if they choose badly. But they're making these decisions blindly which makes it a lot more stressful. I'm still amazed at kids that go to expensive trade schools right out of high school. What are you thinking? How the hell do you have any idea if you want to be doing that when you get out of school?

Parents often make this worse. We know that getting invited to Sarah's party is not going to have any real impact on our lives. We can tell teenagers not to stress out about those sorts of things. But they're surrounded by peers that do stress out. Clearly, parents taking it lightly demonstrating they don't understand--making it all the more ironic. A worse thing adults can do, tell a kid that working hard and taking responsibility is important, while not following their own advice, thus clearly demonstrating that working hard isn't important, and worse still, that the adults word and opinions are not entirely accurate or important--and worse still--that their word need not be accurate.

I find it interesting how efficiently culture replicates itself. Remember, the function of culture is to give us tools to know how to survive our environment. Hanging out with teenagers, I see how they shape each other to duplicate society around them. This is the concept of hegemony. Through hegemony, we learn which way we're supposed to face on an elevator, how we greet a new person, what political party we should align ourselves with, which God to worship or not worship, and how to grieve when we lose someone we care about. Our culture evolves over time, but it's always there to tell us how to act and behave.

I don't have a problem with it. And I know I'm not above it, even though I understand the forces shaping me to do otherwise arbitrary things such as brush my hair before I go out in public or dress a certain way.

In either case, instead of ignoring the concerns of teenagers when they worry about things that my life experiences tell me are irrelevant, I try and listen. If nothing else, it reminds me of when I was a teenager and worried about the things that stressed me out

Sports Team Politics

2011-07-05T05:23:00.000-07:00

I took a speech class in college. The teacher was talking about a really classic speech--one I'd heard of before. It's a classic Pro Life argument in which abortion is compared to slavery. There were a few people in the classroom that instantly voiced their disagreement before the teacher explained the connection. On the surface, it sounds like an unrelated connection. But if you investigate, it's a really good argument. The point being that slaves had little rights and that we give even less rights to the unborn. It's not enough to sway me from being Pro Choice, but it's a good argument. Which is why I say, it's important to look passed the surface and understand what's on a deeper level.

I talk to a lot of people about politics. Most people that are serious about politics discuss it like they do sports. A guy in Team A cheats on his wife, and Team B fans open their mouths with, "That's just what Team A people do." A politician in Team B cheats on his taxes, and idiots from Team A slam his whole party.

It's important to take a step back from that and debate party politics rather than team politics. There's nothing about being a Democrat that compels people to post pictures of your junk to your Twitter followers. Nor to cheat on your taxes when you're the one who writes the tax codes or to award government scholarships to members of your family. Indeed, the Dems have certainly had a bad couple years now with ethics violations and scandals. But again, it's important to note that it's not party affiliation that shapes moral behavior. It certainly contributed to the historic Republican victories in 2010--something I'm pretty happy about. But it's unfortunate that it came about for the wrong reasons.

I say this because the current administration is a radical departure from what the Democrat party has been for the last several decades. My hope is that independents are saying, "Whoa, hold on. That's way too far left." Can you imagine John F. Kennedy saying, "No nation in the history of the world has ever taxed its way into prosperity," standing right next to Obama as Obama seeks to raise taxes instead of cutting spending? Obama who just committed the biggest economic failure as a president in the history of this nation--the Stimulus Bill, that not only didn't create a single job, but actually cost 1.9 million jobs due to the uncertainty and instability it caused, then stuck tax payers with a trillion dollar debt with no sign of an apology from Obama more than, "As it turns out, there's no such thing as shovel ready projects." Um, oops? If Obama was leading a corporation and did that, he'd be in jail. That's not an exaggeration.

What's happening on the right side is very different. And despite what nitwits like Janeane Garofalo might think about the Tea Party, the Tea Party is as much a response against Neocons as it is against Liberals.

Some Democrats today are eager to distance themselves from the history of their party. Democrats fought for slavery. The KKK was founded by Democrats and they killed Republicans and blacks alike. Remember that it was a Republican that freed the slaves, and since Abe Lincoln, most Blacks who registered to vote, registered as Republicans since then. So to Democrats, Blacks and Republicans were two faces of the same enemy.

It was a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, that established anti child labor laws, ended sweat shops, and greatly improved the lives of workers. And in the 1960s, when LBJ wanted to pass the Civil Rights Acts of 66 and 68, he had to turn to the Republicans to get it done because his own party was apathetic.

Then things changed. LBJ was a Democrat and many Democrats didn't like the idea of the Civil Rights Acts, much less having it signed by their own guy. LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam which was unpopular with both parties. The combination of the two made LBJ one of the very few presidents that was too unpopular to be able to run for a second term. Then Nixon came along. Nixon saw a disillusioned south and saw an opening. Republicans had always controlled the northern states while the Dems had the south, but Nixon saw a way to persuade southerners to flip. It didn't happen over night or even entirely during his administration. But it started with him in something called the Southern Strategy.

Not long after Nixon, we got Jimmy Carter. Carter was an honest guy--exact opposite of Nixon. He really meant well. He just wasn't very good. It was a tough blow for Democrats trying to recover after seeing their party splitting in half. Then came Reagan. Reagan spoke about small government, the strengths of capitalism, and of compassionate conservatism.

As the economy started to recover from the mess Carter left contrasting sharply to the utter hell of life in Communist Russia, many Democrats no longer wanted to be associated with the failures of big government. They became the Neocons--new conservatives that brought their old fiscally liberal, socially restrictive ideas to a party that was the exact opposite.

Now when I tell people I'm a Republican, they think that means I'm a racist that hates gay people. Now Republican candidates have to appease the Neocon crowd that never should have been part of our party in the first place. That's why we get Big Government Neocon Presidents like George Bush who massively expanded government spending who was unfortunately followed by a Big Government Liberal who massively expanded government spending.

And thus, the rise of the Small Government Tea Party movement.

Speaking of that, I recently read an article in which the question was asked if this country needs Ayn Rand or Jesus more. It's an interesting question because it so divides the Republican party.

Ayn Rand was an Atheist who escaped the oppression of Communism and moved to the US to be free. She wrote fiction that showed the morality of Capitalism and small government. This makes her a hero among Conservatives, but she also points out that Christian Fundamentalism limits freedom, and thus should be avoided, which makes her not well liked among Neocons. Anyone who knows me, knows of the two figures, which I think this country needs more.

Anyway, my whole point here is that politics should not be thought of like sports, but rather as a series of strategies to govern. The individual players may influence what party labels mean, but we should look past the labels and individuals and understand the core concepts they represent.

The Greatest Desire

2011-05-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

I took a lot of philosophy classes in college. But there was one line that's really stuck with me the most. It's from Aristotle. Now this is highly paraphrased and "in my own words," but the quote basically says that the greatest desire of the weak is to have power over others. I think about this concept because it springs up a lot. I'm sometimes guilty of it myself. But lets go through and look at this.

Gossip is a big example. We love to say mean, embarrassing, or hurtful things about others. But even if what we're saying is true, the fact that we engage in this shows weakness in our character. We do it because we want to knock others down. A person strong of character need not do this.

The Jerry Springer show is another. When I look at that show, I see a bunch of troubled individuals who need patience, understanding, and help. Instead, they are wound up and exploited for high drama and high ratings. But why do people watch it? Partly because it appeals to us on an emotional level. Humans are emotional beings, and part of us watches because we want to help. But another part of us watches for the, "Man, look at these idiots," and "and I thought my life was going bad. Thank god I'm not these people," factors.

Knowledge is another big divide. Want to start a nerd fight? Ask a bunch of nerds about what being a ninja *really* means. I've seen that question devolve into name calling and threats of physical violence. Why do we fight over this stuff? Why do we *have* to be right? It's our weakness. "Knowing" the answer to things that the "lesser" people don't know gives us power over others. There's a big difference between being educated in something and being opinionated in it. Too few people know the difference. And I'm dangerously close to sounding like a hypocrit here by saying I do. But I'm not perfect, nor am I always strong of character.

I think culture has to be the biggest divide of them all. It's the understanding of culture that makes me the most thankful for my education in Anthropology. I've learned many great things from my time spent in class. One of my favorite lessons is from the words of Franz Boas. He's a mixed bag--someone who famously fudged his lab results in his attempt to try and prove that living in the US would give you a larger brain. But aside from that nuttiness, Boas argued that culture is a series of strategies designed to solve problems unique to a people's environment. As such, one people's culture is just as valuable as another's.

I'll give you examples. I used to have a dim opinion of Ebonics. When a black person would "axe someone a question," I'd roll my eyes. Is it really that hard to say "ask"? How lazy are you? We live in America. You should learn to speak English like the rest of us.

But then I thought about it. The founders of this emerging country hated the British so much, that we intentionally changed the spelling of many words. Now, some people might not realize that "gray" is the American spelling and "grey" is the British. But I think most of us know we took the "u" out of British spelled words like "honour," and "colour." Those words even felt weird for me to type like that. Still, there are more modern examples of dialect. Having lived in California all my life, I didn't know that "hella" was a regional word. I hella say "hella" all the hella time when I talk. I don't normally type it though. People from the south say "y'all,' which I use too because it's so useful. Y'all should hella do the same. Some east coast people drop "r" sounds. Like people from Boston who might say, "Pawk the caw in Hawvawd Yawd." I heard that this started due to a movement of east coast people being influenced by Britain around the first World War.

So the question is, why are we fine with all that, but not fine when the African American community speaks with their own changes? Seems like a double standard. But speaking more about culture, if we understand that all culture is equal, then we understand that the "high culture" of ultra wealthy aristocrats is just as good as Redneck culture. So if someone says they're "more cultured" because they go to art galleries instead of monster truck pulls, they're wrong. The term "more cultured" is meaningless. Culture is just as valuable if you're wearing smokey eye make up, big hair, and animal prints, if you're wearing traditional Hopi clothing and singing to the corn, if you're going to the graveyards on Nov 2nd to leave food for loved ones that have passed, or if you're at the park and you've got a 40 in one hand and you're pounding on the table with the other because you just won a round of dominoes.

All people have value. All people can teach us something. No one is above us and no one is below.

Not the End of the World

2011-05-23T16:16:00.000-07:00

So I didn't even know the world was supposed to end until the day of the supposed rapture. I've heard a few stories about the aftermath--Christian fundamentalists that blew their life savings and/or their children's college funds thinking the world would end on May 21st. One thing I can say about Christianity, their extremists make rash and unwise financial decisions. That's a hell of a lot better than what extremists from other religions do. How's that for a slogan? "Christianity: Our Nutjobs are a lot less dangerous!"

ok, topic switch. Let's talk about the Republican Primary race. On my last post, I didn't mention one guy that I'd sorta of heard of, but now really, really like. That's Herman Cain. He's one of the few people out there that can talk about America with such love and passion that it brings a tear to my eye. I don't wave flags or any of that. But I do have a profound love of my country. So patriotic themes can often do that to me, but some speakers just connect with me better.

Of course I'll be keeping an eye on things. It should be interesting.

What's in a Codename?

2011-05-05T03:56:00.000-07:00

So Osama was a huge news story with lots of spin offs. But one of them--the story about Native Americans being upset that "Geronimo" was used at the codename for Osama was one particular story I wanted to focus on. I'm sure I've mentioned this topic before on this blog, but I want to revisit it, because it's important. It's an issue that most people don't seem to understand.

I think the reaction most people have to this story is to call it political correctness gone to far. Or, worse, to remind people that the military uses lots of Native American names and imagery, such as Apache Helicopters in their lingo to bring respect to the fierceness and strength of Native Americans in battle. That sounds like a compliment, doesn't it?

I've even heard from the mouths of people I otherwise considered a friend, disgusting comments like, "The Native Americans lost. We won. They need to get over it."

Quite unfortunately, Hollywood has contributed to one of the greatest shames in the history of the United States: the myth that somehow American settlers and Native Americans engaged in great battles and that the "West was Won." This is not the case.

We have no accurate records on this issue, but of the millions of Native Americans that were killed by American settlers during the European Invasion, a tiny fraction of them were killed in battle. The vast majority of them were killed by small pox and other diseases, by starvation, by being gunned down and hunted, by being put into concentration death camps, and by good ol' round ups and firing squads. I'll go through these one at a time.

Disease
The rosie "First Thanksgiving," of the pilgrims and the Native Americans sharing a feast together--yeah, no. The first Thanksgiving went a lot differently from the myth. Squanto had seen his entire tribe killed by plagues brought by European contact. He was the only one still alive. He shared food from the harvest because there was no one else alive that he knew. His tribe, the Patuxet(yeah, I had to google it) along with many others, suffered a 100% mortality rate(minus Squanto), leaving much of the New England area blanketed by bodies of the dead. The Pilgrims didn't need to fire a shot to colonize America--only to share their small pox infested blankets in the first example of Americans using Biological Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Most scholars put the death rate of Native Americans to European diseases at about 90%, meaning 90% of the indigenous population of North and South America being wiped out, not by war, but by disease. It's impossible to know the exact numbers of what the total population of the Americas was prior to the European Invasion, but we at least know that this event caused the greatest loss of life in the history of the world--far more than the Black Plague of Europe and the World Wars including the Holocaust.

Famine
So we all know that Americans killed buffalo in an effort to destroy the food source for the plains indians. But what people might not know is that Americans did that elsewhere, regularly going into Native American farmland(yes, many were peaceful farmers), and destroyed their crops. Keep in mind, California Indians spoke three thousand separate languages alone. There isn't a "Native American People" any more than there is a "European People." America was essentially hundreds of thousands of little countries: each tribe having their own language, culture, and religion(and neighboring enemies). If a unified force of American settlers wanted to run your dinky tribe off your land and salt your fields, there wasn't anything you could do about it.

Genocide
A particularly despicable fact in American history, our government paid people to kill Native Americans $5 dollars per scalp. There's a name for this term. It's called State Sponsored Genocide. Men, women, babies... it didn't matter. Americans slaughtered Natives for a living, bringing their piles of scalps to the post office to be paid, what in the 1800s would have been a fortune.

Death Camps
It was with great sadness that many Americans watched an entire people fall to disease. These were controversial times. You had the idea of Manifest Destiny, the idea that God had given this land to Christians and all they had to do was exterminate the pesky Native from them. But you also had the Christians that were heart broken to watch peaceful Natives wither. This massive guilt did two things. It caused Christians to want to blame Natives for their own sickness and it compelled them to want to convert Natives to becoming Christians before they died.

Spanish Missionaries took in Native Americans in large numbers. They forced them to do labor in exchange for finding God. The California Missions became death camps where Native Americans died by the hundreds through starvation or disease. The Spanish, no doubt troubled by spending all that time to convert them, only to watch them die, must have been confused. They didn't understand what stress, malnourishment, and physical labor did to an already weak immune system in a disease ridden environment.

Firing Squads
Have you ever heard of the Battle of Wounded Knee? Here's some history, because this is what passes as a "battle." So hundreds of Lakota were rounded up, taken to a ravine, and shot. Men, women, babies... it didn't matter. The 7th Cavalry was in the process of taking all the weapons away from the Lakota when the execution started early, meaning the only American Army personnel killed in the "battle" died from friendly fire.

Ok, what about Custer's Last Stand--the only battle ever named after the loser. Think from the Native American perspective. The White Man is a filthy, diseased ridden, violent brute. Just being near them can kill you. They will attack you on sight, and bring lots of friends. Wouldn't you be terrified? Well, Native Americans were. In nearly all cases, Natives simply ran. Now picture Post Civil War. The Yankees Army had just defeated the Confederates. Now what? A battle hardened Army with nothing to do. President Ulysses Grant, a general in the Yankee Army was now determined, as President, to take it to Native Americans as if they were one people, with one army, to fight against in battle.

Custer, seeing Grant's rise from an officer all the way to President, wanted to make a name for himself as well. He knew that Native Americans all ran. As he was tasked with bringing up the rear, he was convinced that by the time his regiment got to the field, the Indians would have all fled, leaving no glory for him. So he disobeyed orders, and ordered a forced march so that his troops would arrive first. His men, having marched two days straight with no sleep would find out that not only did the Lakota choose not to run this time, but there was a heck of a lot more of them. How many, we don't know since none of Custer's men survived the fight. But what is clear, The Battle of the Little Bighorn, as it would be later renamed, spelled the end of the American Indian wars. Now angry at a humiliating loss, the 7th Cavalry took their revenge, forcing them from their land, rounding them up in the ravine at Wounded Knee and massacring them.

Ok, so what's my point? I remember in high school, this one girl told me she hated covering Native Americans in History class. I asked her why. She said it was because it was so depressing. Every day was more bad news, more terrible things that happened to them. The worst part of that, is we think that's all in the past. It's not.

The state of Native Americans in this country is the biggest proof why Liberalism does not work. Here you have an entire ethnicity of impoverished people, dependent on the government. No amount of money will change that. In fact, the more money given, the more demoralized, defeated, and dependent Native Americans feel. I have to say, I know what it feels like to be taken care of and feel helpless because of it. It's tough to break that cycle.

But back on topic, you might wonder, how could Americans commit such horrible acts against Native Americans? Didn't anyone care about babies being gunned down? Someone had to have a conscious. There had to be outrage somewhere.

But here's the deal. There was a need to paint Native Americans as warriors, as savages... even, as animals. I mean, after all, they were just going to kill each other anyways because they're so war like. Despite some tribes being so peaceful that they didn't even have a word for war, all Native Americans were painted by the same propaganda brush--much in the same way that some would suggest that Muslims all want to subject us to Sharia Law and we need to fight for our existence against them. No doubt, the same movement persisted in America at the time. So the public was lied to through hegemony. Not any one person spread this lie or misconception. It was a general movement--much in the same way that feeds Islamaphobia today. We're a much more enlightened people these days, so it's a weak comparison to how bad it must have been a century or two ago, but you get the point.

When you see a Native American sports mascot with a tomahawk, you are seeing a relic piece of war propaganda, justifying State Sponsored Genocide against Native Americans and an easement of our guilt for causing the greatest and deadliest plague epidemic in the history of the world.

Once you understand that, only then will you see why sports mascots, Apache helicopters, and Operation Geronimo are offensive and why calling the controversy following them as "political correctness gone too far" makes you ignorant.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love this country. I'm proud to be an American. We have dark spots in our history. Every country does. No reason to beat ourselves up about it today. But it's important to at least understand the dark spots and the damage they continue to do.

Ding Dong

2011-05-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

I don't have much to say that hasn't been said. I'm not excited about Osama's death. I can't imagine celebrating death. But I'm happy for my country and our fight against those that mean us harm.

I was really happy with President Obama's speech. It was a difficult one to make. There was a narrow path that needed to be taken. He walked it. I'm happy about the choices Obama makes about how to talk to Muslims around the world. We need to be seen as strong and willing to stand up for ourselves without fear. But we are also a tolerant nation. Anyway, I really liked the speech he gave and the dignity with which he delivered it.

As for what happens now, who knows? War is a funny thing. War may be the opposite of peace, but I think it's important to realize that peace can be just as bloody or worse. Hitler might have been at war with Europe, but he was at peace with the Jews. Saddam might have been at war with Iran, but he was at peace with the Kurds. My point is that peace always leads to suffering. Because if a person can force their will on others with impunity, someone will do so. Only war makes freedom possible.

Obama made politically unpopular decisions about escalating the war in Afghanistan to dismantle the Taliban and find Osama. Liberals wanted us out. The fact that Obama went against his own party on that, does say something.

Invisible

2011-04-27T03:00:00.000-07:00

They often say that our own culture is invisible to us. Much in the same way that egocentric people say they don't have an accent. Of course we all have accents. And of course we all have culture. We just don't think of it that way. It wasn't until I got my degree in Anthropology that I really understood how strange American culture was.

Franz Boas' once argued that culture was a system of strategies designed to solve problems unique to a people's environment. All Anthropologists define the tricky word "culture" differently. But this is, I think, the best definition. I've explained it to people, but either they don't get it, or I bore the crap out of them with it. If you've ever watched the show The Big Band Theory, I often feel I can relate to Sheldon's character--not that I'm arrogant or think of myself above others, but that I find the world and human behavior fascinating while everyone else just shrugs about it and takes it for granted. Or I bore people with my enthusiasm for social sciences.

So anyways, maybe this will bore people, but it's not like anyone follows me anyways. So here goes. Let's look at the problems unique to the American environment. The New World was big. Spain had tobacco fields in the south, and was making a killing from them. No one had found gold yet, but it seemed like a matter of time. All the different countries of Europe were scrambling to grab as much of America as they could get their hands on. Our fledgling country had won our independence from Britain, but we still had to deal with the French and British trying to grab as much of "that area above us" that would later become Canada, and the Spanish were trying to grab as much of the land below us. The Native Americans were just trying to stay alive but, quite unfortunately, would be trampled with much of their beautiful culture snuffed out along with them.

I mention the economic principle know as The Tragedy of the Commons a lot. It's a fantastic principle that applies here as well. The New Americans needed to expand and settle as fast as they could to claim land before the French, Brits, and Spanish did. How did we accomplish this? We needed a culture of consumption. If culture is a system of strategies designed to solve problems and our problem was that we weren't expanding and/or building infrastructure fast enough, then it makes sense that mass consumption would be encouraged. It's still part of our culture. We don't take what we need. We take what we can. And our culture tells us we're important based on how expensive our cars are, thus pushing us to take more and more because that's supposed to make us happy.

We're also obsessed with guns. I've heard some that complain about the Second Amendment(because they don't understand it), saying that people don't need armor piercing bullets because deers don't wear bullet proof jackets. The Second Amendment doesn't have a damn thing to do with hunting. The Second Amendment guarantees us the right to bare arms in case our government shall rise against us. Yeah, Liberals don't seem to get that. Our founding fathers hated government so much, they wanted to ensure that we would always be well enough armed that we could rise up and violently over throw our leaders if they got too tyrannical. Like no where else in the world, the gun symbolizes to an American that our government should fear us, and thus, we will always be free from Totalitarianism. The gun is freedom.

American is the most religious industrialized nation in the world. But it's interesting to note that many of our founding fathers were not Christians. In fact, the Treaty of Tripoli from 1796 states the following:

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

Many of our founding fathers were Christian, but even they were careful to ensure that Christianity was never part of our government. Instead, we would adapt the idea of another very important part of American called "e pluribus unum," or "Out of many: one." Combine that with the idea of American Exceptionalism and you have another extremely important part of American culture. As a side note, Barack Obama inaccurately described the definition of American Exceptionalism(because he didn't know what it meant). It is the idea that Americans have special freedoms because we are guaranteed our freedoms and rights by God--not by politicians. Obama, when asked if he believed in the idea of American Exceptionalism answered, "Well, I'm sure people from other countries feel they're exceptional too." Yeah, sorry, but the fact he can say such horribly stupid things while "sounding smart," doesn't make them ok. He's still an idiot.

Anyways, put these two very American ideas together, and you have the idea that from all faiths, religions, and ethnicities, we Americans all have the same rights regardless of what politicians say or try and take from us. Our freedoms are more important than our government. We are a nation of the people and our government exists to serve us, not the other way around.

Consumption, guns, and God pretty much sums up American culture. I take very little. I hate guns. And I'm an Atheist. But I still very much love my country and am proud to be an American. I'm not a walking contradiction. I'm just more complicated than most people can handle.

Trolls and Warlocks

2011-04-11T09:31:00.000-07:00

Ok, last Charlie Sheen reference title. But this one may or may not apply. I wanted to rant about who we might see run for the Republican primary. I've ranted about Obama a lot, but there's not a lot of contenders on the GOP side to get excited about either. At this point, I would vote for my cat over Obama, but still, here's my take on the GOP stars.

Sarah Palin
She's not going to run. I think the only one propping her up is the left. She can't sneeze without a story about her. I read an article about her where the story was that she went a whole day without commenting on some event. What the hell is wrong with the media? The fact that the main stream media harasses her as much as they do, is a story in and of itself. One reporter, in a moment of honesty, admitted that they make up anything, put Palin's name in the story, and get more hits. She's been a money maker for the left ever since the election.

She's not stupid. As much as the main stream media needs her to be seen that way for ratings. I certainly don't agree with everything she says, and I think some of her positions are stupid, like her thinking that the Pro Life Movement empowers women--that's stupid. But she's not stupid. Anyway, Palin is likely not going to run. She's a mediocre politician who fights too much to be able to compromise and get things done. I like her, but she wouldn't be an effective President because of this.

Michele Bachmann
I don't think she comes across that well. She gives poorly thought out or stock phrase answers to questions. Although I agree with her positions, she comes across in interviews like she's had those positions programmed into her. I just don't see her as a charismatic leader.

Tim Pawlenty
Sad to say he might be the brightest star despite, or perhaps because, he's so little known. I know very little about him. I haven't seen any interviews by him or anything. No idea.

Hick Huckabee
He's charismatic. He's good at working with people. He's very polite and humble when talking with people, even people with radically different views. I like him and so does most the party base. We all know him, and he has a really solid shot of being our next President. However.

I'm really unhappy with his social conservative stances. I think it's very likely he could push for a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage, or at the least work against the gay civil rights movement. Those of us in the younger generation are much more tolerant of the gay community. Such actions would be a giant step back for the civil rights movement.

Newt Gingrich
I've always liked Newt since the days of the Contract with America and the swell of prosperity in the 1990s, when he led Congress as Speaker of the House together with a more fiscally moderate democrat in Bill Clinton as President. Now, you could point out that during this time, the community Reinvestment Act got altered and this ultimately lead to the collapse of the housing market, and thus the recession economist say we are no longer in. Aside from that, Newt is smart, charismatic, and he can do a hell of an interview. Interviews are important to me because it shows how a politician can sell their case and influence people--skills needed to get things done.

The big thing about Newt, he cheated on his wife while she was on her death bed. Not cool. Not at all cool. In fact, he's a serial adulterer and instead of taking responsibility for that, he blames it on not praying enough. This doesn't inspire confidence. Sure, Bill Clinton has the same issues and no one cared, but republicans can't go around claiming to be the party of family values and morals and then do stuff like that.

Donald Trump
This is an interesting one. He's a little quirky, but he's charismatic, very well known, certainly tough. He has tons of business experience and could do wonders to turn the economy around. However.

Like Newt, he hops around. He has a super model for a wife, and is generally too "Hollywood" for most conservatives' tastes. But worse is the recent birther influence. So in a recent interview, he talked about how Obama's grand mother testified that she witnessed Obama's birth as it took place in Kenya. This means Obama was not born in the US and cannot be President of the US as detailed in the Constitution. He also mentioned how Obama has spent millions of dollars in legal fees to keep his birth certificate from being released to the public.

Ok, let's sort through this. The birth certificate issue is puzzling. I don't know what to think about it. But I'm willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt and / or wait for more details on that. Obama certainly blows lots of money for stupid reasons, so his reasonings for secrecy could be less sinister.

During the 90's, an associate of Bill Clinton went into the library of Congress, confiscated documents, smuggled them down his pants, and destroyed them. He admitted to such in testimony and served jail time for obstruction by refusing to reveal the contents of the documents he destroyed. We know only that they where about White Water Gate, the real estate scandal that the Clintons were involved with before Bill became President. Remember that story? Vince Foster, who had information implicating the Clintons killed himself to avoid testifying. The scam was about creating dummy companies to get money or something like that. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember all the details. The Clintons invested a lot of money into it and lost it all, meaning they either got scammed too, or they weren't very good at it.

In either case, what I'm trying to get at is that the main stream media might be more harsh on Republicans, but they cover the bad stuff with Democrats too. If there really was anything to Obama hiding his birth certificate, I just think we would have heard more about it. The media loves Obama, but they love ratings more. They'd be covering this story like mad if there was something to it.

The story about the grandma, I just don't buy it. It sounds like an urban legend. Again, if he really had his own grandma swear she witnessed Obama born in Kenya, it would have been a huge story. I certainly wouldn't be hearing about it for the first time from Donald Trump in an interview. So in short, I'm really not that enthusiastic about voting for a guy that says radical conspiracy theories in an interview and tries to make them fly.

Mit Romney
I don't know that much about him other than he's a Mormon--which means he wears magic underwear(which is weird), and he proposed a health care system very similar to Obamacare. Although I don't know the difference between Romneycare and Obamacare, the fact that they are similar is going to really hurt him if it came down to him vs Obama. Obamacare is a disaster. Why should we trust Obama part II?

Ok, now for the "Not Running, but We Wish They Were" portion:

Chris Christie
Love this guy. Tons of charisma, very tough, very smart, and very popular in the base. He's said repeatedly he wants to stay governor of New Jersey.

Paul Ryan
He's very articulate. Brilliant guy. He's still pretty young, so we might see him make a go for it later down the road.

Condoleezza Rice
She's repeatedly said she has no interest in running for office. Bummer. She has two PhDs, but still has a kind, humble personality in interviews. I really like her.

After leaving the Bush Administration, she went back to teaching at Stanford. She recently put out a book about her life. Sometimes politicians do that--write a book as a weather balloon to test their popularity before running. Maybe that was part of her motivation. I don't know, but I hope so. I don't think she's all that tough. She might be too much on the nice side, but the media barely covered her at all. So maybe she is tough when she needs to be. Contrast that to all the coverage Hillary Clinton has doing the same job. Anyways, I still really like her and would love to see her run... for anything.

Allen West
He's a rising star in the GOP and the Tea Party Movement. It's premature for him to look for a white house run, but in his first couple months as a House freshman, he introduced a bill to cut spending for a program that saved $60 million dollars from the budget and it got unanimous support. In the interview I saw, he was getting praise, but he simply said that if the near 500 members of Congress did the same, they could fix the budget crisis.

I've been keeping an eye on him for a while though. He's spoken at Town Hall meetings and Tea Party rallies. He's definitely someone to keep watching.

Dogspeed

2011-03-23T15:39:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to say I agree with Obama when he said, as a candidate in 2007, the following:

The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch.

Clearly Bush is completely out of line starting a third illegal war by choosing to plunge the US in war against Libya without Congressional support. Is Bush not the worst President ever? I mean the guy really... oh, wait a minute, Bush isn't President any more. Obama is. But that can't be.

Obama campaigned against Bush saying his tax cuts exploded the debt and that we should not escalate the war in Iraq because the US should not get involved in civil wars. As President, blew through over a trillion dollars in a Stimulous bill he promised we desperately needed, then a year later admitted he now knows there's no such thing as a "Shovel Ready Project." That was a trillion dollar President-in-Training mistake that we didn't need right now. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, saying it was "the good war," despite Bush having the good sense not to get us too mired there. Now we've lost far too many troops and resources there with little to show for it. He extended the Bush tax cuts, despite all his supporters and himself single handedly pointing at this one excuse for all our problems with debt... and then he carried on "the problem," himself. And now, he's started a third war without approval with Congress(even Bush waited for Congressional approval).

Why are we at war with Libya? Because Europe gets oil from there. So we're bombing people we don't know just so other countries can keep a steady supply of oil. For every 2 Cruise Missiles we shoot at Qaddafi's tanks, it costs us a million dollars. Our missiles are often more valuable than what we destroy with them.

Civil war, genocide, atrocities... these things happen in many African countries all the time. But Libya has oil and the others don't. Where are all the Obama supporters that chanting "No Blood For Oil!" when it was a Bush sending over troops? And as a side note, these same anti war protesters have no problem going to the grocery store and buying inexpensive produce that got there by way of big diesel trucks. I get pissed off at oblivious people that act like they're morally superior while they benefit against the very thing they protest. The same people that say, "Oh, but I drive an electric car because I care about the environment." No, you drive a coal powered car because that's where electricity comes from, you moron.

Anti war hippies piss me off in general. I say "hippies" instead of saying "Liberals," because the term "Liberal" includes a wide variety of people with very different view points. As much as it pisses me off when people make broad and inaccurate generalizations about all us Republicans, I shouldn't do it about Liberals. But anyways, back to hippies. It's not a strong military defense that causes wars, but the lack of one. Hitler didn't attack Poland because he wanted a challenge. Cut military spending, reduce the US's ability to police the world, and you'll see violence increase. The US needs to stop pretending to be the world police and accept we are the world police.

That said, I don't entirely disagree with Obama's decision. But I want to see the anti war, Obama supporters stop being hypocrites. Obama's approval rating is 45%. That's about 20% too high.

Oh, and I want to point out something else. Gas prices are now at $4 dollars a gallon. But don't you all feel a lot safer since Obama banned new well oil drilling in the gulf of Mexico? Of course, we don't own the gulf of Mexico. So Obama didn't stop drilling there. He stopped Americans from being able to drill there. That means instead of us getting more oil, many south American countries who hate us got to drill there instead. And that accomplished... what, exactly? Populist President, not doing the right thing, but doing the popular thing. We don't have a President. We have a celebrity.

And on to Health Care news, because this just keeps getting better. So over a thousand of the biggest corporations have gotten a special federal waiver allowing them to be exempt from Obama's crushing, anti business health care law. Guess who can't get the waivers? That's right, small businesses. That's the thing with federal regulations. The big companies have an army of lawyers, accountants, and analysts to get around any new regulation the government throws at them. But the smaller companies can't. So everytime some idiot politician wants to pass some regulation to "take it to the man and clean up Wall Street," what they're really doing is making it harder for small businesses on main street to compete with the big guys. This is the same reason why big business loves Liberal policies like the job killing regulation of minimum wage--it puts the hurt on small businesses struggling to compete.

Why are things not improving? Is it still Bush's fault for reasons we don't even remember any more? You could make taxes 0%, and it's still not going to make much difference. The problem is a lack of stability. People say of FDR that if something didn't work, he tried something else. That sounds like a good thing. It's not. If things are constantly shifting around you, what do you do? You play it safe, huddle in survival mode, and wait it out. No one knows what the hell Obama is doing because he doesn't know. What are we doing in Libya? What's our goal there? He doesn't know. What's our goal in Afghanistan? He doesn't know. Federal ban on gay marriage? He says his opinions on that are "evolving." Meaning, "I don't want to take responsibility for my beliefs." His inability to lead has caused massive instability and a gaping lack of confidence. He played the populist. He swayed the idiots. Now no one knows what he stands for other than he chases popularity instead of leading. Instead of creating financial stability, he destabilized the financial market with a chaotic and an unpredictable health care bill and a wasteful "stimulus" bill. He turned a simple Recession into The Great Recession, and it's just going to keep getting worse until we get a President who can bring some stability.

GDC is over.

2011-03-07T22:54:00.000-08:00

My last day at GDC was fairly uneventful. I met a few more people. My contact asked us if we wanted to help volunteer for E3 which is in June. I told her I would, so that's set. E3 is less about business and more about new games coming out. Isn't not open to the public, so not everyone can attend.

Tonight was the last night to go out to clubs and network, but I was tired. So I just went home. Out of curiosity, I looked up craigslist in SF to see about people posting about GDC in terms of after party get togethers and what not. Oh my. I found 4 adds in the Personals section about it. All 4 were in the Men Seeking Men section. I didn't click on the posts. The titles alone frightened me. Well, it was San Francisco after all.

You know what? I looked up on the GDC website and it had listed all the companies that where hiring in the career pavilion. Well, if you click to expand, it gave the phone number and the email address of the HR person for each company so you could set up private interviews. Oh my God. What an idiot I am for missing that. I could have easily seen which of those companies were hiring writers, set up some interviews and talked directly to who I needed to. Man, I really blew it.

So as I continue the hunt, life gets a little more confusing. I had a Skype meeting with the Project Lead of the one game I'm writing for. They're still not paying us, but they want to reach an agreement with each of us to talk about what they'd be paying us if they were. Like I've said, I never thought I'd see any money out of this. But what if I did? What if this is actually my first big break into the biz? They quoted me a salary which is typical of experienced game designers, but astronomically large compared to what us lowly writers make selling novels along with pieces of our souls to publishers. By that, I mean, most published authors can't make enough money to support themselves. I mean, even authors that have books out, in stores, and on shelves, still struggle. So tonight, he quoted me a salary that was well above anything I could reasonably hope for as an author.

I know this will sound strange to any one reading this, but I felt uncomfortable being offered that much money. I'm a published author, but I've never published my fiction. And I don't have any industry experience. I'm a nobody, being offered more money that my dad made at the peak of his career at the start of mine. I don't know how to take that. Then a part of my realized this is all Monopoly money anyways until I actually have the check in my hands and it clears.

So I had assumed that if I got hired by a big company, I could keep telecommuting part time, like I'm doing, for this unfunded company. But what if the new company won't let me? I'm really kind of at a loss here. Do I stop looking for a job, hoping I start getting paid by the unfunded one, or do I keep looking for a paying job knowing that might cause me to bail on the first one? If I did leave this project, they'd have to rework a lot of stuff. It'd certainly set them back a bunch. And I don't want to do that to anyone.

I'm not in this for the money. I could care less about that. I don't bail on people. But I might never see any money out of this unfunded project. Is that worth turning down my dream(paying) job for? So yeah, it's pretty confusing knowing what to do. In either case, if this unfunded project ships, that will be a huge boost on my resume. I'd be able to claim over a year of game industry experience with one shipped title under my belt. That takes me from 1 of 200 candidates applying for the same job, down to 1 of 10. Much better odds of getting hired.

But what if this unfunded project does get funding, they pay us, and the game is ultimately successful? They were telling me tonight that this is just the beginning and that they want to keep making more games. And that they don't want to see me going anywhere.

As a side note. Networking with other writers at GDC might have been a waste of time in terms of getting hired. We're all competing with each other. But it did give me a better idea of who I'm competing against. I never met another writer that's obsessed with MMOs like I am. I know games in and out. I know players in and out. I know what players like, hate, and will tolerate. I know in-game culture. As an Anthropologist, I study behavior. As a writer, I study story and characters. As a game writer, I need to work some kinks out, but I'll be really, really good at it. Maybe I should be getting paid an astronomical salary. Time will tell.

GDC, Day 5

2011-03-04T05:55:00.000-08:00

You know how I normally dress? Sweat pants and a Slayer tee shirt. I got in the elevator to go to the convention for the day and looked at my reflection. Of course I've look in the mirror every day this week before leaving my hotel. But this was the moment I thought about it. I was wearing khaki slacks and a dress shirt. I looked at my reflection and said, "This is who I am." Then I thought about last night, how I threw on some sweat pants and a metal band tee shirt just to go across the street to get a pizza. That's not who I was any more. I don't want to go back to that. I don't want to go back to Sacramento and be that teenager trapped in a man's body, wondering where my high school days went.

So I was hoping Thursday would be my big networking day. I still have a decent amount of business cards to hand out. People seemed a lot less approachable. They looked tired. And there was whole mess more people around. I ended up networking with the people that could help me the least--other writers. We saw each other at the same panels, the same social gatherings, and just seemed to gravitate towards each other in general. We can't really help each other since we're all competing for the same jobs.

I did better just sitting down at a table, waiting for people to sit down next to me and striking up conversations with them. I apparently met some really important Sony exec doing that. She explained what she did. It was something like a communications position, like she meets other companies trying to do stuff and she gets their games published through Sony. Could be an excellent contact if Sony would be interested in funding the MMO we're working on. Though, I hardly know how business gets done in the game biz other than what educated guessing could accomplish. But still, it might make sense for me to make a connection, then get our project manager in touch with her and let them talk it out.

I also met some guy that's a head chapter leader in the IGDA. He gave me some great advice about working the career pavilion. This is stuff I should have known, but it's been so long since I've had to apply for a conventional job, that I forgot this stuff. The HR people at the booths are the gate keepers. They are primarily checking to see if you're crazy or not. If you're a loon, they thank you for your application, tell you they'll pass it on to the right people, then throw it away when you're not looking.

At the end of GDC, the "non throw away pile" has some potentially good candidates mixed in with a lot of crap. It's impossible for them to accurately distinguish the difference. I understand this. I know I'm an untested, unknown quantity, applying for a high financial risk industry where my work could help make or break a huge investment in time, money, and resources. No company is going to want to gamble on people without experience. I get that. I hate that. But I get that. And really, if I didn't know me, I wouldn't hire me.

So anyway, this chapter guy(I'm not going to mention any names) told me that the whole objective of the booths, is to get passed the HR booth people and get on to the real people doing the hiring. As he was talking, I remember telling an HR booth guy about what I did. He told me the Content Designer guy was around, and if I wanted to come back in an hour and talk to him if I had any questions, I could do so. I didn't realize it, but what he was doing was telling me that he liked what I had to say, and he wanted to get someone in the company that knew more about the position I was applying for to better sniff me out. Like a dumb ass, I said, "I think I'm good, thanks," and passed on it.

Ah well, more stuff to know for next time. I got the impression that industry people wanted to help the talented wannabes learn the tricks and secret handshakes so they can make the industry better. Meanwhile, the untalented people should stay on their side of the fence. I'm slowly climbing the fence. I got a lot of really great advice. Really, I just have to keep at it.

One thing that really surprised me, when I talked about the project I was involved with, people seemed really interested. Like it was a big deal. I was like, "Did I mention it was unfunded. I did? Yeah well, that means we're not getting paid. Oh, you get that?" But people didn't care. They still took that as serious sounding. I guess it's not all that uncommon for people to work on serious, but unfunded projects. The Stargate MMO comes to mind. Those people worked for free for a long time. When they finally gave up, a lot of those people went to big studios. One of the Content Designers(a position I apply for), went to Cryptic Studios (a studio I've applied for multiple times over the last couple years). So, I'm thinking I need to take my current project a hell of a lot more serious. I mean, it really is a cool project. I just didn't think it meant anything since it was unfunded.

It's not that I blow it off. It's just that I found it mentioned on the Gamedev boards along with a lot of crap. It looked pretty cool. They said there might be money down the line, which I read as, "You will never see money from this ever." I just thought of it as a portfolio piece. Anyone that knows me, knows I don't care about money. I really don't. I need enough to eat, sleep, and take care of minor things here and there, but I don't care about material possessions. I need a good computer to do my thing, that's about it.

Anyway, other than free burritos from some tiny game companies giving away food to people with GDC badges, not much else happened. Another group of people gave out Korean tacos. It said, "pork" and I hope that's what it was. But yeah, I was pretty nervous. While you waited in line for your food, they had their games set up for you to demo. I didn't really think about all the people on the street handing out fliers and stuff. People were dressed up as wizards, pirates, and zombies just outside. Since I stayed inside from opening to close most the time, I didn't really notice them being there. As they gave out the free food, they asked people to blog about their company and check them out and stuff. But now I can't remember the names of their companies. But there, I blogged about them.

GDC, Day 4

2011-03-03T04:48:00.001-08:00

Day 4 was yesterday, Wednesday. Today is the day I get my first chance to go to the career pavilion. A few people on the street have asked me what the "GDC" on my badge around my neck stands for. So people have struck up conversations with me about it. So these two garbage collector guys stopped me as I was walking from my hotel to the convention to ask me about it. I stopped and talked to them about how I was hoping to try and get a job. One of them said, "No, you're not going to try and get a job, you're going to get that job." I laughed, and they kept going. He said, "You're going to go in their and take someone's job because you're the best." It was just so funny and awesome. He said, "Let me tell you something. When I applied for this job, I told them I used to be a carpenter. The guy said, 'You see these ten pages I got here? These are a list of guys trying to get this job, and they're all carpenters. What makes you any different?' So I said, 'None of those guys are a bad ass. You want to start your company off with bad asses, right?' So that's what you gotta do. You gotta go in there and let them know you're a bad ass."

I shook their hands, patted them on the shoulders, thanked them immensely for their advice. Then I put my hands together and did a short bow. Why? I dunno. Cause it was an instinct and I really appreciated their encouragement. They did the same and bowed back, which was really funny. I'm a white guy, bowing to two black guys, which makes no sense, but it was fun and I smiled the whole way to the convention.

Aside from women asking me if I want dates and the 10-12 pan handlers I pass to or from the convention, I've got a general sense that the people in San Francisco just seem to be really nice.

So Wednesday - Friday is when Expo Pass people get to actually start doing stuff. And I had a lot to do. First off, they opened the Expo floor up at 10pm. It might have been a little bigger than the size of a soccer field. On the far left where closed booths for game companies. I didn't really get what was happening there. I think people made appointments to interview for jobs or they're doing some kind of business deals there. I don't know. In the middle was wear a lot of companies expo'd stuff. There was a dancer lady with motion capture sensors strapped to her. She was moving around and the 3d, CGI character on the screen was perfectly synced with her. I've seen that done before, only the 3d character was fully rendered--which I hadn't seen done before.

There were a bunch of other things like some guy lecturing about new features in 3d Studio Max and Maya. Since I'm not an artist, I just kept going. I got the the career pavilion. This is why I came to GDC in the first place. I didn't really get what I was supposed to do. Just walk up and say, "Hi, I'm awesome, please hire me"? So I just kind of pretended like I was looking at something else while I stood in hearing range to listen to what other people were saying. Ok, so I saw a lot of artists with their digital portfolios on IPads showing off their work. Blizzard wasn't taking applications. It seemed like their booth was set up to tell each person in line why they weren't going to be hired. They were pretty nice about it. It was more of a, "You need to do this and this, then come back next year," kind of thing. I mean, I'm trying to get a vibe about why employers are even here in the first place. They get plenty of people applying for them through their websites, so why even have a booth? It's not like the very people they want to attract aren't already aware of Blizzard. But I think what it is, is that employers want to help develop a better community of employees. So maybe a diamond in the rough gets some encouragement to keep going, thus better expanding the pool of talent worth hiring down the road.

So I hit the Blizzard booth first since I figured I might learn from that and won't get hired either way. He told me that I was too all over the place and needed to focus on one type of game writing and get experience doing that.

That makes sense, but does offer a problem. The term "writer" means a lot of things in the industry. There's design documents that need to be written. These will never be seen by the public. They're instructions for the programmers and artists to follow in creating mechanics and art assets. There's content design. This is quest information. There's dialogue. Writers that do dialogue come in near the end of the project. There's transfiction writing. This is creative writing that is really glorified fan fiction. Transfiction writers have no impact on shaping the game, but come in after to create more content in terms of novels, web comics, etc, to go along with the game. All of these forms of writing are done by different writers and here I am applying for all of it. If I can do a little bit of everything, it either makes me more viable to companies looking for one of the things I do, or less desirable to a company that wants someone that specializes in that area. It's hard to know which way to go. As I get more exposed to the industry, I'll be better at reconciling this problem.

Ok, so I hit the other booths. Blizzard had a long line, but many of the others didn't. Again, I was still trying to figure out what the objective of the people at these booths had. I hit some stumbling blocks. One guy, I mentioned that I'm a studio producer for musicians, and that would make it easy for me to transition to working in the studio with voice talent--an important thing since writers are often writing the dialogue. The guy said, "We don't make the kind of games with voice overs."

Tom Sloper gave advice on Gamedev.net for people like me going to the GDC. He said the most important thing we can do is listen. He also said that employers don't care about us(I think he was exaggerating), but rather, care about our interest and enthusiasm.

I was thinking about as that guy told me that I made a false assumption about his company. I tried to cover by saying that if they chose to start using voice overs in later games, I could really help to make them more believable. But still, as I went booth to booth with the, "I don't know what kind of games you guys make, but please hire me" attitude(ok, so I tried to play that down the best I could), the bottom line was, they could see through that.

One guy told me they already had a writer. I said, "And he's almost as good as me." He laughed, but I later regretted saying that. I mean, just because he laughed, doesn't mean he didn't think I was an asshole for saying that. I mean, I want to be a "Bad ass," but not a jerk. What I should have said after that is that I was kidding, that I was sure they had a wonderful staff and I'd be honored to work with them--which is very much the truth. Instead, I think I just came across as another forgettable person standing in line with too much ego and not enough experience.

In line for Obsidian Entertainment--a game company that makes the hit games... ah, I have no idea... the guy said to the artist standing in front of me, "Every time I see your work, it keeps getting better and better." How many times do we need to keep coming to the GDC to get hired by someone?

I would cheat a little, pull out my IPhone, look up each company on the internet to see what kind of games they made, and try and give my pitch based on that. Tencent Games in Boston was actually hiring a Content Designer. The position said they were looking for someone to help the Creative Director and Lead Writer realize the full potential of their game lore. Um, crap, that's what I've been doing for the last 15 years in my writer critique groups. So I walked up to the booth and explained what I did and what I could offer. The other thing too, these people manning their companies booth--um, who were they? Think about it. So if you're a programmer, artist, writer, accountant, social media marketer, producer, what have you, these are radically different roles. And they just had one person there talking to you as if one person really knew the ins and outs of what you do. So as I'm explaining to the lady how awesome I am--I was being funny and down to earth about it--she said, "Content Designer? That's on our list. Does this match what you're talking about?" as she showed me the description, that I already read off their website before I talked to her. I mean, I just explained to her what I did, and now she was asking me if that fit the job description. It made me realize that she was listening to what I was saying, but only kinda sorta. Then it started to make me wonder what the booths were really for again.

I thought this was the grand daddy event for job seekers going to the GDC. Now I'm starting to wonder if there's much difference between going to the booths or just emailing your resume through their sites while sitting at home. I know there's got to be more to it. What ever is really going on, I'm on the outside looking in for now.

In either case, not all my booth experiences were negative. I'm kind of making it sound like I was actually like a dope, being an ass all full of myself. That's not really how I was. I was being pretty down to earth, pitching what I did with a nervous tinge in my voice I hoped wasn't noticable, why I thought my choice of majors and the skill sets I developed set me apart and made me unique, and what I could bring to the table. But I was charming about it. I made people laugh. The lady at the Warner Brothers booth was handing out WB deodorant. I asked her if it makes you smell like Bugs bunny. She thought that was funny, and we joked around about what WB must think of gamers if they're passing out deodorant to us. She told me about how their office in Seattle was looking for writers and asked if I'd be willing to move. I got that question a lot, actually. Hmm, it seems kind of silly to ask me that. If you're applying for a game company, you pretty much have to accept that you're going to be moving to do it. I've decided that I don't like telecommuting. I don't like being alone at home, feeling in the dark about what's going on. I'm a visual person. I need to figure out the vibe of things, the body language of people talking to me, and get a sense that way about things.

Other than the two big companies there--Blizzard and Bethesda, all the other companies took resumes. Some of them wrote notes on them. One guy wrote, "Writer" on the top even though I had that near the top. Another put a box around, "Content Designer" which I had as my resume title after my contact info. One wrote, "Willing to move," on the back. A couple I didn't leave my resume with. One company said they only hired local people... and they had no offices in California. Um, why were they there then? Another only had offices in Taiwan, which, at this point, I'd move to Taiwan for a job. I don't care. He told me, "If we decide to start having a western touch to our games, we'll consider you." That just seemed odd that they would come to a convention in the west, but not have west themed games.

I don't know. Like a lot of what was going on, I didn't really get it. I think it will make more and more sense as time goes on. I think something killing me is that I didn't know which companies made which games. I know maybe the top 20 game companies, but there's hundreds that I should know. And only a few of the ones I do know, I know fairly well.

How much farther would I have gotten had I walked in like, "You know how much I love playing your game such and such and how great the story line is with the thing and the thing?" How much further would I have gotten had I contacted these companies ahead of time and asked to set up meetings to get a private interview with someone that actually knew what questions to ask a writer? I'm on some mailing lists that had game companies posting that they were available to schedule private meetings with people at the GDC. They were all companies that didn't make the type of games that need writers, so I didn't go through with that, but what mailing lists am I not on to hear about the companies that do make the games that could use me?

Ah well. There's always next year, right? Next year, I'll be a lot better prepared.

So I got to go to a couple panels today. The first one was on the importance of testing games early. The guy presented worked on Halo a lot and talked about things they did in that game. I've never played Halo, so I didn't really get a lot of what he said. But he said something like at the beginning, they make you run around without a gun. They want you to get used to the controls first, without having to worry about defending yourself. So some players would get pretty frustrated at playing a shooter and going the first three minutes without having a gun to shoot. So finally, you talk to this really important guy, and there's this big deal about how he gives you his gun like he's passed the mantle on to you, and it's all epic. And they found that players would take the gun and immediately shoot the guy just because they were so mad at going so long and not being able to shoot anything. Some people weren't mad, but just wanted to test the gun out, shot the guy, and it screwed up their game. So they had to change the game so that you didn't get ammo until after you left the room. Now, this is a problem that game testers won't encounter. Why? Because they're game testers. Game testers do a poor job at simulating what the typical player is like. Most players don't play 50 games a year like us hardcore players do. So they do silly, none nonsensical things like shoot important people they're not supposed to shoot.

I went to another panel after that, that was a game writer's round table. They mostly talked about the frustration writers have in that most "writers" get hired because they know people, not because they're good writers. And because of that, games often have bad writing--which they do--and that writers need to band together to try and promote good writing in games. It's sort of a weird thing here. Some players don't care about writing, but the ones that do and can spot good writing, find it important. The problem is that most game makers can't spot good writing and don't care about it and don't see it as that important. How do we, as writers, impress upon the greater game development community the importance of hiring actual writers for writing positions?

I don't know. But after, I worked at the IGDA booth for a few hours, felt tired and hungry and for my motel. I had been living off a case of Slimfast, some blueberry bagels, and a bag of tangerines that I bought before coming out here. I stocked up on anything that didn't need refrigeration, but didn't think about nutrition. I was badly craving anything with protein in it. Getting a pizza might not have been the best filler for that, but I decided to see if Domino's lived up to the "we don't suck any more" claims on their commercials. I thought it was pretty good. I ate almost an entire medium pizza by myself, crawled into bed and slept. Ok, so it's now thursday morning. Hmm, I don't really know what to do today. I have to work something today and there's some awards show--that sounds like a big waste of time. I've heard that Will Wright sometimes comes in and gives speeches, but he has to do it under a pseudonym or the room gets crazy packed and unwieldy. For anyone not obsessed with games, Will Wright created Sim City, the Sims, and all the other early Maxis games making him the most successful computer game designer in the history of the world. Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

GDC, Day 3

2011-03-03T04:08:00.001-08:00

So Day 3 would have been Tuesday. I'm getting behind on keeping up since it's Thursday morning as I type this. Ok, so Tuesday, I didn't have much to do in the morning. So I'm still trying to figure out the vibe, the hiddenness of things. You know when you don't know enough about something to ask questions about it? Well, there was so much going on that I knew I wasn't prepared to take it all in, but I knew from the beginning that this trip was about learning how to get in to the industry rather than getting into the industry.

I accidentally dropped my folder. It's a really old folder, one that's lasted me from my junior college days--so almost 10 years. The front binding tore, so it was hanging on by little more than a thread. I couldn't just throw it away, but I didn't want to show up to interviews with something clearly old and damaged. I bought a new folder at the Walgreen's nearby. It was a symbolic thing. I was saying good bye to my college days and accepting that I was forging a new path.

So tons of stuff to do, but not for meager Expo pass holders like me. I heard a guy say, "They've got balls to charge us thousands of dollars for content that they're just going to show on youtube for free." But i occurred to me as I thought about all the GDC seminars I've watched on youtube. All this stuff I'm missing out on has nothing to do with the content itself. It has to do with being a high level industry people being able to be surrounded by other high level industry people without the wannabes like me pestering them. At this point, I'm riffraff, and the people that shell out the money(or who work for companies that did), have a really high chance of walking up to someone, starting a conversation, and having it be a contact worth making.

That's ok. I understand things have to be that way. It doesn't bother me because I know one day I'll be a high level person. And two, I shouldn't expect some big exec to give me a job tomorrow and whisk me away into some huge company making epic games. I need to start with the little guys and start small and pay my dues. I'm fine with that.

So I go to do my first day of volunteering. There was some meet and greet for IGDA members. Basically people wanted to go and I checked to see if they were on the list. If they were, they got a wrist band to the party. If not, no go. I thought it was a little amusing being the list Nazi when I'm not a member of the IGDA. The fact that I'm not a member, yet I'm volunteering for them, is another really weird thing, but that's another story. It's only like $25 - $50 bucks a year depending on what kind of member you are. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. I'll probably join soon. I'm really thrifty, and all this money I've been blowing through has got me a little nervous, so even $40 bucks has me a little nervous. Once I'm employed, I won't be as nervous.

So the wristbands got sent out, we closed down the IGDA booth and headed out to the mixer. It was at a dance club and it was really loud. I went with some other IGDA volunteers and we walked around and talked to people. I met some artists that seemed interested in the gaming project I'm working on. I gave out my business card and hopefully something will come out of that. I asked my project lead if there was anyone he wanted me to try and recruit and he said character modelers and animation artists.

We closed out the night by hopping to a few other clubs. It's amazing how many clubs are in downtown San Francisco. But at night, any club you go to near the GDC convention will have tons of gamers there networking. More and more, I'm thinking the whole conference is just a gimmick to get people to hang out.

It was close to midnight and I was pretty tired. The blisters on my feet were starting to get blisters, so, instead of going to the next club, I just went home to catch up on sleep.

I'll type up Day 4(yesterday) right after this.

GDC, Day 2

2011-03-01T12:32:00.000-08:00

So yesterday(monday) was a pretty short day for me. I didn't really understand that volunteering earned me an Expo Pass, not the full access one. So none of the cool conferences and summits were open to me. The Expo pass generally means for Mon and Tuesday, you get to wait in the lobby.

So I checked in and everything and got my badge to wear around my neck. Walking San Fran, I can see lots of other GDC'ers wearing their huge badge around their necks. That's kinda cool, I think. Anyway, so two hours after I took care of getting my badge and pass and worked out what my work schedule would be for volunteering, I got an email from GDC saying I won an Expo Pass. They announced they were giving some away a couple weeks ago, and I filled out a form to win one. But yeah... little late in the announcement, guys. I wrote them back and told them I already had a pass, so please give mine to the next person on the list.

Ok, so why am I working for a badge when I could have accepted the free one? One, I really don't care about moving boxes around and setting up stuff, or whatever work needs done. And two, it gives me the chance to network with people.

Anyway, here it was monday, and it's setting in that I have nothing to do(nothing I have access to, I mean). So I asked my volunteer coordinator if I wasn't on the schedule for Monday, could I just do whatever. Basically, I was trying to nicely say, "Can I go home?" She said that Mon and Tues of GDC is when all the high level industry people come to do all the conferences and summits. And since there's not many other people around yet, this is the perfect time to talk to them and make contacts. I nodded and said that was a really good idea. Then I walked to my hotel room and went home.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But my stupid hotel room didn't have internet. They had WiFi, but I don't have a wireless modem on my desktop, and my laptop won't run Rift. I had to get home, log in, and see how my Rift guild was doing. Kinda crappy, the game comes out, I start a guild, recruit like mad--we're the biggest guild on my server, then I leave for a week. Lame of me, I know. But I changed the ranks so they could do all the stuff they need to do without me. So they should be ok. They're doing well.

Alright, so sorry for anyone interested in GDC finding these posts through googling GDC and hearing about my Rift addiction. Today should be a little more interesting. I'm working some party for IGDA--and I barely even know who they are or what they do... and I'm volunteering for them.

GDC, Day 1

2011-02-27T22:24:00.000-08:00

Well, let's start with the basics. GDC stands for Game Development Conference. It happens once a year for various regions of the world. The one in San Francisco is a big deal. Thousands of people go each year. A week pass to the event costs about $4k dollars, so it's not for the light of heart either. But if you want to make contacts, this is the place for that.

How the heck did my broke ass get in? Well, I offered to volunteer a month ago. I didn't think much would come of it and I eventually forgot about it. Then I got told the day before, there was one spot left if I wanted it. Not being an IGDA (International Game Development Association) member, I got last priority. So I jumped at the chance for the last spot.

After crunching numbers on gas vs bus vs BART vs train and every combination of those, I just decided to bite the bullet and get a hotel in the middle of down town San Francisco within walking distance. So I packed as fast as I could, and got in my car.

Tonight was just the orientation meeting. Or it would have been, had I not missed it. So first off, I settled in at my hotel room, set up my computer, etc. Hey, how do you think I'm typing this? Then I figured 15 mins would be plenty of time to walk there. My first problem, aside from forgetting the printed out map of the area at home, was that my sense of direction was all off. I knew I needed to go South East of the hotel, but I didn't know what direction that was. I walked out of my hotel, made it almost half a block before getting solicited by a prostitute. Yeah, I was in SF alright. A few more blocks, and I saw a woman that looked like her body was sculpted in a lab. She had a skin tight, sequin dress that barely covered her thighs. She was really tall, so instantly, I considered the possibility it could be a man. I dunno. It was weird. S/He just looked like someone you only see in movies.

The more I walked, the more I took in the diversity. It's 8 o'clock at night on a sunday and there's old people walking down the street, young / student looking people, people walking their dog, homeless / crazy people yelling at invisible people, and a lot of women that looked like prostitutes. I also noticed how many people looked like they just walked off the set of an 80's hair metal band video shoot. I don't just mean their had spikes hair or a leather jacket with chains. I mean the whole freaking package down to every detail.

So I finally had to break down and ask for directions. I asked the lady sitting behind the counter at the hotel I was staying at. Yes, because I walked in a circle.

So I followed her directions and found the Mascone building. Cool. Um, only, the Mascone building is MASSIVE. Like, you could a big rock festival there, in each of the several floors. So I wondered around in there for a long time before finally having to ask the only two people in the whole building I saw. They said, "This is Mascone West. I think you want Mascone North. It's the next building over. God damn it! I HATE being late.

So I go across the street... um, I still don't see it. There's a bowling ally / arcade / hockey rink building and on the other corner, a massive theater complex. I couldn't believe the streets of SF. You could see a pizza shop, laundry mat, sex shop, and high classy bar, all right in a row. And everything was packed with 30-80 people in view at anyone time walking the streets... even at 9pm at night. Damn, it was 9pm already. Ok, now I'm starting to narrate this like my character Elaeria from my novel.

Blah, anyways. So I'm really frustrated. I have NO idea where to go or what to do. I think about packing up and just driving home. I'm never going to find it. So finally I ask this woman on the street. She pointed which was to go and said I couldn't miss it. I told her my powers of missing things knows no bounds. She either thought that was funny or felt sorry for me. She offered to show me. So she walked with me for a block and showed me. Um, that's NOT where Google Maps said it was supposed to be. It was passed the movie theater and bowling alley thing. As in Marcone West and Marcone South and Marcone North had other buildings in between them. They weren't *right* next to each other. How confusing! I thanked her for her time, and went inside to look for them.

Anyway, so I showed up right as they were wrapping up. They asked me to join in a group photo, so maybe I was just in time. The coordinator was really nice. She gave me the condensed speedy version of her speech and a three sheet long print out of everything she said anyways. So, maybe it was no big deal I missed orientation.

Well, everyone seems nice so far. This is all about networking, so everyone's trying to make friends and be friendly. It's an interesting vibe. I need sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a very long day.

Terriftic

2011-02-22T03:01:00.000-08:00

I must be really tired. That title makes me laugh. Why am I tired? I haven't gotten much sleep because I've been playing in the Rift beta nearly non stop. Ok, so if you're into MMORPGs and you've somehow missed the hype, Rift is a big game coming out later this week.

Rift is an open map quest based game just like all the others. It's a fantasy MMO with a dark, far future fantasy twist. Not a lot unique, but still cool. Let's start with lore. So there's this Nexus dimension that connects all the elemental plains - Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Life, and Death. The Gods sealed it off, protecting the plains from invading each other. In the center of this Nexus plain, lived humans, dwarves, elves, and what have you.

Now, I haven't seen this mentioned, but I got kind of a Garden of Eden vibe here. Some of the people worshiped the Gods. Others wanted to bite from the Tree of Knowledge. So one group, called The Defiant developed advanced technology. Through their technology, they accidentally broke the seals, protecting the world from the armies of the Elemental Plains. So the faithful and the scientific are fighting each other, and the armies from the elemental plains are breaking through, coming through Rifts in the seal. And lots of people die. So the Gods resurrect the most powerful of the faithful so they can battle the armies from the Elemental Plains. These champions, or Ascended are The Guardians. Ascended have the power of three souls in the same body, allowing them far more power than a regular mortal. This is the time line in which the game starts. We know, future wise, that the Guardians will not be successful and that they will eventually lose and the world will be destroyed.

The Guardians blame the Defiants for creating the Rifts. The Defiants blame the Guardians for destroying their machines, crippling the Defiants from being able to clean up their own mess.

In the future, the Defiants will develop the technology to create their own champions, or Ascended, merging three souls of the dead into one body, and resurrecting that body in an Ascended. This is where the game starts for the player that chooses to play a Defiant. The world is nearly destroyed. There's little to no hope, but one. The Defiants have also built a time machine and at the end of the tutorial level(levels 1-6) they transport you to the past--while the Rifts are opening, but there's still time to save the world.

So whether Guardian or Defiant, you're on equal footing. With twice the number of Ascended, the players are able to stop the Rifts, repel invaders, and seal the Rifts as they come. But old rivalries die hard and Guardian and Defiant Ascended clash in civil war.

That's the basic lore. So what makes things so different? Game play differences are that the game is chaotic and ever changing. There are very few places you can go AFK at. A Rift could open up right on top of you. If no one repels the invaders and seals the Rift--I've seen 20 of them open in one small zone at once, the invaders start to build footholds. Once they build footholds, they can start summoning more of them and invade small camps or even major cities. Even if there are no Rifts around you, you could still see small armies of Elites running past you. Some of these elites are open world raid bosses, requiring dozens of players or more to take down. What's nice about this is that the raid bosses are level appropriate for the zone. So if you're only level 12 or something, that's fine. Two other nice things about zone events, other than they're constant, is you get decent XP--even if you just heal and don't attack anything. You just have to be in a dangerous area and be doing something. And two, you don't have to ask for an invite to the raid. A button pops up asking if you want to join. Click it, and you're in. It's constant, spontaneous raiding... even at low level. There's no rolling for loot. Everyone gets something.

I mostly stuck to the lower levels as I tried out all the different characters. But I noticed in the higher level zones, the rifts were different. A Death Rift in Stone Fields summoned a ghostly library with displaced townspeople wondering around and a Librarian boss that read books from different shelves while you fought him. Weird stuff. I imagine more variety the higher level you get with different tactics needed.

Ok, the other cool thing, the class structures are really complicated. I hated it at first, but yet, couldn't dismiss it. There are 4 classes. Seems simple. But each character can pick 3 of the 8 souls associated with each class. A Mage can be a Life Mage(Chloromancer), and Necromancer, and a Fire Mage(Pyromancer) all at the same time. A Warrior can be a Paladin and a Blood Death Knight(Reaver) at the same time. A Cleric can be a shadow Priest (Cabal) and a Purifier... basically, stuff that makes no sense together, you can do it if that floats your boat. And it makes sense from an RP perspective. I mean, you have the souls of different people in you, and access to their power.

Let's break this down.

Warrior Souls:
Champion - offensive, 2 handed weapon wielder
Paladin - defensive, shield block heavy tank
Reaver - defensive, death magic dot heavy, aggro tank
Warlord - defensive, buff / debuff heavy tank
Paragon - offensive, dual 1 handed weapon wielder
Riftblade - offensive, elemental style, ranged / melee hybrid
Void Knight - defensive, anti magic / mage's nightmare tank
Beastmaster - offensive, pet class

Some interesting combinations here. The Beastmaster's pet can tank and the Riftblade can throw spears of fire, stone, and lightning from a distance making this a plate wearing hunter that can engage hand to hand if needed.

I wouldn't combine Paragon with Champion since one needs two weapons, the other, one big one. But aside from that, any other combination of offensive souls would make a good damage dealer.

as for a Tank, the Reaver has tons of disease dots that they can spread around that generate tons of threat so I used this soul for aggro. The Paladin has great shield block abilities and great single target, threat building build up attacks. For the third soul, I didn't experiment much with the Void Knight, though I've heard lots of people liked it. I picked up Warlord instead and used the Warlords powerful finishing moves to debuff my target or buff my teammates. All four of the defensive, tank trees have talents that boost your armor, health, and other mitigation and / or threat generation. And they all stack.

Believe it or not, but the warriors are the only class that can't be healers. Nope, not even Paladins. Paladins can self heal and rez others, but that's it.

Clerics:
Inquisitor - offensive, single target, ranged damage dealer. Can self heal
Purifier - healer / debuffer, lots of direct heals
Sentinel - healer, direct and AoE heals
Justicar - defensive, self healing, tough as nails tank
Shaman - offensive, melee heavy damage dealer
Druid - offensive, melee heavy, pet class
Warden - healer, HoTs and buffs
Cabalist - offensive, AoE damage dealer

I didn't experiment much with the Clerics. I've heard that Cleric Justicar tanks are some of the best in the game for mitigation. Combined with Druid and Shaman souls and they never run out of mana. They're very good at self healing and can AoE heal pretty well--something I did running around Rift to Rift in raids. I didn't get high enough level with my Druid to get the pet that tanks for you, but I've heard the Satyr is a good tanking pet. I know that Clerics can make fantasic damage dealers. This makes them one of the classes that are great healers, tanks, or DPSers.

Mage:
Elementalist - offensive, pet tanking class
Warlock - offensive, dots, life drain, and mana regen
Pyromancer - offensive, AoE damage
Stormcaller - offensive
Archon - offensive, damage and party buffs
Necromancer - offensive, pet class
Dominator - crowd control, damage and debuffs, cc, and snares
Chloromancer - healer, perhaps the best healing soul in the game

I didn't mess with these guys much either. The Chloromancer is interesting. At low levels, they can debuff a target so people hitting it get healed. They can also dps to heal others. As strange as it sounds to pair this life mage with a Warlock, or shadow mage, since the Chloromancer has mana issues, being able to get mana back from Warlock spells makes this a strong combination.

Mages are the only class in the game that cannot tank.

Rogue:
Assassin - offensive, stealth heavy, burst, melee damage
Nightblade - offensive, melee with some ranged
Ranger - offensive, ranged damage with a tanking pet
Marksmen - offensive, ranged
Saboteur - offensive, bombs and traps, currently a PvP beast
Bard - healer, single and AoE healer with tons of party buffs
Blade Dancer - offensive, melee damage with some damage mitigation
Riftstalker - defensive, tank

Ok, so I played the hell out of my rogue and was surprised I liked this class the best. The main combination I used was Ranger for the tanking pet and Marksman for more ranged attacks. Ranger is good enough on its own, but the Marksman gives you another shot that buffs you. I messed around with a third soul for a while. The Saboteur, though powerful, seemed like too much bomb management work. According to the forums, people are begging for Sabo nerfs, so I'm guessing the bombs are really good for PvP. I used a Bard soul for a while. That was neat because it gave me another way to heal my pet. They do decent dps, though not great. I didn't want a melee soul because my pet keeps stuff off me, so it would just be a waste unless my pet died, which happened sometimes. Then I figured out that the Assassin's many, many poisons worked at range. Yay, poisoned arrows!

I didn't try and main heal any instances as a Bard, though I imagine that would be challenging. They don't have mana, and rogue energy regens ridiculously fast, so maybe they could be main healers. If a rogue is a dpser in a party, I can imagine the healer would be bored.

Ok, so I did try the Rogue tanking spec, the Rift Stalker. My souls were Riftstalker, Blade Dancer, and Bard. I picked Bard for the +10% to health and the slight mitigation they have. Blade Dancer has a lot of +dodge, so that was a natural choice. Let's talk about the Riftstalker. Having rift powers, they can shield themselves. They can also teleport around a lot. Think of Shadow Step from the Subtle Rogue tree in WoW. Now imagine each time you port, it gives you a shield. Casters over in the corner shooting at the healer? I teleport to them, stab them a couple times, then port back to the rest of the melee mobs. The teleports port you to the mob you have selected. So I was constantly porting around the battle field rather than gathering mobs up. I had a blast doing that.

Races:
I'm a little torn about whether I like this or hate this, but the racial stat bonuses that each race gets is pretty significant. Each race gets +10 in something. At level 25, my rogue never got a piece of gear that had as much as +10 in anything. Some of the level 50 epic stuff had +15 in something. So +10 to a stat is a big deal at low levels and at least a slight factor at high levels. But that didn't stop people from making strange combinations like Kelari Mages or High Elf Warriors. I made a High Elf Paladin because they look so awesome. Speaking of awesome, Rift is the first MMO in the history of the world that has dwarven female characters that actually look like females. I made a Dwarven female Champion Warrior. Her two handed sword was twice her size, which was pretty entertaining as is. But she looked like a 6 year old girl running around with a colossal sword. I mean, I was pretty set on playing the Defiant side, but the Dwarves are just so awesome looking in this game that I've been tempted to at least try Guardian side. I loved my Dark Elf(Kelari) rogue so much, I'm going to start there. The Kelari look really fragile and petite looking. I had a Bahmi warrior too. She looks like an amazon. Looked. She got wiped in the holocaust known as the Beta wipe. But I'll remake her once the game goes live in a couple days.

Ok, lastly, I'll talk about the first 5 man instance. It's called Iron Tombs. The first boss is tank and spank. The second encounter is three mini bosses. A mage, a healer, and a warrior. Kill the healer first, blah, blah. The last boss is almost Tank and Spank other than he does an AoE that would kill everyone, but a ghost guy pops up saying, "Heroes, come quick. I'll protect you from his magic." He makes a circle of protection. Run into the circle and you can survive the AoE.

But the part of the instance that struck me the most was the part where you are surrounded by little shadow demons. There are these orbs in the darkness. And it's really dark down there. The Shadow Demons keep on coming. But if you jump on an orb or bump into it hard, it lights up, and the light will kill the shadow demons. It just reminded me of some horror movie where you're hiding in the light, and you can't see all the monsters wanting to kill you outside your small circle of protection.

The first time I ran it, we didn't know you could activate the orbs. And it was a pain killing off all the shadow guys that kept repopping.

So, will Rift kill WoW? The one thing WoW has going for it is nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd. Everyone that plays MMOs knows WoW, has tried it on some capacity, or at least has friends that play it that they could join. WoW has tons and tons of content. It's an aging game engine that's be revamped with Cataclysm, but still has low polygon characters and models. It's cartoony and highly stylized. Is that good or not? It depends. Too much photorealistic art in games can make things hard to spot. One of the problems I had tanking in Age of Conan was the mobs blended in with the back ground, and I couldn't always see mobs loose and attacking my healer. I was too busy doing all those funky Dance! Dance! Revolution! combo buttons to get my attacks off as is.

Rift has fantastic graphics, with amazing particle effects, great animation, and higher polygon models. They made it so WoW users wouldn't miss anything. Even the macro programming language is the same or similar. It's missing a random dungeon finder system, but they say they're adding one.

I've been through a lot of MMO launches. I've never, ever seen a game this well polished at launch. So I'm hopeful that things will go well. I can't wait to get started with my new rogue.

Twilight's Last Reaming

2011-02-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

I didn't watch the Superbowl. I never do. I did watch Christina Aguilera destroy the National Anthem however. Look, forgetting the words... it happens. As a professional singer myself, I've forgotten words to songs I wrote and had to make up stuff on the spot. It's not that big a deal, and Miss Aguilera did so seamlessly. I have to admit, I didn't even notice she flubbed the words. What I take issue with is the pop / rnb vocal style used.

I know what she was thinking. She was thinking, "OMG, the national anthem is all, like, boring and stuff. I have to mix it up and make it, like, not so boring." She has fans and all. But the National Anthem is not supposed to be entertaining. It's a symbol of national pride... of what it means to be an American... of our forefathers that fought and died defending our fledgling nation win our independence and freedom.

eThug

2011-01-28T19:51:00.000-08:00

I used to chat with people a lot on the internet. There was this one forum in particular I used to post on. Well, all of us were from California and into the underground music scene. There were some "my band's better than your band" conflicts, but I think most of the drama came from the fact that the music industry is unreasonably hard to break into, and we often vented our frustration on each other.

Politics was a popular topic. Believe it or not, but it's common for metal heads to be fiscal conservatives. Metal heads tend to support military action when needed, hate big government, and favor low taxes. Religious dogma is what keeps many artists and musicians in general from gravitating to the GOP. And I understand that. As I've said, I'm not religious, but I've grown far less critical of those that are over the years. Most Republicans are religious, but I don't see that as having anything to do with actual Republicanism, which is why I don't let that deter me from the GOP.

There were several people there I fought with. I remember one in particular that I called out, told him where my band was playing, and asked him to let me know ahead of time if he was going to show so we could put on our fliers, "Show up early to watch Brian kick some retard's ass in the parking lot before the show." He talked a lot of crap about wanting to fight me, but of course, never showed up.

There was a woman with a clear mental illness that used the forums to constantly vent about how terrible her life was. Her friends were constantly trying to cheer her up, while others openly ridiculed her, saying pretty awful things. I was sick of her behavior and said some pretty awful things too. Some of our mutual friends took her side and hated me over my comments. Several others decided I was awesome for being critical of her and wanted to be friends with me for it.

I spend a lot of time looking back on my life, and I think about the people in my life I've hurt with my words. Did hurting those people make me feel better in anyway? Could I have spent the same amount of energy helping those people instead of hurting them? Which would have made me feel better?

I spend a lot of time regretting poor choices I've made. I've always been a perfectionist. That sounds like a good thing, and in some people, it forces them to constantly strive to improve themselves. But in my case, it often means that anything short of perfect is a waste of time, nothing I do will ever be perfect, therefore, I don't even try. I think my biggest regrets is, not that I've made mistakes, but that I haven't made enough mistakes. I haven't put myself out there enough. I haven't failed enough.

Of the many resumes I've sent to game companies, I got my first response back. It was a rejection letter for a job I was well qualified, telling me I wasn't qualified. How could that be? I massively re-organized my resume. I had forgotten that hundreds of people might apply for a single position and employers are looking for any reason to throw resumes away to weed out the masses. My resume had great information... if you took the time to read it. It was 3 pages and written nearly in essay form. I feel silly now, blowing a chance for a position I was actually qualified for by sending a resume out that didn't fit the cookie cutter mold. I mean, it's one thing to stand out and be different, but it's another thing to show an employer that you've done your homework, know what a standard industry resume is supposed to look like, and can conform to easily fit into the industry culture. I didn't show that. I showed an outsider looking in. I showed an unknown quantity in a sea of sure things. I wouldn't hire me. I wouldn't gamble on the unknown when I have several sure things lined up. To get a job in the game industry, I have to prove I'm a sure thing.

In either case, I'm really happy to finally get a rejection letter. It's something. Working in isolation is depressing. But to know people are at least listening, is encouraging.

It's kind of funny that the one game project I'm working for full time is talking about how we're going to get funding soon, then all of us will start getting paid. Eh, I'm still working under the assumption I'll never see a dime from this, and all I'm doing is building something to look good on my resume. As such, I'm still sending out resumes to any game company hiring for anything I'm qualified for. I'm considering sending out my resume even to companies not looking for writers. But for now, I'm learning a lot about collaborating on a team. After years of writing solo, it's a strange adjustment. Solo, if there's something I don't know, I can just make it up. In a team, I can't just do that. I have to either ask or wait for approval with the rest of the team to make sure we're on the same page. I don't like that because it means I keep hitting brick walls. But I like it because it forces me to run with ideas I wouldn't have chosen otherwise, challenging me to make sense of new story ideas. In either case, I think I'm moving in the right direction. But I know, 10 years from now, I'll look back at this time in my life, regretting I didn't do something different from what I'm doing now. I just don't know what that will end up being.

The Loughne Gunman

2011-01-11T18:05:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, an event happens that makes us question gun control. The saying might go that guns don't kill people, people kill people. But guns sure help. Yelling "BANG!" at people you don't like doesn't accomplish much.

But something to remember, highly publicized news events are highly publicized because they're rare. Now, I don't like guns. I've never fired a handgun. I've regrettably fired a riffle when I was a little kid, only because my grandfather made me--something that still bothers me. I don't want anything to do with guns. If I served in the military, I would refuse to carry them. I don't like the idea of something that can so easily remove a person from existence. This makes me sound like a peace loving hippy. I'm not. Although I don't like guns and would never own one, I don't like the idea of taking them away from responsible people that do like them. All more gun restrictions will do is make it harder for responsible people to own guns. Criminals aren't following the rules in the first place. As sad as this event is, passing populist laws based solely on infrequent(even highly publicized ones) is not good policy.

First off, let's talk about this kid that shot the judge, congresswoman, nine year old girl, and the others. He was a lefty--smoked pot regularly, quoted from Mien Kumpf and the Communist Manifesto. He was also an Atheist--one of his only redeeming qualities. But my point here, he was definitely not inspired by Sarah Palin or the Tea Party. That didn't stop a lot of idiots on the left from instantly coming to that conclusion.

The more responsible news sources on the Left(along with everyone else) reported that he was just crazy and his political ideologies are immaterial towards finding some kind of motive. Good. Had that not been the case, I wonder if that would have changed things. By that, I mean, let's say the guy instead quoted from right wing sources, would the Huffington Post say he was just crazy and that's all there was to it, or would they have made a case of how extreme rightwing zealotry leads people to violence as Nancy Pelosi has famously said of the Tea Party?

Reading about the glory of Socialism in Mien Kumpf, reading the glory of Communism in Karl Marx's book, or glory of... well, sitting around smoking pot might be something Liberals might do, but it doesn't make you a deranged killer. Neither does wanting smaller government and people to take more responsibility over their own lives, but for me to point out that Nancy Pelosi is simply an idiot for suggesting otherwise is like trying to make the argument that water is wet. Having actually been to a Tea Party rally, I can say I haven't seen such a large collection of peaceful and friendly people in my life.

From what I've read about the Congresswoman is that she's a Conservative Democrat with a history of working with Republicans in her Conservative district. She voted against re-appointing Nancy Pelosi--something which greatly angered many Liberals. But again, as much as I don't like most Liberals, the fact that this lunatic may have been motivated to try and kill the Congresswoman based on this fact is just random and does not reflect on what Liberals are like. He's no different from all the other crazy people that have shot politicians and celebrities. Crazy people exist in all parties and all religions.

Yeah, I'm making a political argument at the same time I'm saying this shouldn't be political. Kind of hypocritical of me. The point I'm trying to make here really is what I've also heard people on the left, like John Stewart, saying: that we should tone down the rhetoric and stop finding reasons to blame "the otherside" for things that doesn't really have anything to do with their policies.

And although as a Republican, I probably wouldn't have voted for the Congresswoman, she sounds like a good person to me. It is my hope she makes a full recovery and bravely continues to serve her constituents in her district, including townhall meetings and other public settings.

Reason for the Season II

2010-12-22T10:09:00.000-08:00

So last year, I made a post on this blog that was critical of the religious origins of Christmas. Many of us Atheists who've felt subjugated, marginalized, and in some cases, discriminated against in the past, sometimes take target with the hegemony that we're not real Americans if we don't believe in a God. After all, it says "IN GOD WE TRUST" on our currency. God is mentioned numerous times in the Constitution. Though this might not be the Christian God, Christians have certainly adopted it as so.

I didn't know there was a word for people that didn't believe in God when I was a child. Maybe I was around 8 or so when I made that choice. I was the only Atheist in my family. And although I was raised Christian, I had serious doubts from a very young age. Ultimately, I decided that I didn't agree in an invisible man in the sky that cast magic spells on the world.

High school was difficult. Some girl in one of my classes kept talking to me about God and I finally told her I was an Atheist. From then on out, the Christians in the school decided that meant I was the Anti Christ and worshipped the devil. I got told numerous times by people that I would go to hell... um, if I didn't believe in hell. Really, Christians? Do you see how dumb a threat that is to make to an Atheist?

A very common question I get is what terrible event happened in my life that made me turn away from God. This is such a bizarre question, that I'm still baffled by the frequency in which I'm asked it. It's the same as me asking a Christian what Zeus did to them to make them turn away from him. Or to ask a Christian did you turn to Christianity after the Flying Spaghetti Monster allowed a loved one to die? It's just so ridiculous. Christians, stop asking me that. It's about as insulting as assuming someone is gay because they were molested as a kid.

Anyways, Atheists continue to face discrimination. According to polls, Atheists are the least trusted by Americans. We're lower down the scale than Muslims. Not that I have a problem with Muslims, but what did us Atheists ever do to you people to make you distrust us so much?

Sometimes people mention Mao and Stalin--two Atheists that murdered millions of people. The problem with that, is they didn't kill people because they were Atheists. They killed people because they were Communists. Karl Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto that the world would never know peace unless all societies rejected religion. Then, we'd have nothing to fight over. How many people know that Imagine by John Lennon is a song advocating Marxism? Me and my tangents.

Ok, so there was this guy named Hitler. He wanted to create a totalitarian regime just like the communists had, but he wasn't going to follow the movement created by Karl Marx, a jew, and he wasn't going to give up Christianity. Hitler, who was Catholic, believed that the world could be united under his rule if everyone followed Catholic, Aryan superiority. Those that did not, would be killed. So Nazism is essentially the exact same as Communism, but with God and racism. My point is that it was not Atheism that caused Mao and Stalin to kill people, just as it was not Catholicism that caused Hitler to kill people. I blame Liberals, but that's for another post.

I'm still struck by something Glenn Beck once said. Religious people often show hate and distrust(or contempt) for us Atheists, but Beck makes a distinction about religion of faith and religion of culture. It's not a point he belabors. But it's one I think should be made clear. Though I do not believe in God, I am culturally a Christian. I've never smoked pot before or done illegal drugs. I don't sleep around. I've never struck anyone in anger. I don't lie or deceive people for personal gain. I sometimes exaggerate about myself to try and get people to like me, and I hate that I do that, but sometimes it slips out when I'm feeling nervous around people. But otherwise, I'm an honest, moral person. That doesn't mean I think these are only Christian values. But I can make the argument that I think Atheists are in a better position to hold Christian morals than Christians are.

After all, I do good things because I want to. I feel better about who I am and how I help to further along society because of my actions. I know when I die, all that I am on this planet ends. The only way I exist passed that point, is if I've made the world a better place because of my life.

Christians do not believe as such. For you, you're not good because you want to be(although that can also be the case for some people). You're good because you fear punishment. That's not the same thing. You don't do good deeds to make the world a better place. You do them because you want a reward. After all, you think you're going to exist in some form after you die. You can trash the Earth as much as you want because you feel this isn't your permanent resting place. It's some make believe Heaven you're trying to get to, that you're focused on. This doesn't make you a good person. Though, like I said, there are Christians that have faith, and are good people. Prisons are full of the most religious people on the planet, where as Atheists are extremely rare in prisons--a much, much lower ratio than in the general population.

Ok, well, that's not what I wanted to talk about in this post. What I actually want to talk about is to be critical of Atheists and this ridiculous anti Christian movement. I think the backlash against Christianity by the Politically Correct crowd has gotten out of control. You don't need to believe you're scaring off evil spirits to celebrate Halloween. You don't have to work all day in the fields to be bringing in the harvest to celebrate Thanksgiving. You don't have to be Mexican to celebrate Cinco de Mayo or Irish to wear green on Saint Patrick's Day. And you don't have to believe in the Christian God to celebrate Christmas.

So none of this "Seasons Greetings" or "Happy Holidays" crap. Just say "Merry Christmas." And if Atheists out there get mad, they can suck it. It's just another holiday with a strange origin. Just enjoy it.

Game Jam

2010-11-21T16:39:00.000-08:00

So I went to my first game jam yesterday. It was a get together of about 12 people. We split up into two groups. Each had about 4 hours to come up with an idea and make it into a fully functioning game. I didn't even know it was possible to do that, that fast, but it is.

Ok, to back up a little. The site was the game studio of 5th Planet Games in Roseville. The guy hosting the event even bought us all pizza. Apparently, there was a never ending supply of soda and candy there too, though I passed on that. The two teams were pretty unbalanced. The host, who was a programmer who worked there, the guy running the event who was also a programmer and worked at a different gaming studio, and another guy(who I think teaches game design at a local community college) was there... yeah, they were all in one team. The rest of us that had never been to a game jam before, we made up the other team. There wasn't much thought involved in setting up the teams. It was the people that sat down on the left side were in Group A, the rest in B.

But putting that aside, we managed to put something together. As "the writer," I knew long before I signed up to go, that there was going to be nothing productive for me to contribute to a quickie game. But, I knew it would be interesting and hoped to maybe learn something and network a little. As it turned out, I was the only "artist," so I ended up drawing sprites for our 2D tank combat game. I mostly downloaded sprites off the internet and photoshopped them to fit what we needed--ie, the gun had to rotate separately. Well, our "programmer," wasn't all that experienced. So the best he could do is get the tank to drive around in all 4 directions.

The other team didn't have an artist at all, so they had a fairly(for 4 hours work) complex game with smoothly moving boxes and circles. The object was sort of like Pac Man. So our game has some cool sprites with limited game play and theirs--the opposite.

Not that I know much about the game industry, but it seems like Facebook and the Iphone created this revolution of simple, quick and dirty games that small teams can knock out in a week. So these little studios are popping up and making money cranking out silly games. I dunno. These aren't the kind of games I have any interest in playing or making. I only care about role playing / adventure games or puzzle/strategic games. Twitchy, fast paced games that rely on reflexes... I've never liked those. So neat revolution happening, but nothing I can really hop on. But, it is good practice to get in and brain storm with fellow gamers and work as a team.

I guess this is the dilemma on the job front. Do I diversify or intensify? I could diversify by teaching myself level design. There's a lot more companies looking for level designers than writers. A lot more. Or, do I intensify and just focus on trying to pad out my writing credentials? Maybe I can focus on some short stories, get them published professionally in some small markets, and add it to my portfolio.

In either case, I'm still plugging away at my novel. I'm pretty happy with it. The main character is also the narrator, and she's a young woman. She's still naive about the world. So there's some things here and there that she doesn't pick up, but the reader will. It's fun writing that way. I think people will really like her once I finish the book. She's a strong character with strong convictions and perseverance in a brutal and unforgiving world. But she's also very lonely despite being surrounded by people. That's probably something a lot of us can relate to. Speaking of that, I should go back to it.

New Chapter

2010-11-09T00:32:00.000-08:00

I've spent my entire life in school. Sure, I've worked over the summers either doing construction or teaching since I was 14. I've had other jobs here and there to take a break from school or while I went to school. I worked as a journalist for a music magazine, was a professional musician, taught computers to 4-6th graders, booked bands at a night club, and many other less glamorous positions involving far more monotony than skill. But I always held on to going to college, despite changing majors a billion times. It was like this life line, this promise that one day I'd have the education to get into a surefire job to launch me into a brilliant career. Essentially, I've been waiting my whole life for life to happen.

So a month ago, despite acing my programming classes and Calc II, I decided I've had enough school and it was time to really go after my passion--creating. Now, being creative and having someone pay you for it, is about as hard a way to make a living as looking for a job as a breather. Everyone is creative. If literacy is the only real qualification, I'm literally competing with over a billion or two English speakers in the world. Ok, so what do I have going for me? I've sold my writing before, so I'm a published author. That narrows things down a lot... uh, to half a million people? I have a BA degree in something. About 15% of Americans do. And my BA is in something pretty useful for writing--Anthropology. Yay me. I'm starting to get somewhere. I sure play a lot of video games and know a lot about them. But as I narrow out my competition, I also narrow out my job fields. How many published writers who are game enthusiasts, native English speakers, and have a college degree in a social related field are there out there? I dunno. Maybe a few thousand. Ok, but how many game companies are there hiring full time game writers? Heh, wow, really not many. The overwhelming majority of writing done in games is done by someone who has another function in the game rather than a single person dedicated to just writing. There might be a hundred companies in the world big enough to consider a full time, dedicated writer. This is a really, really hard route to go. Not to mention, I have no experience in the game industry, and any company with a big enough project with enough overhead to support having a writer is not going to want to go with a rookie.

But I'm doing it anyways. One thing I have on my side, though big games take tens of millions of dollars to make, there's no shortage of people in their basement making smaller games for free. They might not be able to pay a writer(or anyone else on the team), but they certainly want one and won't turn down free help. Some of these games... well, they, of course want to be able to make enough money to pay people if the game sells or enough people donate. The reality is that 90% of these games that actually do make money, will make very little. If a game makes a couple thousand dollars in donations, and you and the other 10 guys on the team spent a year working on it... well, you see where I'm going here. Not a happy prospect. But most games won't "make it," and just fizzle out long before they ever get published. Even big companies often go broke before they're able to finish a game. As is, all companies publish their games before they want to. Everyone wants to spend just a little bit longer polishing and fixing bugs, but have to go to market to keep from going belly up. That won't stop the players from posting on your game's website about what idiots you are because there's bugs in your game like you didn't wave your magic wand over the game enough times to get all the bugs out.

So anyway, back to me. I decided I could spend the next 3 years finishing the prereqs to get into the Masters program at CSUS, then another year or two getting my Masters in Programming all to ensure a nice stable job sitting right next to the guy with my dream job. Or I can spend that same 5 years working for low to no wages as a game writer, hoping to make some contacts and build up a portfolio strong enough to get me that dream job of creating stories for games. So a month ago, I dropped out of college(hopefully) for the last time, and I'm going to go for it.

Well, it didn't take me long to get involved with several projects. The main one I'm working on, there's a small company in Canada looking to transition from software development to games. They're already programmers and game enthusiasts. They just needed to add some artists to the mix and have the start of a game company. I'm under an NDA, and although no one reads this blog, I still can't give the details. But what I can say is there's about 20 active team members--which is still small. The concept artwork for the game so far is very good. I really like it. It's quality stuff as good as anything you'd see in any top notch studio.

The project lead made a post on a game forum, looking for more artists. They weren't looking for a writer, but I contacted them anyways and talked my way in. It's sort of a Star Wars like game with lots of weird aliens and something like "The Force," so there's fantasy elements too. The concept artists draw these really bizarre looking aliens and I write about them and come up with names for them. Wow, having a degree in Anthropology(both cultural and evolutionary biology specializations) really helps here. So I look at physical adaptations they have, decide how they eat, what they hunt, how they defend themselves, etc. And I turn these concept art drawings into an entire ecosystem with highly detailed information. My background as a professional journalist helps here too. I give these highly detailed bio sheets for these little critters. This company is really happy with me and the work I'm doing. But, I mean, I'm a published author with a technical degree, and I'm working for free for a position they weren't originally looking for. The bar isn't very high. But... they are happy. I talk to them through Skype a few hours a week and we brain storm ideas about what players can do in the game--so I have a decent amount of say as well.

But I dunno. Many of the people working on the project are people that actually work on games professionally, so it's not a bunch of kids. So will the game actually get published and be big? Interestingly enough, part of that be based on me. The game's not going to go far without an investor(s) coming along and funding it. It's just not possible to make a great selling game without a big investment. Artists make $60k a year on average and programmers a little more than that. Big games have about a hundred of them working full time for a few years(bigger games have 3 or more times that). There's not much the 20 of us can do working part time to match that other than making a small, playable demo like we're doing now. But as "the writer" on the project, I'm the one that's going to be writing the pitch to investors, the dialogue that the characters in the game say, and the written content on the game's website. So it's my words investors and play testers will read.

Ok, so I have some in game quests to write.

Megmentum

2010-10-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

So I met Meg Whitman yesterday. It was a pretty small rally at a processing plant between Sacramento an Natomas. There were over a hundred people there. After the rally, lots of people were getting autographs, shaking Meg's hand, and sharing their enthusiasm. Meg was really nice, spending a good half hour just talking to people one on one and taking pictures with her. I handed Griff, Meg's husband, my camera so he could take a picture of Meg and I. Meg put her arm around me and smiled for the camera as Griff struggled to figure out how to push a single button.

I was standing there thinking, "Really? It's just a simple camera." Then he thought he had to back way up, so he did. And I was getting a little irritated. Just take the damn picture already! Other people were staring, waiting for their turn. Finally, the little red light flashes, and there... I got a picture next to Meg. She looked great. I looked really irritated and with half closed eyes. Damn it! What's wrong with me? Why couldn't I just relax and smile and be patient? Oh well. I'm a little bummed the picture didn't turn out well and a little irritated at myself for being irritated. I normally have a lot of patience, but when too many people are staring at me and I feel uncomfortable... well, anyways.

There's a lot at stake in this election. I've talked enough about Meg vs Jerry. Let's talk about the scariest thing on the California ballot - Prop 25. The spin: Prop 25 makes it so that the members of the State Legislature do not get paid their salary for each day that the budget is late. And the days of lost wages cannot be recovered. Sounds great, right? Oh, and by the way, it also makes it so the State Legislators only need a simple majority to pass the budget, instead of the 2/3rds vote. But don't you worry your pretty little heads about that part.

So the Democrats have controlled the State Legislature for the last 40 years. Regardless of what you might think of Republicans, I think all voices should be heard. The Dems are pushing Prop 25 pretty hard, because it would completely take Republicans out of the equation and mean that we, the Minority party in California, would no longer have a voice and that the Dems can do to us whatever they want. The mob should not rule. This Proposition would greatly aid in the decline of California.

Remember, we have one of the highest dollars per student education cost in the world, one of the lowest test scores of industrialized countries in the world, one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, the second highest sales tax in the country, and one of the highest state taxes in the country. Despite being one of the most resource intensive areas in the world, California is the shining, crowning achievement of failure on almost every measurable front. The central valley provides 20% of the food consumed by the rest of the country. We have redwoods and logging fields in the north, oil wells in the south, gold in the eastern mountains, and to the west, ports that trade goods from around the world.

My point is that California might be chugging along, struggling through the recession like the other states with half the resources and opportunities, but we should be leading the county. We're trailing behind. We need to radically change the direction we're on.

In either case, it's baffling that the Governor and jr Senate Seat is close at all. I don't get what there is about Boxer and Brown that there is to get excited about. This notion that Meg and Carly are only running to make their billionaire buddies rich... hmm. Rich people are going to get rich either way. If you took all the money in the world away from everyone, then gave it all back, evenly distributed: the formerly rich would be rich again, the formerly poor would be poor again, and the middle class would stay the same. This is fundamentally why I will always disagree with Moderate to Liberal Democrats. Lower expectations leads to lower results. Baby people long enough and they will eventually need to be babied. If you're so mad that rich people keep getting richer, then go to school, get a degree in business and go out and do the same. But don't sit there with your degree in something unmarketable like Philosophy or something, whining about people that have things you're too lazy to work for. Hey, I have a degree in Anthropology. I didn't do myself any favors either. But I'm not going to whine about it.

Last Debate

2010-10-13T03:58:00.000-07:00

Considering the dismal showing Meg made against Steve Poizner in the debate before the primary, she's gotten considerably better. She stumbled a few places against Jerry Brown last night, but did well over all. She was clear and articulate which contrasted against Brown who got off on tangents and bordered on incoherent a few times. I'm not going to waste time bringing up the same talking points they'd said before. When they get into "did he raise taxes according to this source or cut taxes according to this source," I just start to ignore it. I mean, a politician can do nothing except pass a bill that directly lowers taxes, but have taxes still go up due to several other factors. That's why they can both be right about his record.

Let's start with what Meg did well. She dodged the Sarah Palin question. When asked if Palin would campaign for her, Meg said she would do her own campaigning. She was careful not to offend conservatives who favor Palin, at the same time, not aligning herself with a figure that's not all that popular with many independent California swing voters that Meg needs.

Meg had a great line criticizing Brown's promise to cut the Governor's, already tiny, budget by 10%, saying if that's Brown's big plan, California is in trouble. Brown was flat out stumped by that.

Where she stumbled. Brown made the irresponsible excuse that one of his staffers referring to Whitman as a whore is the same thing as Pete Wilson calling the State Legislators a bunch of whores. It's not the same thing, which Meg pointed out. But she didn't articulate why, instead making it seem like it's ok for her "side" to do it, but not Brown's. But here's why it's different. It's like if you called me(a white person) the N word, it's a whole lot different than using that word to refer to a black person. Why? Because the word is a weapon designed to tell a minority they're not good enough to compete with a member of the majority. It's an offensive term used in an effort to "keep women in their place." I don't like it when Conservative women are called that and I don't like it when someone I strongly disagree with like Nancy Pelosi is called that. Not cool.

But let's be adults here. People say all kinds of offensive crap behind closed doors. And it's also not fair that the leaked message got out in the first place, nor does it reflect on Brown. It's childish to think that Brown should seriously fire the staffer who said it. But my point is, it's not on the same level as what Pete Wilson once said, 15 years ago, about a group of mostly men who he felt was in the pocket of unions(which is why he called them whores). The word whores, was, in this case, not used as a weapon. This is a massive difference.

Also, Meg should not have interrupted Brown when he stumbled about having the backing of sheriffs. Meg stopped him to say Brown meant to say he was in their back pocket. It wasn't funny. It came off as childish.

For being a career politician, Brown surprisingly stumbled a lot and was fairly inarticulate. I was able to follow the points he made because I've been keeping an eye on things and I know the context. But I can imagine independents who only watched this one debate would have to conclude Meg was more polished. But for the most part, I liked what Brown had to say, though you certainly have to question if it's all talk or not. By that, I mean, for all of his talk about living within our means, and being a fiscal conservative, he then went on to praise the incredibly irresponsible and wasteful government spending of Obama's "Stimulus" bill. I just took that as meaning that Brown didn't actually mean anything he said about being responsible.

But, the biggest mistake Brown made was missing the opportunity to hit Meg in the one spot she's very vulnerable--to tie her to our current Republican Governor. He brought this up, passingly, in the last debate. And it was a great point, but he wasn't all that clear about it. Ok, so this is what I'm talking about. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a political outsider too. He looked at the unions, saw the corruption and how they're bleeding the state dry, and went after them. Corrupt organizations didn't get that way by playing nice. They fought back and the idiot voters in California sided with them, and rejected Schwarzenegger's Special Election propositions which is why we're in the budget mess we're in. Many of us California Republicans are disillusioned after sending the Terminator in against the Democrat Controlled State Legislators and seeing him come back in pieces. What is it that makes us think Meg is going to be any tougher?

At least Brown speaks the same language as his fellow Democrats and can possibly work with them better. After all, politicians are more likely to compromise with their allies than with their enemies. Now Brown made this point during the debate last night, but not in comparison with how Schwarzenegger has struggled. And of course, we've seen the disaster of the Obama administration when a Socialist President has a super majority in Congress to rubber stamp whatever he wants. Although Brown talks the talk of being a fiscal conservative, we have no reason to believe that's what he'll be after the election.

The LSM

2010-10-02T03:04:00.000-07:00

So Obama is hitting the campaign trail hard, trying to pin the bad economy on those evil Republicans who keep blocking everything he's trying to do. Let me point out something. When the Republicans lost control of Congress in the end of 2006, unemployment was at 4.6%. After a year of Democrat control of Congress, the Great Recession hit. Another year of Democrat control after that and unemployment had doubled. Now with four years of Democrat control of Congress and two years of Democrat control of the White House, and the unemployment rate has tripled. Some would say it's even quadrupled if you count in the unreported people that stopped looking for work.

Now, you might say, well, Congress doesn't really have that much control over the economy. It's all in the White House and you can't expect Obama to clean up 8 years of Bush's mess in just 2 years.

But during the last two years of Bush's presidency when the Democrats controlled Congress, you never heard Bush blaming the recession on the Democrat majority. But you do hear Obama constantly blaming the recession on the Republican minority. The Republicans have 0 power right now. How idiotic is it to blame someone that can't do anything?

I still have to laugh at all the Bush haters that wanted change, and got, in Obama, Bush 2.0. I'm amazed at the idiots that want to blame Bush for the economy, but have no idea what he did to damage it. I know I've said this before, but people always say that Bush passed unsustainable tax breaks for the rich and started two unfunded wars. Well, those two things can certainly lead to budget deficits. No question there. But aren't people smart enough to see how budget deficits have nothing to do with causing a bad economy? What difference does it make to me if our government goes broke? How could that possibly hurt the economy? Sure, sure, a broke government means higher taxes later, but until that happens, there's currently no correlation between these two things. The government is broke because the economy is bad, not the other way around. If the housing market bubble didn't burst, the economy would still be going strong, meaning more people with high paying jobs paying taxes and thus, the government wouldn't have gone broke.

Saying the economy is bad because of 8 years of Bush is just plain idiotic. Now, if you want to argue that Bush caused the housing market to crash because of deregulation, that's a better argument. Deregulation isn't something you can pin on just Bush though. Mistakes were made. Economists gave bad advice. And that's that. This childish finger pointing needs to stop.

Speaking of childish, I've been thinking about the bizarre stereo typing the mainstream media and other Hollywood elites have been doing about the Tea Party. I just don't understand the hate against the Tea Party, Palin, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc. Then it occurred to me. It's like, I finally figured out what people on the left were saying. They actually believe this is new. They actually believe all this time that they've been Moderates, and that Fox News, Beck, and Palin have whipped up a bunch of gullible, racist rednecks into hating Obama just because he's black and that these Conservatives have created the Tea Party movement out of thin air.

I went to my first large Tea Party rally a couple weeks ago. There were about a thousand people there, I guess. It wasn't terribly exciting, but I was glad I went. I was struck by how incredibly nice people were. No one bumped me or made any contact with me. Even when I stood in front of the stage, everyone was polite and respectful. It's true that there were very, very few minorities there. I only saw a couple african americans and maybe a couple hispanics. One of the speakers was an african american woman and people cheered just as much for her as any of the others.

I know racism. In college, I've taken the following classes: Ethnic America, Ethnic Minorities in America, The Psychology of Racial Discrimination, Anthropology of Women Cross Culturally, and many other culture classes on my way to getting a BA in Anthropology. I know racism. There was none of it at that Tea Party rally. Also no trash on the ground after it was over. And yes, I took tons of pictures. The grounds were spotless.

So why does this ridiculous racism charge keep coming up? CIS recently had an episode where the villain was a member of the Tea Party who killed a cop. Tonight, watching a 20/20 episode about Islamophobia, they talked about radicals in the media that spread irrational fear of Muslims and showed a clip of Glenn Beck--despite the fact Beck has strongly condemned Islamophobia and encouraged peace with Islam.

Well, us conservatives are used to the Liberal Mainstream media distorting things. The media always depicts us Republicans as villains and the Dems as the good guys. For decades, the Conservative market had been a massive, untapped group of consumers. The biggest question I have of Fox News is what took you so long? Those of us on the right that have gone so long only hearing from the left, we see Fox as something that finally represents the other side. Fox is not fair and balanced. Fox certainly caters to the Right, and that's fine as long as people who watch Fox are responsible and try and get a mix of both sides as I try and do.

But for those on the left who've grown up listening to the Liberal Mainstream media and Hollywood and thinking it represented the "moderate" side of things, Fox News is a big shock. To them, when they see Conservatives, who've been there all this time as part of the silent majority, suddenly rise up, they flat out don't understand it. They've been listening to Liberals for so long, they don't know any different, so they don't understand the Tea Party movement. I can just imagine the confusion as they think, "Well, if you're not a bunch of racists, what the hell is your problem with Obama anyways? I don't understand. He's trying! Why do you oppose him so much?"

And to be honest, if Liberals and the Liberals-who-think-they're-moderates could actually reach that point of asking us that question and listening instead of calling us names or accusing us of being mindless koolaid drinking zombies that follow around Glenn Back because we believe everything Fox tells us, that would be a miracle.

Book Burning

2010-09-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

Will he or won't he? Rev Terry Jones announced he's not going to burn the 200 copies of the Quran after all. But the mere announcement that this pastor in a tiny little country church in a small Florida town was going to burn some paper and binding with the word "Quran" on it has sparked thousands of Muslims to riot in violent protests where over a hundred people have been injured so far. News media outlets are showing footage of Muslims burning the American flag and chanting in mass "Death to America!" Yet, we're told that most Muslims are moderates, that it's only the radicals that hate us. Sooo... while American leaders are condemning Rev Jones for what he *might* do, where are those moderate Muslims condemning the violence and burning of American flags?

And speaking of the Ground Zero Mosque. While everyone talks about religious freedom here in America, how would the Muslims feel about building a church or synagogue in Mecca? That's not going to happen anytime soon. Where's the tolerance there?

Newt Gengrich, recently put out a video called America At Risk about how Islam is incompatible with peace. We used to argue that building up nukes meant the world was safe. No one would ever start a war because we all fear "mutually assured destruction," which nicely makes up the acronym MAD. Remember that phrase mentioned a lot during the cold war? In the Muslim world where suicide bombers are heroes, MAD-ness isn't a deterrent, it's a bonus! With Iran building nukes, are we counting down the moments until the end of the world with madness? If Muslims will only accept everyone living under their repressive Sharia Law or the end of the human race then, like Newt says, we must end Islam out of self defense. Right?

Ok, now let me start chipping away at these arguments. First off, I really am a fan of Newt, and I was disappointed by his latest "Muslims are going to kill us, we're all going to die!" video he recently put out. I understand that fear mongering works really well and that's why it's done for tv ratings or votes. But this is over the top. We fear what we don't understand.

A big one, is we don't understand ourselves and how radical the idea of freedom of religion is. Our own culture is invisible to us because we think it's "the norm." But American culture is really, really strange. I can walk up to the leader of my country and insult him or her verbally and not go to jail for it. To a lot of people in other countries, that might mean Obama was weak rather than prove how strong the US is.

Now, let's look at American Muslims. Why are Arab Muslims coming to this country in the first place? Because they're escaping the oppression of their home countries. Consider the argument about the Ground Zero Mosque, "Why should we build one here if we can't build Churches in Mecca?" That's an incredibly stupid argument on several levels. It's Americans who want to build the Ground Zero Mosque in America, so we're talking about a completely different group of people. Americans building in America. Not people from Mecca building in America who are not letting Americans build in Mecca. If Arab Christians(and yes, they exist) living in Mecca, want to build a Church in Mecca, they will be denied because they don't have the same kind of freedom of religion there that we have here. Again, this is why many Arabs, and other foreigners, come to America in the first place.

For a counter to my counter argument, I've heard people bring up that the Mosque is a "whole 2 blocks away from ground zero." Um, no. A piece of one of the planes hit this building(that used to be a clothing store) and it's still damaged from that which is why it's not open now and doing business. That means it's not 2 blocks away from ground zero. It's in it.

Should the Mosque be built? I think we all agree they have the legal right to do so. But should they? New Yorkers should make this call. They know their neighborhood certainly better than I(or Obama) do. I don't feel like I have a good sense of things on the ground there to really form an opinion on this, so I leave this to them.

Speaking of Obama, he gave a speech the other day about Rev. Jones and the Quran burning that I thought was important. Many of our military personnel fighting in Afghanistan are American Muslims. As Obama pointed out, what kind of message are we sending to fellow Americans as we call some of them, including ones shedding blood and dying to defend our freedoms, our enemies? Picture an American Muslim soldier with his arm blown off from fighting for freedom in Afghanistan and call him our enemy simply because of his religion. I don't care what or who someone prays to, but I couldn't do that. Anyone who can should be ashamed of themselves.

I was happy that my conservative influences like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have condemned Rev. Jones' Quran burning plans. It upsets me to hear fellow Republicans get swept up in this ridiculous Islamaphobia trend, but glad that at least two prominent conservative pundits have not.

Ok, so why aren't moderate Muslims condemning the burning of American flags going on right now? Well, how do we know if they are or not? Are you going to their houses and asking them? I mean really, how do we know what they think unless we see it on the news or the internet or hear about it in person? And if we don't see it, it's not real? What kind of logic is that? Some Imams have been on the news opposing the Ground Zero Mosque. The father of the Underwear Bomber alerted authorities as to what was about to happen. So it at least happens on some level publicly.

Something that we need to understand about wanting Muslims to condemn acts of violence from "fellow Muslims." This seems logical to us because we're operating under the assumption that terrorists do what they do *because* of Islam. This is not so. Members of the KKK burned crosses as means of terrorist acts and they quoted the Bible when doing so, recited scripture in their ceremonies, etc. But they didn't hate black people and Republicans *because* they, the Klansmen, were Christians. They hated blacks and Republicans because they, the Klansmen, were scum. Christianity was just a backdrop. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants car bomb each other as terrorist acts but not because of religion. The Catholics in Northern Ireland do feel like they're discriminated against because they're Catholic, sure, but it's cultural difference, not a religious one.

So, if you accept this premise that Muslim extremists are not terrorists *because* of Islam then you can understand how odd it is to expect moderate Muslims who feel like they have nothing in common with terrorists to feel like they need to condemn them. As a Sacramentoan, I've never felt like I needed to come out and condemn the Uni-Bomber for killing all those people or for the band Cake who puts out such horrible music.

Maybe you don't accept this premise. After all, not since the KKK has a large group from one particular religion all conspired to attack the US with terrorism. But let's look at something else these Muslim Extremists have in common other than Islam. The Imam behind the Ground Zero Mosque said that the US is partially to blame for 9/11. This was a horribly stupid and insensitive thing to say way back when it happened, however he is right.

After all, who created Al Qaeda? We did. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, we were so eager to the break the backs of the red army, that we trained and armed the Afghani freedom fighters to fight the Russians. These freedom fighters were successful, and this was a key part of breaking the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Yay us, right? Those freedom fighters we trained became Al Qaeda, and the Stinger Missile launchers that they're still shooting at our troops to this day are the ones we gave them decades before.

Most Americans believe that on 9/11 "they" attacked us first. This isn't the case. Clinton had been sending predator drones into Afghanistan during his administration. 9/11 was a counter attack. Now, we were attacking military targets in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda attacked the Trade Towers--a civilian target and that makes them scum, so by no means am I saying this is tit for tat. 9/11 was a despicable act. Unjustified, but not unprovoked. So please do not misunderstand and think I'm making light of the horrible and tragic attack on the Trade Towers and Pentagon. I think Bush was justified in sending us to war in some capacity, though in hindsight, I think we all wish that would have gone differently(not used WMDs as an excuse, for example) etc, but the better course of action was to not create Al Qaeda in the first place. Right now, we are training and arming a new generation of Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan to fight against the Taliban. I'll bet you we're doing the same covertly, at least on some level, in Yemen and Somalia. We are, perhaps, creating our own future enemies.

I'm not a conspiracy theory nut. I don't believe the US does this on purpose so that we always have an enemy to fear monger about. I never assume malice when simple incompetence seems likely. I'm only saying the politics of temporary fixes to today's problems can cause new problems for tomorrow.

Beck and Call

2010-08-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of interesting things to talk about with the Tea Party rally in DC over the weekend. Interesting to me, at least. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Alveda King were the most famous of speakers. I watched Beck's hour long speech, but I only saw clips of the others. None of what they said was particularly interesting to me. It was mostly about returning to the values of God and what it means to love this country. I did take note that Beck mentioned mosques along with churches and synagogues as places Americans should go to get back with God. Muslim Americans might face the most amount of discrimination lately, and are mistrusted by both major political parties.

It's easy to mistrust what you don't understand. There are some very hateful things in Islam. And two, the only terrorists we've seen in this country lately motivated by religion were Muslims. The word "terrorist" is nearly synonymous with "Muslim Extremist." But let's pick at this perception. There are hateful things in the Bible too. Deuteronomy says a woman who marries and is not a virgin shall be put to death. The Bible says the same about people that eat shell fish, approach altars while sick, or labor on the sabbath. What do preachers do for work? They preach the word of God on the Sabbath. So they're laboring on the Sabbath then... right? The Bible advocates beating your children into obedience, how to treat your slaves, that Lot did the just thing by sending his own daughters out into an angry mob to be sexually assaulted to spare his two male visitors. Horrible, vile stuff. But Christianity has changed with the times. In the recent past, the Christian group, The Klu Klux Klan burned crosses as acts of terrorism. We can easily recognize the KKK as an extremist group that doesn't represent Christianity. We can do that only because we are familiar with Christianity and American culture to know they are the exception. But since most of us do not know or understand Islam, all them Muslim folk seem the same to us.

I saw a political cartoon with an Arab American hopping on one leg. It was after some recent failed terrorist plot. And the guy next to the Arab American was saying something like, "...ok great, now condemn terrorism while hopping on one leg and touching your nose with both hands!"

I think it's sad the way Americans mistrust Muslim Americans. Yes, it's scary that there are terrorist cells. Yes, you never know if your Arab neighbors secretly hate you and want to kill you. But that's true of all neighbors. Crazy runs in all ethnicities, religions, and nationalities.

Anyway, when Beck mentioned it a couple times in his speech, it made me wonder if it was possible for the Republican party to reach out to Muslims. Muslims are mostly independents and feel rejected by both parties. I've heard a lot of disparaging comments about Muslims made from Conservatives. Rush Limbaugh had a link on his website to a ridiculous propaganda video about how the birth rates of Christian Americans and Europeans are slowing while Muslim Americans and Europeans are growing, meaning the Muslims are going to out breed us like cancer. It was a well produced propaganda video, which made it all the more unfortunate. I generally like Rush, and I think that 95% of the time when he's called a racist or hate monger is just plain wrong. But he does hint at playing on Islamaphobia.

While I'm on the subject of Rush and racism. I want to point out something I think is funny that Rush does. He loves pointing out hypocrisy of Liberals. Many Liberals are racist depending on how you define the word. Many believe that African Americans are racially inferior and thus need extra help. This is racist by my definition. But anyway, so Rush will play a clip or read a quote of a Liberal saying something racist. He'll do so in the beginning of his show. Then he'll take part of it out of context and repeat it in new context throughout the rest of his show. Like, with the Tiger Woods scandal. Some Liberal called Tiger a light skinned negro, or something like that. I don't remember exactly. So for the rest of the show, Rush referred to African Americans as light skinned negros. Rush wasn't trying to be racist. He was using the phrase to poke fun at Liberals and left minded people. But his critics, who don't listen to his whole show to hear what he's saying in context, will say, "See! Rush is using the term 'negro.' He's a racist!" not realizing that Rush is repeating what someone "on their side" said and that Rush is doing this on purpose to try and get this reaction. It does two things. The next day on his show, Rush can play reaction clips and read quotes from Liberals calling him a racist not realizing the original context that Rush was quoting someone else. Rush's fans, who do know the context, can then laugh at Liberals. Rush becomes more popular with his fans. Rush's enemies, who don't bother finding out the context, then hate Rush even more and thus perpetuate his notoriety. And when Rush's enemies look towards Rush's fans and calls them "sheepeople," it makes his fans laugh at them because they don't get "the joke." And thus, Rush becomes more popular with his fans. The worst thing Rush's enemies could do is say, "Rush isn't a racist. He just says silly things to get ratings." If Rush's enemies stopped hating him, it would be a career killer.

Wow, I'm really getting side tracked. So Beck organized this rally on the same spot and day in history that Martin Luther King, Jr gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Civil rights activists, who have incorrectly decided Beck is a racist simply because he's a conservative, decided to plan a counter rally with the purpose of stopping Beck from being able to distort and rewrite history regarding King's dream.

This was a waste of time in that respect. Beck mentioned King a couple times in his speech, but those references seemed thrown in and out of place. Like he felt obligated to mention King and edited his speech last minute to do so. Otherwise, his speech had nothing to do with race or equality. I noticed that nearly every shot of the crowd during Beck's speech had African American spectators. I wondered if the camera crew did that on purpose to make the crowd seem more diverse. The Tea Party is overwhelmingly white.

In sharp contrast, Rev. Al Sharpton's counter rally was overwhelmingly black in crowd representation. Sharpton is dead wrong about his opinion of conservatives. Many of the things Sharpton said were propaganda and unfortunate. He said that "those people" at the other rally are the same people that thought of civil rights leaders are trouble makers. That's a pretty despicable thing to say.

Working out at my gym as I do on the elliptical with 10 different tvs hanging from the ceiling in front of me and a box to switch my headphone mix to which ever one, I can see how different news organizations covered the rally. The fact that King's niece, Alveda King spoke at Beck's rally really upset Liberals who want so desperately to believe Beck is a racist and see proof of it. I watched as several news reporters asked Alveda the same question, "Do you feel like you're being used by Beck and the Tea Party movement?" As if "You're being used by the Tea Party movement and disgracing your uncle. What do you have to say for yourself?" is what they really wanted to say. Alveda was gracious about it, no matter how many different reporters asked her that. Her answer was that we need to love each other.

I thought about that as I watched the speeches at Beck's rally. I had read about the counter rally. Sharpton's words were divisive, but many of the other speakers gave more conservative speeches about turning to God, doing more for the community, and of individual responsibility. It occurred to me how similar the two rallies must have been in content, and what a missed opportunity that happened. Rev. Sharpton has said a lot of things that I agreed with in the past. I mostly like him and think he's a smart man. He's just dead wrong about the Tea Party and Beck. What if he had gotten over that and combined his rally with Beck's? And what better day to do so.

Then it got me thinking about the civil rights movement of today in general. The Civil rights act granted all Americans the right to vote without facing intimidation and it ended segregation. The Community Reinvestment Act of the 70's prohibited racial discrimination of bank loans. Many other court case decisions and laws have come down since then to change the practice of overt racism. What more can the Civil Rights movement do?

Then that got my thinking should the Civil Rights movement end and we, as a society, focus instead on loving each other rather than dividing each other? It's an interesting question because, after all, the Civil Rights movement can not gather steam unless it has an enemy. Does Rev Sharpton and Jesse Jackson need Beck and Limbaugh? If the racist boogiemen aren't out there commanding their sheepeople, do Civil Rights activists have any reason to rally people? And if this is so, who is the real fear monger? I'm not suggesting racism is over. Far from it. Overt racism is over. Racism has gone into hiding and many Americans think it's gone. The Civil Rights movement looks like a relic from the passed now. True or not, has that perception undermined the movement's ability to change anything?

If the Civil Rights phase is over, what's phase 2? Like I said, racism still persists. The Curious Formula is still around. African Americans live, disproportionately, in poverty. Well, you can't ignore the fact that poor people go to poor schools and rich kids go to rich schools. So poor people stay poor and have poorly educated kids that stay poor. Republicans want school vouchers and Democrats fight it. Get poor kids out of the ghettos and into good schools and let the poor schools collapse or get taken over by better management. This, I think, is the answer. It isn't a perfect solution. It isn't going to do much in the short run. But I think it's a necessary step for a long term solution.

Until then, Alveda King is right. Instead of focusing on our differences, we should focus on loving each other.

School Planning

2010-08-24T02:25:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day of the semester. I tried to add an Econ class and there were people standing in the back of the classroom and I wasn't even on the wait list. I got confused about what time the class started and was a couple mins late. I just looked through the window and decided not to bother opening it. That's fine. I'll take micro and macro econ next semester. There are two upper division versions offered at Sac State over the summer that I'd need to take for pre-reqs for grad school.

This is "perfect" timing. I'll get another Associate's degree this semester in Physical Science. During the Spring semester, I'll be able to apply to grad school for a Masters in Economics. At the end of the Spring Semester, I'll earn my third Associate's degree, this time in Computer Science. Over the Summer, I'll be able to take intermediate level Micro and Macro Econ and hopefully get a letter of recommendation from the instructor, then, by the end of the summer, I will have completed all the requirements needed to get into grad school starting in the fall of next year. Only problem, I'll only have a few weeks into my first Econ classes to make the decision if I even want to study Econ at all, let alone go to grad school for it and make it my career. That's a lot of pressure.

What about Computer Science? I think I'd rather do CS, but because of the budget cuts, all the CSUs are closed to people seeking second Bachelor degrees. I could go for my Masters in CS, but there's a ton more pre-req classes I need to take first. Now, CSUS(and probably the others) allows you to take classes through their Open University program without actually being enrolled. It's a different price set up, but it's not radically different in costs. The problem is that they don't let you use any form of financial aid using the Open University. Since I don't have any money, this is a problem. I'll have to get a part time job to save up the money and wipe out my savings for the two Econ classes I'll take over the summer as is, and that's just two classes.

Now, once I get into grad school for Econ, I can take undergrad Computer Science classes as well to prepare myself for that. It's the same amount of work taking the undergrad pre-reqs needed to be able to start the Computer Science Masters degree program as it would be to take the graduate level classes to finish the Econ Masters degree program. There's another problem. Due to budget cuts, Sac State is hard capping grad students to only 9 units. Well, what if I'm a grad student taking under grad classes? Am I still capped? That would cut the amount of classes I could take in half and make getting a CS take twice as long.

At this point, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to just go be an economist rather than a programmer. But is that what I want to do? I guess when the time comes, I'll have a better idea. Maybe by then, Sac State will open up to second bachelor degree students or lift their unit caps. Who knows? I get really sick and tired my life plans being conditional on uncertainty.

Megawalk

2010-08-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

I didn't know what to expect volunteering for Meg Whitman. I showed up to a tiny campaign head quarters in Rancho Cordova. There were about 8 people there. All of them were clean cut white guys in casual dress clothes. Something about too many clean cut whites guys in one spot creeps me out. I'm just being honest here. Like I think they're going to start telling me about Jesus and how I need to be saved.

They were actually really nice, as it turned out. I let them know I had no idea what was going on, but that I've been a registered Republican all my life and I wanted to help. They put me with another guy that's done "whatever it was we were doing" before, gave us a bunch of pamphlets, a folder full of addresses, and sent the two of us out to go walking door to door. It was called a Precinct Walk, as it turned out. I really, really hate bugging people about stuff. So going door to door to talk to people was flat out not something I wanted to do. I hate it when religious people come to my house with their talking points, completely unable to put together a logical argument or be able to follow what I say to them. Now I was about to do it to other people.

It ended up not being that bad though. We only went to the houses on our list and they were homes of registered Republicans. The guy I went with, Mike, was a pretty cool guy. We never argued with people. We just listened to what people had to say. On our list, about 4 out of 5 people weren't home or didn't answer. But the ones that did, they usually told us who they were for and who against. A few people spent some time talking to us and some of the comments they made really taught me a lot.

To give you an example. I go to the bios of candidates on their websites and they all have the same layout. They start with the city they grew up in, where they got their law degree, how many years they spent in the private sector being rich and awesome, and what they want to do in office. That sounds like common sense stuff to put in a bio to try and impress people. But it occurred to me that most voters really don't care about that stuff. They don't believe politicians in the first place, so their promises are meaningless. Their stances mean nothing. How they feel about abortion, the "ground zero mosque," and the rest is meaningless if they don't have the power at their office to affect it. A County Supervisor can't repeal Roe v Wade, so who cares if they're Pro Life or not?

A guy we talked to said he can never get a hold of any of his representatives. He got the impression candidates saw lower office as a stepping stone. They don't want to be there. They don't want to serve the people. They just want to move up the ladder and get on to bigger and better things. None of the three candidates we passed out fliers for where there today. I know Meg Whitman was in San Diego today doing a walk through a mall and talking to people. I'm sure the other two were equally busy. But it got me thinking, how great would it be to be a candidate walking door to door, listening in person to people tell you what problems, unique to that area, need to be fixed? How great would it be to tell them in real time if it's something you can fix or not, or if you have an easier solution? It would sort of be like being a legislative hero. Like, "I'll save you from rising property tax hikes!" or "I'll fix those pot holes!" Dun-da-Duuunnnn! Ok, now I'm being silly. But doesn't that sound cool, being able to help people like that? Yeah, I bet potholes take months of debate to be able to fix. Government moves incredibly slow.

Something else I was thinking. If there's a problem in my community, I don't really know who to go to amongst my elected officials. I'd bet an over whelming majority of people don't even know who their elected officials are at the local level or care, let alone who is responsible for what. It would be interesting to see a website with a message board with a list of what a candidate has power over, what are the top suggestions voters in that region have to better their community, and what the status of those ideas are(for example, looking for funding, dependent on a zoning law change, up for a vote, under review, etc). It makes sense to me that all candidates should have such discussion boards where other voters can discuss these issues and the candidate can respond. But I haven't seen too many. No doubt they get clogged with spam and topics on national politics. You'd need a moderator to clean it up. But it's doable.

It reminds me of when I got into the alpha testing for the MMO game, Champions Online from Cryptic Studios. We'd make suggestions to improve the game, and people from Cryptic would say if it was a change that made sense, why if not, or they'd ask our opinions about solutions to it.

My point is, a candidate could spend a lot more time building a fanbase with voters that way rather than going to big business conventions looking for big donors. Of course, what do I know? There has to be a reason why politicians go where the money is instead of focusing on the voters. But, I'm reminded of how much my blog helped my band years back, how many people came up to me at our shows and talked to me like they knew me. I think people would respond, especially in the Facebook age where word can get around rapidly.

In either case, if I can get into some Econ classes this semester, I'll see if I like it or not. To get into grad school for Econ, I'm going to have to pretty much ace all my classes. So assuming I can add, and that's a big if since the waiting list is long, I'll make a decision at the end of this semester if this is a good path for me, or if I should stick with Computer Science.

Arden Arcade

2010-08-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

I think we'd all like to consider ourselves informed voters before we head out to the polls. That's not always easy. Case in point with some local politics here. I live in a neighborhood of Sacramento called Arden Arcade. For years, we've seen our neighborhood slowly decline. Businesses go under. Local services and police coverage degrade. Gangs slowly creep in.

Meanwhile, other neighborhoods that have become cities have made changes for the better. Citrus Heights neighborhood voters voted for cityhood, and the new city of Citrus Heights was able to renegotiate new contracts with police, waste management, and schools, and get more efficient services for less. Elk Grove is also a success story.

My neighborhood of Arden Arcade sees much of our property tax money leave the community to go to other areas of Sacramento county. Since we have no mayor or city council, we have no representation, no one to fight to keep money in our community. No one in power with any reason to care about improving things. This November, we have a chance to vote on Measure D, a measure that will turn my neighborhood into the city of Arden Arcade. This sounds like exactly what we need to do. Or do we?

What if our poor neighborhood can't afford 8 well paid council members and an even better paid mayor? Mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson makes over 100k, and the 8 member panel over half that each. How much would property taxes have to increase to cover that? Citrus Heights has Sunrise Mall to our right. The city of Sacramento has Arden Fair Mall just across the street from us to our left. Between that, we have our Country Club Mall which has struggled for decades. Tower Records closed and is now a Good Will. A big grocery store by my house is now a $0.99 Cent Clearance Center. More and more, I see homeless people sleeping in our neighborhoods or digging through our trash for cans.

Is cityhood exactly what we need to pull out of poverty, or the last straw of financial tax burdens on the backs of businesses already struggling? I don't know. I wish I did know.

It's this kind of thing that makes me think maybe I really should work towards a Masters in Economics, get an understanding on exactly what's going on, and do something about it.

Tomorrow, I'm going to a campaigning event for Meg Whitman. I have no idea if she's even going to be there or what we're supposed to be doing. I signed up on her website to volunteer. I got a form letter telling me to show up somewhere. What's the dress code? Do I need to show up early? Can I take pictures? I have no idea. I just hope I don't have to sit in a call center calling people and giving talking points off a script. I don't mind walking down the street waving signs. Maybe I'll just stand there listening to people talk for photo ops. I have no idea. But it's a good insight into... something. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Brianomics

2010-08-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

So, I tend to hop around from major to major. I spent almost 10 years in a two year college trying to decide what I wanted to do. When I transferred to a 4 year university, I still changed my major to something else almost immediately, got a degree, and decided it's not what I wanted a year before I graduated. So now I'm back at the 2 year college working on another major. Already, I've thought of several other majors I could try along with it. Is there anything I *don't* want to study? Not really. I'd stay in college forever, learning everything they can possibly teach me until they ran out of classes.

In this case, I want to finish my BS in Computer Science no matter what. I really like programming and, unlike Anthropology, would actually enjoy the work. But, I don't want to get a Masters in it. I'd like to get a Masters one day, but I've never been able to decide in what.

So the other day, I got a hold of a textbook on Economics. There are a few things I like about the subject. It's sort of about business--which I like. I've aced every business class I've ever taken. But it's also about human behavior. I love studying people as well. I think what put me off the first time I took Macroeconomics is all the terms and memorization. But, I'm older now from when I first took those classes at age 22. Nearly all those terms, I now already know, so it would be a lot different.

But I thought this textbook was really interesting. Another thing I've sort of looked down on Economics about is I know Keynesian Economics is really trendy. If you don't know what that is, one way of summarizing it is to say it's the belief that if the government taxes the living snot out of people, then uses the revenue from that to inject money directly back into communities, that will ensure a robust and stable economy. The Liberals / Socialists love Keynesian Economics because it's Big Daddy Government taking away our freedoms and telling us how to live. Obama and his economic team are all supporters of Keynesian Economics.

Now, I have no idea if the author of this textbook is representative of all economists, but he wrote that Keynesian Economics has been disproven because it's failed every place it's ever been tried. He said Economists have gone back to free market solutions and believe that Government is too inefficient to compete with a more nimble and flexible free market system in terms of ensuring a strong and stable economy.

It's interesting that this book was published in 2004. And here 5 years later, Obama passed the "Stimulus Bill" that was a huge, expensive tribute proving that Keynesian Economics doesn't work. How many real jobs would have been created had that money instead been massive tax breaks to businesses to encourage them to hire people? Obama's top Economic adviser, Christine Romer, recently stepped down, and not long after another on the economic team stepped down. She was dead wrong about the Stimulus Bill. Don't believe Biden, the Idiot, trying to say the Stimulus Bill was more successful than anticipated. Romer, and thus Obama, promised the Stimulus Bill would prevent unemployment from exceeding 8%. It went to 10%. They were dead wrong. The Stimulus Bill either far under performed, or had next to no effect at all. I would argue that Obama could have gotten better results if he piled the trillion dollars in the back of his limo, and tossed fistfuls of it out the windows as he drove around neighborhoods all over the country. A trillion dollars thrown down the toilet to test an Economic theory that's already been disproven. And people think Bush was an idiot because he stuttered in his speeches but otherwise made sound economic decisions? Some Obama is an idiot but articulates his wrong ideas better and people like him. Sad.

Anyway, I have at least a year before I'd need to decide to go for a Masters in Econ or not. I just think it's nice to know the field might not be dominated by nitwits, forcing me to learn a bunch of discredited crap. There was a woman in my Calc II class who was an Econ major. She said that California was bankrupt because people pay too little in property taxes. I just shook my head. The state with the second highest tax rate in the country, and we're bankrupt because we're not taxed enough? It's mind boggling how stupid people are. There are too many memorize / regurgitate people in the world. They can ace tests, but they can't think their way out of anything. I think most the people currently running this country are that way.

You're not a Republican

2010-08-10T05:21:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking more and more about one of those goals I mentioned--running for public office. I looked up some things. You know, in 2008, a woman won an elected office in California with only 600 votes? It was for two positions. The guy that came in second with 500 votes, also won a seat. It was a member board seat for the Arhole Unified School District. I've never even heard of that place. I'm guessing there's not many voters in that area. But still, if I wanted to start out small, there's room for that. The dinky offices in Sacramento are a few thousand votes. Still, that's doable with a lot of campaigning.

I'd want to get a more appropriate education. A BA in Anthropology is cool and all, but not all that helpful for dealing with political issues. Yeah, I know. Most the people in lower elected office only have under graduate degrees, if that, and in less useful areas. You can tell because they just list "alumni" of the college they went to, rather than their degree in their bios. Maybe that means they didn't even finish school.

Well, I looked into what it would take for me to get into a Masters degree program in Economics at Sac State. Not much, as it turns out. Let's say I worked on my Masters in Econ at the same time I worked on my BS in Computer Science. That might be pretty cool.

But here's the big problem I face. Both political parties are basically controlled by outside groups. The unions control the Dems, and the corporations control the Republicans. The unions can organize votes for lower election offices. The big corporations can back the higher offices. Maybe this is why California tends to have Republican Governors, but has had a Democrat controlled state congress for the last 40 years. As a Republican starting out small, I'd have an uphill climb. I'm certainly not pro unions and not willing to pretend that I am. I like that being a Republican makes me an underdog, though here's another issue. I'm a social moderate. I could score big points with Republicans opposing gay marriage, but I don't oppose gay marriage. This sort of puts me in the worst of both worlds in terms of support. Dems might agree with me on social issues, but won't vote for a Republican no matter what. Republicans who really care about social issues might not see me as an improvement over the Dem, so might not bother voting. But if I did run, I'd have to run as me. I like who I am, even if it doesn't make me a politically viable candidate. I'm not afraid of challenge though.

Well, speaking of gay marriage, I want to talk about Prop 8 for a while since it got repealed. I've been pretty unhappy about the comments I've seen made by other Republicans on the various Facebook pages I frequent. Most of it has been despicable. Let's go through some of these comments.

-- "This Liberal activist judge over turned the will of the people!"
There's a lot wrong with this. Judge Walker isn't a Liberal, for one. He was appointed by Ronald Reagan. His appointment was challenged by, and fought against by Nancy Pelosi who labeled him a homophobe. She didn't know he was a homosexual. Dumb ass Nancy just assumed since a Republican nominated him, he had to be an intolerant hate monger. Dumb ass hypocrite Nancy, in turn, showed who really was the hate monger, but that's beside the point.

I find it offensive that too many Republicans call him a Liberal. Gay marriage is a civil rights issue. Calling someone a Liberal because they care about civil rights is a massive insult to the very many of us non Liberals who care about civil rights. If you don't care about civil rights, then you don't belong in the Republican party.

Ok, next "the will of the people." I want to remind people that the US has never been, and hopefully will never be, a Democracy. We are a Republic. That means the masses do not rule simply because we can. We have the Bill of Rights and the mob cannot take away rights from people just by out numbering them. Polls show that most Californians favor gay marriage. Prop 8 only passed by 52%. It barely squeaked by. Let's not get all high and mighty about the will of the people when the vote is about a 50/50 chance each time it's put up for a vote and polls show younger voters tend to overwhelmingly support gay rights... aka, as the older generation passes on, the polls shift more and more. It's just a matter of time before it's legal all over the country. Prop 8 supporters are on the wrong side of history.

--"Homosexuality isn't natural"
This is an opinion based on what "natural" means. Our closest cousins in the animal kingdom are bonobos(close to chimpanzees). Homosexuality is a lot more common in bonobos than in humans. Look it up. All you people that think homosexuality doesn't happen in the animal kingdom, you're dead wrong. Dead wrong. All sorts of things can be considered unnatural. Being born infertile, birth defects, mental illness, and The Icecapades.

--"For two thousand years, marriage has been between a man and a woman."
I don't know where this "two thousand years" comes from, but I've seen and heard a lot of people quote it. Marriage is a hell of a lot older than 2k years. As far as we know, the Neanderthals might have practiced marriage. That would make it hundreds of thousands of years old. But in either case, I don't understand what this is supposed to say and why it's supposed to carry any weight. Slavery has been around a lot longer than 2k years as well. Does that mean Lincoln was wrong and we should bring it back?

--"If gays can get married, what's next? People marrying their dog?"
This is the same argument you can make against interracial marriage. This does, perhaps make it easier for the people fighting for the rights to marry their pets. But I'd bet you can fit all of those people on a single episode of Jerry Springer. This just isn't a serious issue. If people want to marry their dogs, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. No one would be able to get enough signatures to support it being on the ballot. No politician would bring it up for a vote. No law maker would slip it into a bill. It's an incredibly empty argument that has no weight.

--"If gays can marry, I don't want to have to let my children be taught that homosexuality is ok."
Part of this is the incorrect idea that homosexuality is a choice. It isn't. No one would chose to be gay if it was. So if your kid is taught that homosexuals exist, it doesn't make your kids more or less likely to be gay themselves. You can't be recruited into being gay. Second, by saying this, you're not only condemning an entire group, but you're passing on your hate and ignorance to your children. I'd much rather my children know that some people are gay than be taught hurtful stereotyping and intolerance.

--"The point of marriage is to procreate."
One, says who? And two, not a damn person would tell an infertile couple they can't get married. This is the dumbest of the excuses.

Well, that's all the arguments I can remember seeing. As a side note, let me remind people that we Republicans are the party of Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves because it was the right thing to do. The Democrats are the party that fought to maintain slavery, that fought for segregation and that founded the KKK.

Republicans are the party of Teddy Roosevelt that fought for the 8 hour work day and to end child labor exploitation. Democrats are the party that fight to take freedoms away from us like if we have the right to pay for health care or not.

Republicans are the party that overwhelmingly supported the Civil Rights Acts of 1966 and 68 and President Lyndon Johnson could only get luke warm support from his own party on it--and ultimately lost any chance of re-election from his base because of it.

Republicans are the party that have fought for school vouchers to get poor kids out of the ghettos and crumbling schools and let the parents chose to send them anywhere they want to. Democrats are the party that exploits the poor and keeps them in endless cycles of poverty to keep them as reliable voters while convincing them it's the Republicans' fault.

Never forget that Republicans have had a very long history of fighting for the little guy. Homosexuals are the little guys. Fighting for their rights should be a Republican cause. You can't call yourself a Republican if you disagree.

If you don't think Republicans are the party that fights for the rights and freedoms of all Americans, then you're not a Republican.

Dreams

2010-08-08T19:14:00.000-07:00

I've never really written out all my life long aspirations of career goals. But I thought it might be fun. This list doesn't include things I've already done, like years of working in the construction industry. That was never by choice.

Long term goals:
1. Robotics Engineer - to rest
2. Fantasy Fiction Author - active
3. Computer Game Designer - active
4. Computer Programmer - active
5. Professional Musician - to rest
6. Marriage Counselor - to rest
7. Ethnographer - to rest
8. Politician - possible
9. Business Tycoon - possible
10. Model - not likely
11. Comedian - not likely

Short term goals:
12. Sign Language Interpreter for the Deaf - to rest
13. Night Club Owner - to rest
14. Journalist - possible
15. Teacher - active
16. Webpage Designer - possible
17. Night Club / Concert Promoter - to rest

Let's go through these.

Robotics
When I was a little kid, I wanted to build robots that could do... well, what robots in cartoons do. In high school, I took electronics classes. But being able to solder broken wires is about the extent of my education on that front. I did retro fit non motorized toy cars with small engines to make them go. It was something I had a lot of fun doing, but without any other bigger applications for me to move on to, my interest fizzled out. There was a computer game called Robot Odyssey that came out when I was a kid. In it, you use your cursor as a soldering gun to change the wiring of robots to perform different tasks. I loved that game. I've heard of electrical engineers that credit playing that game as kids that got them started. I've put this interest to rest. If I work with anything robotic, it will probably be computer / virtual related over mechanical.

Author
I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was 12. I had reading learning disabilities. My parents thought that would be a good way to get me to read, so they got it for me. It sparked in me my interest in the Fantasy, sword and sorcery genre. I don't have a natural talent for writing. If I'm good at writing at all, it's because I've worked very, very hard at it. Maintaining things like this blog is good practice. I'm constantly thinking about how to make my sentences clear and easy to understand. I still have a long ways to go. This is still a very viable goal for me, though one that will be a hard route to go.

Game Designer
My learning disabilities made socializing hard for me as a kid. I became pretty introverted, but not necessarily purely from shyness. As such, I turned to computer games a lot, especially the adventure ones where you communicate with characters in the game. This is a perfect career for me. It combines my creative side, with my drive for communicating through art and story. This is the career I'm currently working towards.

Programmer
I like programming. I've done is since the mid 80's in BASIC on my first computer--an Apple IIC. This is more of a short term goal... a stepping stone towards becoming a Game Designer. Though being a computer programmer for the rest of my life wouldn't be bad, as long as I got to eventually oversee large projects. I don't want to retire as a lowly code monkey.

Musician
Of everything I've done, I've spent maybe the most amount of my time trying to accomplish this goal. The most joy I've ever had in my life is creating art and communicating it to others. I remember playing in new cities for the first time, and seeing people in the crowd singing lyrics I wrote along with me. The lyrics I write are very emotional and personal. And to see perfect strangers connect with me in that way, it always made me feel like I wasn't alone. But, being a musician is a hard life. There's no money in it unless you get signed. And then there's money in it, but non of it goes to the artists... just enough to keep them alive. Michael Jackson was in debt $50 million dollars to his record company. Doesn't that say it all? Ultimately, I gave up on this dream as a career goal. Though, I still teach music and I cherish the memories, good and bad, during this time in my life. I'll will still pursue this goal, but not as a career.

Counselor
When I transferred to a 4 year university, I did so as a Psych major to pursue this goal. My personality type of INTJ makes me the perfect candidate for a Therapist. I'm excellent at listening to people and understanding things from multiple perspectives. I didn't get very far before I decided that it's not as easy as simply caring about people and "curing them," after months of therapy and that's that. There's no cure for any mental illnesses. I like helping people. That's why I love teaching. But there are so many people that will never get better from counseling. There are some that will in extreme cases. Suicidal teens, some non violent felons, drug and alcohol addicts, I think these people can be helped. My brother is following this path, and I think he'd be really good at it. I can relate to teens pretty well. Still, I put this goal to rest. I don't like the idea of spending the rest of my life doing the same thing especially if I know a lot of the people I try and help will not improve.

Ethnographer
This is a type of Anthropologist that lives with a group of primitive people in the jungle somewhere and writes down how they live. Sounds great and interesting. The problem is that every "primitive tribe" in the world has already been studied many, many times over. I've thought about joining the Peace Corps. I sent in for their information and they sent me a huge packet of forms and what not. I love the field of Anthropology. I just sort of feel like it's mission accomplished and we(as in the greater scientific community) pretty much understand every culture in the world. No one person knows it all, but everything there is to know, some Anthropologist somewhere knows it. Now, for cultures no longer in existence, that's a different story. There are more fossils and artifacts to be found to learn about people and cultures in the past. To be an Archaeologist, you pick a site, spend the next 20 years excavating it and hope you find a chip of bone or something that adds a tiny piece of some puzzle. Most Archaelolgists dig for years and find close to nothing. I don't see myself doing that. But back to the modern day side of Anthropology, I no longer want to go live in a mud hunt to study a people that I can just learn about in the library or off the internet.

Politician
This is a real possibility for me. I could start off running for the Sacramento City Council. Maybe run for State Assembly after that. Doris Matsui is the House Representative here in Sacramento. I'd love to run against her one day in the distant future if she was still around by the time I was ready. I think Congressman is a decent, long term goal for me, one I'd have to work very hard for. Senator is too unlikely. I don't have the ivy league school connections, a mass of wealth, or celebrity status in anything(nor will I ever). I know I talk about politics on this blog site like I think I have the answers. This blog site is mostly for me to practice my writing. The more you study something, the more you realize how little you know about it. I know very little about politics. I've gotten an A in every college Business class I've taken. I love business. I know human nature pretty well. I have the basics down... the gut, common sense intuition about how policy should go down. But I still have a heck of a lot to learn about economics before I would seriously tackle running for office. I've eyed getting a Masters in Economics. I've completed all the lower division, pre-reqs for it. I'd just have to take a couple upper division classes at Sac State, then I could apply for the Graduate program. Again, this is a real possibility for me and something I think about.

Business Tycoon
Possible, but I don't know. I have the fiscal discipline to be wealthy. I'm good at coordinating things. I'd be good at running a business. The funny thing is I really don't care for money much. It's an odd quirk of mine, I suppose. I live pretty modestly. I'm fine without the fancy cars and house. Becoming rich takes a lot of hard work--something I don't have a problem with. But it boils down to me working my butt off for something I don't care about. Now, if I found another motivation other than money, running a business or cluster of them, would be something I'd consider working towards. The challenge of it, would certainly motivate me. Plus, not being motivated by material things would be a plus. I'd use the money I made to re-invest, rather than waste on cars. This is a goal I should think about working towards.

Model
Yeah, I feel pretty egotistical mentioning this. I'm a decent looking guy. Or at least I could be. I'd have to work really, really hard on reshaping my body and I have a very long way to go for that. I'm in the process of doing that--not to become a model, but because of the challenge of it. Even if I could be a successful model, it's not anything that would satisfy me by itself. I have friends that are not what society would consider attractive that model, but what they do is more like work as extras. Being an extra might be fun.

Comedian
I'm not naturally funny. I can bust out with some one liners here and there. I can make my mom laugh. I've taught a lot, and I can make my students laugh. I once gave a presentation on use of blood in Mayan purification rituals, and I got laughs. But I can make people laugh because I do something random or unexpected. But to walk on stage where the audience expects me to be funny from the beginning, it's a completely different vibe--one I've never even felt first hand. This is something I'd have to spend several years working really hard to be decent at. Could I handle being awful on stage in the beginning and still keep going? Though I don't have a natural talent for comedy, it's something that's really challenging, and that intrigues me. It's not just about telling jokes. It's a mastery of human communications and psychology. Still, I stopped being a musician because there was no money in it. Being a comedian starting out would be the same.

Short term

Interpreter for the Deaf
I had to take 2 years of a foreign language for the Anthropology major. My learning disabilities made this really, really tough. I struggled until I finally decided to try sign language where I didn't have to use my ears. Turns out, I was pretty good at it. I never did get good enough that I could sign fast enough to keep up with someone speaking. I have trouble understanding people finger spelling quickly. Still, with a lot more practice, I could get good at this. Finding people to practice with isn't all that easy. With Spanish, I can watch tv in Spanish or hear lots of people speaking it. Deaf people don't like people watching them sign a private conversation, nor do they really want to sit around signing with students. I considered using my ASL skills to study the culture of Deaf people. That would be a nice way of combining Sign Language and Anthropology. But yeah, I gave up. I'm really rusty at signing now.

Night Club Owner
Working first hand as a booker at a night club, I got to see how little money they actually bring in and what a pain in the butt it was. Live music, at least. Clubs with DJs make tons of money. I started off booking bands to make connections to get my own band booked. Playing politics with the other bookers at the club I booked at, quickly made me see the advantages of running my own club. Then I figured out how expensive it was. This goal is "at rest" for me, though the idea of being rich one day and opening up a club just for the fun of it is still something I'd think about. I always loved the movies where the villains have their conference table on the second floor and it's over looking the stage of a night club and some really cool metal / punk / industrial band is playing to a packed crowd. Not that villains in real life have conference tables, nor do I even know anyone remotely villain like in person anyway that I could have a conference with. But it's still really cool.

Journalist
I've worked as a paid staff writer for a magazine before. I've also sold my political op ed pieces professionally. Don't google them. They were poorly written and I'm fairly embarrassed I didn't put a lot more effort into them. But being a journalist is something I was / would be again, good at. I just don't like it. There's a huge difference between creative, poetic writing and journalism. There's nothing artistic in journalism. It's just dry statements. I like reading journalistic pieces on subjects I want to know more about. But I don't like writing it. Still, this goal is a possible future one if I need money on the side. I'm more likely to do this if I get other benefits. Like, when I used to write for a music magazine I used to make a lot of contacts with other bands and promoters. The site I wrote for got 9 million hits a month and I was one of the main people writing articles. That made it pretty easy for me to meet people.

Teacher
I like teaching. I like it a lot. It's hard and challenging because no two students are alike. You're communicating a lot of ideas trying to pack the most amount of meaning with the least words. In person, you can use real time and alter your meaning on the fly if it's not received as intended. You know how many times I write something and think, "Is the reader going to know what I mean by this?" But teaching in person, you get feedback instantly. I teach music now, but only during the summers. This is a part time goal for me. I like doing it for now, but it's a little too stable for me. I want to end up doing something big.

Webpage Designer
I do this now on rare occasion. I don't really like it. I like the programming part, but it's the graphic design part that I get stuck on. I'm great at all the parts of graphic design other than the actual free hand drawing part. I can't do that. I can photoshop the hell out of stuff. I can manipulate, retexture, and animate 3d figures, but not create them. I'd be ok with this if I was part of a team that just did the layout and programming. Still, I'd only want to do this as a means to an ends with some greater project on the horizon.

Concert Promoter
I liked doing this. I liked giving bands a chance and seeing their fans enjoying a show I put together. I liked seeing hundreds of people in one place and knowing I put it together. I like promoting too, although I was one of the few promoters in town that actually promoted. Most promoters put together a show and expect the bands to do all the promotion and they just take a cut. I worked my butt off promoting and never took a cut, not even to cover the expenses of the fliers I printed out. I did it for free. It gave me a reason to walk up to people hanging outside a club and talk to them about bands and why they might want to come out. Again, another thing I don't see myself doing forever unless it's a means to something big. I could see myself working for a big company and putting together a big company party--something cooler than a lame company picnic with a boring band.

Well, that's that. What about combining some of these? I'd love to own a computer game company that made educational software and fantasy adventure games. Maybe use political connections to get more educational software into classrooms. I think a hybrid of teachers and virtual software will become the new educational model one day. And I know I'll still keep writing, whatever I do.

The 4th Trusted Name in News

2010-07-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

So, as I do about 2 hours of cardio a day at my gym, I spend those 2 hours watching CNN since that's the only 24 hour news station they have. I have to say, I thought their coverage of the Sherrod case was despicably one sided.

Ok, let's start at the beginning. The whole incident happened because the NAACP passed a resolution condemning the Tea Party for being racist, sparked over a racist post from a guy that wasn't even a member of the Tea Party. This, at around the same time mainstream journalists are caught through something like leaked emails(JournoList-gate), admitting that they falsely accuse Conservatives of being racists to try and protect Obama. I have to say that again. Mainstream journalists admitted to blatantly advocating lying about Conservatives... these are professional journalists admitting to lying about Conservatives and calling them racists without any justification.

So this one Conservative blogger, Andrew Breitbart, gets a tape sent to him by an unknown source of a woman, Shirley Sherrod, giving a speech at an NAACP event in which she justifies racially discriminating against white people. Breitbart posts the video on his website citing hypocrisy--ie, members of the NACCP shouldn't be calling others racist when people like Sherrod admit to racism at NAACP events. Did Breitbart take a clip out of context or did he trust his source and just pass on the video as it was sent to him assuming it was a fair summery of the event? We don't know. If Breitbart had the whole clip and edited it down to make it appear like something it wasn't, than he's an idiot. He should have known the full tape would get out and it would backfire. So he's either an idiot, or he was set up.

But the bottom line is, all the guy did was take a video recording of a publicly given speech and put it up on his website. Youtube has thousands of political videos where people have done the same thing. There's videos taken out of contexts of Obama "admitting he's a Muslim." Obama misspoke. Another video has Mrs Obama "admitting" Barack was born in Kenya. Again, those are taken out of context by people purposely trying to make these people look like they're saying something else. People, on both sides, do it to be cute, funny, idiots, who knows. But it's common.

The difference here is the Sherrod video went viral and the White House, NAACP, and Department of Agriculture of Georgia all reacted to the clip and made a bad decision based on it. Sherrod was forced to resign before the story even made it on the news. I realise some idiots are blaming Fox here, but let's not forget the facts here. She was asked to resign and had resigned *before* Fox ever aired the story.

Now, keep in mind, the NAACP had the full tape all along. The speech, after all, was given at their event and they, instead of retrieving that tape from their archives first, decided to throw Sherrod under the bus, THEN look at the full tape the next day.

So Sherrod got forced out, and has since been made into a hero of sorts by all the news networks trying to get a human interest story out of it. Obama and the NAACP screwed up. They wanted to kill the story before it even hit the news and they did so without all the facts. Mistakes happen, and they've since apologized in their own ways and tried to make things right. Cool. If Obama makes a mistake, and fixes it right after, I'm totally cool with that. So I have nothing bad to say about that part of it.

But this is not the story that CNN is running with. CNN is turning this into a story of Andrew Breitbart ruining the life of a good person and using lies and deception to do it. Over the passed several days on watching CNN coverage over this story--and they've been covering it non stop--not once have I seen them mention a single time that this was a result of a tit for tat war between the NAACP and the Tea Party. Don't you think that's kind of important? Don't you think painting this story as some crazy right wing conservative nut job that "randomly" targeted some poor innocent, saintly women who just wanted to help people, is pretty dishonest if you're not going to at least mention why it started? It gets worse.

Then they had on this guest author, Andrew Keen, talk about what legislative actions should be taken against conservatives that spread lies on the internet. At this point, the host, Kyra Phillips, should have reminded him that it's only in totalitarianist regimes that the governments crack down against people that speak out. That crap doesn't fly in America. We have something called freedom here. Tell 'em, Kyra! But no, that's not what she says. She went along with everything that nut job was saying. Then after this horribly one sides piece portraying Sherrod as this innocent, saintly woman who was victimized by some evil, malicious right wing conservative liar for no other reason than pure evil reasons, went on to say that it's only honest news stations like CNN and the mainstream media that present the truth and that the others lie(implying that Fox only tells lies). I'm thinking, ok, she's going to say something about what a ridiculous, childish statement that was. I mean, anyone that honestly thinks there are news stations that are unbiased or that it's even possible to be unbiased is an idiot. But no, she was completely onboard with everything the guy said. Then after she actually advocated the government should censor the internet(an incredibly frightening thought) because of those slanderous Republicans that slander the good name of our fine President(not the words she used, but you know she was blaming the Right), they actually had the gall to transition to the next story about Netroots. She actually had a smile on her face as she talked about the fine, good honest Liberal bloggers(the kind that invent lies about how the Tea Party is racist) that make up the Netroots community and their convention in Las Vegas.

Well, I was stunned. I can't believe all the crap I hear about Fox News not really being news when CNN pulls such irresponsible, one sided crap pieces like that steaming pile. Atleast when Fox News first covered the story, before the full tape came out, they had several panelists give opposing views like "maybe the tape is out of context." It was balanced. And that's a big reason why Fox has the highest ratings now.

I read an article on the Huffington Post recently that said that CNN has to stop using the slogan "The most trusted name in news," when their ratings have caused them to slip to 4th place among cable news. Ouch, 4th place. Uh, how many cable news stations are there anyways? Not that many.

In either case, this whole story is silly on all angles and it made everyone look bad. No one "won" this fight. Personally, we need to stop throwing around the racism insult. It gets misused and abused so much that it's beginning to not mean anything anymore. There generally are racist people, and they're in every political party and organization. Singling out the racists in "the other guys" is silly and leads us nowhere. Singling people out for being racists, is fine. But don't drag their organization into it if there's no link.

Not the Wright Decision

2010-07-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

Lot's of racial tension stories in the news lately. Heh, sounds like an opening bit to a Leno monologue. The whole Shirley Sherrod story hits on the heels of the NAACP vs Tea Party, Mark William's racist satire, the New Black Panther story, and Liberal mainstream media caught conspiring to hide racist pastor Jeremiah Wright story to avoid making Obama look back.

Let's start with Shirley Sherrod. She was the Director of Rural Development for the Department of Agriculture for the state of Georgia. Back in March, she gave a speech at a convention for the NAACP in which she said she always tried to help black people when they had financial problems with their farms. Then one day, a white person came in looking for help, and she chose not to give him as much help, and instead, gave him the bare minimum assistance required and sent him to a white lawyer--a member of his own kind for help. Now, if she's getting paid as a state worker to help people in need, turning away white people is pretty darn racist. This is where the video clip of her speaking ends and it's since gone viral--though I'd never even heard of it until last night--in part mostly by conservative websites like biggovernment.com who also helped the ACORN videos get big.

So the video gets out, and within a day, the NAACP calls for her to resign. According to Sherrod, Obama's people were making harassing comments to her on the phone and one told her to pull over to the side of the road immediately, take out her Blackberry and use it to send in her resignation which she finally did. She said on CNN she was told if she didn't do it right then and there, she would be mentioned on Glen Beck and condemned as a racist and Obama desperately needed to avoid any more race related controversies right now. So Sherrod gets the sacrificial boot for being a racist(and based only on what she said on that tape--rightfully so).

Why is the NAACP so eager to get involved? They recently passed a resolution to condemn the Tea Party movement as being racist. The Tea Party fought back, bringing up the recent story of New Black Panther voter intimidation dismissal. Then Mark Williams, founder of the Tea Party Express, writes some offensive "satirical" racist blog entry joking that black people are lazy and live off white people and the NAACP point to that as evidence of racism. The Tea Party condemn Mark Williams post, saying he doesn't speak for them. Blah, blah. In short, Tea Party and NAACP go after each other and leave equal shares of blood on the floor. Newt Gengrich gets in the news for making the interesting suggestion that the Tea Party and NAACP should forget all that nonsense and join forces. Wouldn't that be interesting? Have I said lately I hope Newt is our next President?

Also recently in the news, The Daily Caller broke a story about a now defunct site called Journolist in which members from major mainstream media sources conspired to hide the Jeremiah Wright story because it was obviously embarrassing to Obama. Journalist Spencer Ackerman, who's appeared on CNN and various other networks, even suggested to his media friends they should pick a conservative at random and call them racists to distract from the Jeremiah Wright story and let conservative journalists suffer the consequences of going after the left. Other journalists are quoted as saying the best path is to just ignore the story. If you remember when it "broke," you'd know that's exactly what happened.

And, I mean, it was kind of a big story... or would have been had anyone covered it. Here you have Barack Obama's pastor to the Trinity United Church of Christ where Obama was a member of until recently, saying hateful things against jews and whites and Obama, who at one point, donated $20k to the church, can't disassociate himself well from it. And nearly all the mainstream media refused to cover the story. Fox covered it, naturally. ABC covered it briefly. And when ABC covered it, they were blasted by the other journalists on this private message board called Journolist.

None of this should be surprising. Fox broke the ACORN story in which employees were caught giving advice on how to smuggle underaged prostitutes into the country illegally. The brother of the founder of ACORN embezzled a million dollars of tax payer dollars through ACORN, and ACORN used tax payer dollars to help elect Obama and to lobby for his causes(instead of using it to find housing for people which is what their contract was for). Obama was once a lawyer working for ACORN. The other networks eventually gave token coverage to the story long after it broke.

Obama's Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones... only Fox covered him. Van Jones was quoted saying on camera that Republicans are assholes, that it's only white kids that shoot up schools--never black kids, and that big companies pollute in black neighborhoods on purpose. He also signed a petition claiming that George Bush planned and orchestrated 9/11. Again, none of the other media outlets covered this story. And now we see some evidence that the mainstream media have atleast in part, been caught conspiring not to cover important stories if they make Obama look bad. I actually think it's less sinister than that. I think mainstream media is less likely to cover stories that make a popular President look bad because their viewers don't want to see them. If your market doesn't want to buy what you're making, you go out of business. But Obama's popularity has dropped, so that's changing. Obama knows it, which is why he went from freakishly overexposed, to rarely interviewed anymore. I think the mainstream media is a lot more likely to run negative Obama stories now, which has got to have Obama nervous lately.

Ok, so Obama eventually said of Wright that he strongly condemns his racist words and was saddened and angered by them. I think that's probably true, but I'm not buying that Obama didn't know Wright was like that from the beginning. I mean, we all have a racist relative that we still talk to even if we don't exactly approve of what they have to say about some things. So personally, I think the news should cover Wright, but it's not a big deal in my opinion in regards to my opinion of Obama. I don't think Obama is a racist. He has overtly racist people around him because he doesn't pick his people very well and he's not a very good leader. But that doesn't make him a racist by association.

Ok, so back to Sherrod. Obama wanted to avoid another headache. The NAACP, no doubt, was tired of taking damage from the Tea Party hornet's nest they stirred up. Both parties wanted this Sherrod story to go away before it ended up on Glen Beck--which tells you how much power Beck has over Obama. And really, if I was Obama, I wouldn't have such a glass jaw and worry about what people think about me. I'd just do my thing and let the people that aren't for me be damned. But anyway, Beck did cover the story, but he took the exact opposite position that Obama and his people seemed to assume he would. I'm a fan of Beck, and to me, Beck's take on it is pretty much what he always does. Beck asks more questions than he gives answers, which is something I like about him.

Beck watched the rest of the tape. See, most people had only seen the beginning where she said she didn't want to help the poor farmer because he was white. The extended version of the tape shows that she goes on to say of this incident that happened 24 years ago, that she realized she was in error and that the white farmer needed help just as much as a poor black farmer, so she changed her mind and helped him after all, going over and above her job to save the man's farm. So she might have been a racist at one point 24 years ago, but changed her ways. Beck, instead of blasting Shirley Sherrod, blasted the Obama knee jerk decision to pressure her resignation based on bad information. Beck also played the tape of Obama speaking of the Boston police that acted "stupidly" before Obama had all the facts just to remind ous of Obama's history on knee jerk reactions.

Ok, so obviously I'm not an Obama fan. But I still don't think he's a closet racist. I do, however, think Obama has had to deal with a lot more crap because he's black. Not so much because crap is thrusted upon him by the mainstream because he's black, but I think black people in general have to walk a difficult path between embracing mainstream culture without being a "sellout." Case in point, if McCain had appointed a white guy czar who had made racist comments in the past, McCain would have full support from everyone in firing the guy as soon as he knew. It would have been clear cut. But Obama actually got backlash from firing Van Jones from his Liberal base. Isn't that weird? Howard Dean, whoch was the Chairman of the Democrat party at the time even praised Van Jones and said he shouldn't have been fired. Again, that would not have happened if all the colors and political leanings were reversed.

There was a poll that showed that 29% of blacks supported the racist, anti white comments made by Jeremiah Wright. Now 29% is a minority, but it's still a pretty high number of African Americans that agree with such horrible comments. It's almost one out of three. Isn't that a little frightening? Reverse racism is just more accepted in society. The point I'm trying to make is Obama's hands are tied in condemning "reverse racism." He seems to only do it if the mainstream is upset by it. I think most people would agree Obama is a terribly weak leader who has trouble making decisions about anything. And when he does act quickly and decisively, it goes badly.

Sherrod's boss has since offered her a new job and apologized. Interestingly enough, all the major news outlets are covering this story. Again, Obama's popularity has slipped, so the negative stories start to make it on air.

Working Out

2010-07-11T03:17:00.000-07:00

So I'm a little over 5 weeks of going to the gym. I've taken a couple days rest during that time, but have otherwise gone every night. I haven't made a lot of progress in terms of weight loss, but I've definitely increased my muscle weight. Since the scale doesn't tell the difference, I must have been losing body fat as well. I took a before picture when I first started and another at 3 weeks. Seems like I've lost a slight amount of weight from my mid section. So it seems to be working. It's just slow progress.

I do cardio on the elliptical for a little over an hour. An elliptical is sort of like a treadmill but without the impact. That's good since my feet and knees start to ache after a while of normal jogging. I get my heart rate at about a mid aerobic rate where I'm panting a little bit, but could still kind of talk if needed. After an hour of that, I go lift weights for about another hour. I think about that sometimes. I'm going to have to commit 2 hours of working out every single day for the rest of my life if I want to be in shape. Do I want it that bad to make that kind of commitment? Um. I guess so. I know really serious body builders will spend 5 hours every day working out. I'm not really sure why. Obviously they know something I don't. But you can only work out your muscle so much before you're tearing it more than your body can repair it. And it only takes so long to lift a weight. What more are they doing?

Anyway, I'm back to being just a beginner again. I used to be in fairly decent shape when I was into martial arts. Ten years ago, I did a jump spinning kick in a match, slipped on a small rain puddle from the leaky roof, and came crashing down on one of my knees, crushing the end of my femur inward. I had a doctor tell me I might never walk again without a serious limp. I would triumphantly say he was wrong. But I think he only said that to scare me into taking the physical therapy seriously. I never ended up going and my knee didn't recover very well. I wondered if it ever would.

But I realized the other day as I did quad extensions, that my knee didn't hurt like it normally would. I think I've finally made a full recovery 10 years later. I mean, during those 10 years, I've tried to get back into shape, but then I'd go to work out my legs, hit that snag with my knee and get discouraged. Get depressed, more like it. I hate to admit it, but I really kind of did spiral into a depression after that. People spiral into depression after a loved one dies or after they lose a limb or are horribly disfigured. What a wimp I am if a sore knee does it to me. But it really did change my life. It ended my ability to do martial arts to dance or do anything active at all. It seems so silly that such a minor thing like that affected me so much and for so long. Now, it could take a year or more to get back to where I was. But, no matter how long it takes, the only way to get there is to keep going.

Anyways, back to the working out thing. I'm basically doing my old methods. Work on toning for 6 weeks, then bulking for 6 weeks and repeat. When bulking, you lift as much as you can for 8 reps and 2 sets with a minute wait between sets for each muscle you're working on. When toning, you lift as much as you can for 15 reps and 3 sets with a minute wait between sets. I do a split set for both with a 2 day cycle during bulking and a 3 during toning. My 2 day cycle is a standard push / pull method. You do all the muscles you need to push with - triceps, pecks, delts, quads / gluts and obliques(just to fit them in somewhere) on push days. Pull muscles would be biceps, lats, posterior delts, lower back, hamstrings, and I put calves there so I'm not doing leg press and calve raises on the same day. I also do my forearms on pull days. When I do a three day split, I do all the leg stuff on Day 3 instead. I also add the in and outside into my leg routine--push your legs apart on one machine and bring them together on another.

You need carbs in your system while you work out or you won't build muscle. I try and eat bread or cottage cheese and fruit right before I leave to the gym. I've cut refined / processed sugar out of my diet completely and haven't had any for about a year now. That means no chocolate, cookies, ice cream, etc. And rarely do I drink soda--maybe one a month. As a side note, once you get refined sugar out of your system, it's amazing how sweet other food tastes. Wheat bread tastes like cake to me.

Everyone has different gifts and challenges when it comes to working out. I have freakishly large calves and decent sized biceps. My legs in general are fairly easy for me to work out. However, other than my arms, I have very weak upper body strength right now. Good thing I go to the gym late at night where less people are around to see the pathetically light amount of weight I'm bench pressing. I've always had weak pecks though. Not sure why. That, coupled with the fact that I'm toning... by the time I get to that 3rd set and I'm struggling after 12 reps in that set, that small amount of weight feels unbearable. All the weight I'm doing is low compared to what I used to do before I hurt me knee, but in a few more months from now, it'll be different and less embarrassing. I don't know why I let it get to me. No one at the gym gives a damn what I'm lifting. So making it a macho thing is silly on my part.

In either case, I've done body building, I've dieted, and I've done cardio. I've done all 3 of those things on a consistent basis for 6 weeks or more at various times in my life. But I've never done all three at once. Until now. I have about another month or so to see how it's panning out. Hopefully well. Like I said, I've seen only slight, but noticeable results so far. I'm pretty determined to get into really good shape for once in my life.

Keeping Up with the Chapmans

2010-07-10T02:23:00.000-07:00

Vice President Biden was on Jay Leno tonight. In talking about sending the 10 caught Russian spies back to Russia, Jay asked Biden about the beautiful Russian spy Anna Chapman. Biden said it was not his decision to send her back. I was watching one of the tvs at my gym while on the treadmill and I busted up laughing.

Biden and Obama both are pretty funny and charismatic. I want to like them. They're just so horribly wrong with their political ideology. But speaking of the spies, is it me, or is it a little strange that we've been watching them for the last ten years, decide to finally arrest them, then almost instantly, hand them over to Russia? I feel like this is a massive cover up. What it could possibly be covering up, I have no idea. But they committed a crime against us. Shouldn't they get at least a little jail time first? I realize an American jail is like a resort compared to jails in other countries. To be honest, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Anna came back to the US and got her own reality show. Wouldn't you watch at least the first episode?

Speaking of reality tv show stars, Rod Blagojevich has been making some interesting claims lately. In the wake of Obama being caught offering bribes to other Democrats in exchange for them not running against his friends, Blago is claiming that Obama offered him a bribe in exchange for him appointing Obama's friend Valerie Jarret to Obama's old senate seat. It's either been confirmed or at least it's highly likely that Obama did ask Blago to appoint Jarret to the senate seat. Blago said that he wasn't going to give it up for nothing. Now if Obama made an offer, then Obama has broken the law. Blago is claiming Obama did, but it's my gut feeling that Blago is either lying or exaggerating to save himself. I think Obama dodges a bullet on this one.

But if it's true and somehow gets confirmed, we could possibly see another president get the "Nixon treatment." I think Obama is as arrogant as Nixon and feels he's above the law. I think it's likely that Obama did hint at possible bribes, but I think if Blago could prove it, he would have done so by now. So I think the story goes no where, but I guess we'll find out.

I don't know why, but I don't really want Obama to go down that way. I'd rather the country see socialism at "its finest," and decide never to vote in another Liberal ever again. It's sort of interesting that at the G20, Europe essentially said that Socialism has broken them, and they're going to reduce government spending. That would mean every country that's ever tried Socialism either fell into totalitarianism or reverted back to capitalism before it was too late. I guess all the rioting in Greece really scared people and they knew that could easily be their country next. We're speeding down the same path and will be until Obama gets voted out.

Hmm, what else? Oh, the New Black Panthers. Have you seen that video that's on the news? So these two members of the New Black Panthers stood in front of a polling place in a white neighborhood the day of the 2008 election. They're both dressed in the para military New Black Panther uniform. One of them named King Samir Shabazz pounds a billy club in his palms asking stuff like, "Where you goin, cracker?" when white people near in an attempt to intimidate voters. There's another video of him on youtube showing him with a megaphone at some black heritage festival telling people they have to kill white people and kill their babies to be free of white oppression. Nice guy, huh? Ok, so the KKK did (does?) the same thing. Racism is wrong no matter what color the idiot who spouts hatred and ignorance. And he was convicted of voter intimidation along with some white people doing the same against black people in a black neighborhood. They all need to go to jail. Democracy doesn't work unless people can feel safe voting.

Ok, so why is this in the news again, almost 2 years later? Because Eric Holder, Obama's incompetent Attorney General, decided recently to drop charges against the two New Black Panthers despite the many videos of them on youtube calling people crackers, intimidating people with weapons, and saying racist hate speech. The reason the charges were dropped? Not enough evidence. What the hell? The videos are all over youtube. How is there not enough evidence? Meanwhile the other people arrested in 2008 did not get their cases dropped. But they're not black either.

What's going on here? Well, the rumor is that it's the default position of the Federal Department of Justice to dismiss cases of voter intimidation if the victims are white and the perpetrators are black. Why? Because the Voter Rights Act was meant to protect minorities, not whites. At least that's what Former Justice attorney J. Christian Adams testified on after he resigned over this case.

In a decade or two, white people will no longer be the majority. I think it's important to recognize civil rights for all people, regardless of color, and do that now because soon white people will be minorities. You might think that even with white people in the minority, they'll still be able to hold the majority of power as we do now. This is unfortunately true. I say unfortunate because, although I freely admit that as a white person I do benefit from white privilege, I would rather such divisions of skin color not exist. After all, I'd rather my position in society be determined by my character, my ability, and my achievements, not my genetics. A society that operates otherwise breeds jealousy, mistrust, and hatred. My point, if civil rights is not enforced equally, it causes resentment which fuels discrimination which is ultimately counter productive. So by not prosecuting people of hate crimes because they're black, all that happens is more racial disharmony. A government that treats people equally is essential towards creating equality. We still have a long ways to go towards that goal.

One of the Other 57 States

2010-07-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

The Liberals would like to boycott Arizona, if only they could find it on the map. I'm talking about Supervisor Peggy West of Milwaukee County. Her and the county board voted on whether the county of Milwaukee should boycott Arizona or not. West's argument in favor? She claimed that since Arizona wasn't a border state, but rather was "a ways removed from the border" that the popular voter approved law was less justified. She went on to say that she googled the name of the bill, saw a picture of Obama and Arizona Governor, Jan Brewer, meeting, and thus this means that Brewer must already have the national guard sent to her state so there's no need for Arizona to pass such a law. To Milwaukee's credit, someone else on the board corrected Supervisor West immediately after, politely reminding her that Arizona is, in fact, a border state.

Ok, so most liberals are not this dumb. But, it is pretty frightening that an elected official in her second term(so she's been in office a while), shows up at a meeting on whether to contribute to an economically devastating boycott or not and... I mean, wow. Now, I realize there are people out there that might not make geography a high priority in their lives. Americans are notoriously bad at geography. It's nearly non existent in our school system--I know I never had to take it. But wouldn't you think if you were an elected official and you stepped up to the mic to speak on a subject to make an argument... don't you think you'd at least find out if Arizona was a border state or not?

Of course, it's not the end of the world if the county of Milwaukee has an idiot for a Supervisor. I don't even know what a County Supervisor does. But it wasn't that long ago after Obama appointed Attorney General Eric Holder admitted after announcing he would sue Arizona on the Constitutionality of the law on behalf of the White House, that he later admitted to Congress that he hasn't actually even read the bill. Hell, *I've* read the bill. It was only 14 damn pages! He later said that, although he didn't read the bill, he was going off what he heard about it in the media. In the media? What does that mean? Like Jay Leno made a joke on the Tonight Show and the top lawyer in the country that represents Obama on all legal matters decides to threaten Arizona with a lawsuit? This is all politics. The Democrats know that illegal immigrants have children born in this country so that they become American citizens, then they support Democrats. No matter how ridiculous the steps they have to take, the Dems know they need to make latinos happy to court their votes.

So I was staying fairly neutral about Obama's handling of the oil spill. But there's been increasing information that Obama is really screwing up. First off, there's the Jones Act. The Jones Act was something that the unions wanted. Unions, of course, are the financial backers of the Democrat party, so to be fair, the Democrats have to keep the unions happy much like the Republicans have to keep big business happy. The Jones Act makes it so that no boat can be used to clean up the oil spill unless the boat was made in the US and is piloted by a fully American crew--thus to protect American jobs. Obama could easily suspend the Jones Act, but he's not going to. He has to keep the unions happy, and they like it.

So instead, he's allowed a few boats here and there to apply for Jones Act waivers. They claim a couple have done so. These boats and their crew may spend weeks waiting for the paper work, so while a couple or more may have made it through, many have not. The statistics I've heard from numerous sources is that there's over 2,000 skimmer boats available to use to clean up the oil, but only about 20 are actually being allowed in. That's 1% capacity--not very good numbers. ABC, a news organization that certainly is a more pro-Obama news agency, even did a report interviewing a few frustrated managers on the ground saying that Obama's people are falsifying the number of skimmers going out and people involved in the clean up. So the real numbers could be that even less than 20 skimmers are actually out on the water. If I was BP, I'd look at Obama and say, "Screw you guys, we're going to put as many skimmers out there as we can and clean up this damn oil now instead of sitting around wasting money and fudging the books."

What else? So Obama recently attributed the failed Stimulus Bill to creating 600,000 jobs. I would have so much more respect for Obama if he'd just come out and admit that the Stimulus Bill was a colossal failure. I mean, with 48% of the Stimulus Bill money spent to create jobs, that means 600,000 job created cost $700,000 dollars for each job. If that's success to the mind of a liberal, I'd hate to see failure. I mean, $700,000 dollars for just one job... you should be able to hire 20 people for that. That's horrible efficiency. After all, it doesn't mean that the people hired made $700,000 dollars. It means someone got paid minimum wage or a little better, and the other 90% of the money went poof.

What if instead he waved taxes and start up fees for new businesses. How many more jobs would he have created for a hell of a lot less money? Wouldn't you bet BP is getting charged by the government for 2,000 skimmers operating a day but only seeing 20? That's government efficiency right there. And the Libs want to grow our government even bigger and they wonder why the American public rejects them.

Health care remains unpopular. The CBO announced that despite Obama promising over and over that you could keep your healthcare plan if you like it, most Americans will be unable to keep their plan. This is another in a far too long line of broken promises. This, coupled with the announcement months before by the Congressional Budget Office that HC will cost over a hundred million more than Obama promised--putting it well over the trillion dollar mark Obama promised it wouldn't exceed. That doesn't count the closing of the donut hole and the "doctor fix," that's getting tacked on later that will cost hundreds of millions more. The donut hole is the fact that Social Security doesn't pay enough to fully cover some prescription medication costs. The "Doctor Fix," is the compensation for the fact that Medicare and Medicaid doesn't pay doctors the same amount of money for their services--meaning that doctors make less money from treating lower income people. Since doctors can choose to stop seeing Medicare and Medicaid patients, less and less of such patients will be able to see a doctor--a growing trend now.

So far, out of the Stimulus Bill, the Health Care Bill, the Oil Spill, and Immigration Issue, Obama is 0 and 4, and on the wrong side of public opinion on all 4. I'd have to say this puts him at the level of complete and utter failure--made all the worse by the fact that his party, the Democrats, held a super majority in Congress for most of that time. A super majority! If Obama wanted to pass a law that we all had to wear speedos and do jumping jacks on our front lawn, he could do it. He could have done anything he wanted, and he's still 0 and 4. His approval rating is about 45%. Who the hell are these 45% of people? Do you all still really hate Bush that badly that Charles Manson could have been elected and you'd still going around saying, "Well, at least he's not Bush." I don't understand people, I guess.

So, you might be thinking, "Obama still has 2 and a half more years. He'll need more time than that to clean up the mess Bush made!" Of course, I'd bet you can't actually name a single policy Bush passed that "messed up the county." You're just going off what your friends say. I'm not suggesting Bush was a great president. I'm only suggesting that before you hate the man, you do some research and figure out what it is about him you think was bad and come up with a logical argument that's not one sided. Anyway, back to my point. Obama does have 2 and a half more years. He's already lost his super majority in the Senate thanks to the special election replacing Ted Kennedy with Republican Scott Brown. The Republicans will either take back both houses in Congress at the end of this year or at least come really close to it. In either case, the Democrat's ability to pass unpopular legislation against the will of the American people ends at the end of this year. Obama has already demonstrated his contempt for Republicans. Where as Bill Clinton pivoted and worked with Republicans for the betterment of the country, Obama will not. He will fight for his twisted and discredited ideas until the bitter end. No Republican will go along with his horrible and unrealistic ideas and he will get voted out in 2012. It's my hope, that Newt Gengrich takes his place.

Petraying the Libs

2010-06-24T18:08:00.000-07:00

Unhappy with the negative comments from my blog, Obama is pressuring me to resign as blog writer. Wow, what a story. So it all begins a couple years ago. Bush was president. General Petraeus wanted a surge of troops for the war in Iraq to finally break the back of the insurgents. Then Senator Barack Omama voted no on the surge, claiming that the war in Iraq was a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites and no amount of US troops would change that. Luckily, Senator Obama was out voted. The Congress approved the surge. General Petraeus got the troops he needed to start the surge and was successful.

Obama had to admit in interviews later that he was wrong and that the surge did work, and was responsibly for winning the Iraq war. To Obama's credit, he did come clean about being on the wrong side of that issue. Obama's argument even sounds reasonable to me. If I didn't have hindsight, I would be a little uneasy with completely disagreeing with his logic(but again, I'm not a senator and it's not my job to deeply analyze these things). We're all human, and no one, no matter how smart they are, is going to get everything right. Especially when it comes to military matters and you're a person with no military experience.

But General Petraeus was Bush's general, and Obama wanted to be the anti Bush in every way. So when Obama became president, he got his own general, General McCrystal. Obama has always been against the war in Iraq, but has been a supporter of war in Afghanistan. Where Iraq was mostly seen as "Bush's War," Afghanistan was "the good war," one that Obama is determined to win as president. Ok, cool.

McCrystal wasn't like Petraeus. For one, McCrystal has admitted to voting for Obama. The left really liked him. And over the course of the war, Petraeus has been demonized by the left. MoveOn.org--a left wing advocacy group, famously took out an add in the New York Times calling Petraeus a liar and a traitor. The headline was "General Petraeus or General Betray Us?" Republicans in Congress unanimously condemned the add, as did some Democrats. I don't know enough about the situation to know why Liberals hate him so much other than he was Bush's general and they hate anything having to do with Bush.

But anyways, so Obama is president now. McCrystal said he needed 60 thousand troops to create a surge to break the backs of the Taliban. Deja vu, right? Obama admitted he was wrong about voting against the surge in Iraq. But he believes in the war in Afghanistan. This is one of the few issues the Republicans are with him on. Obama campaigned saying he would send more troops to Afghanistan, so he would be fulfilling his pledge. So, give McCrystal the damn troops he wants and let's put this war to bed, right? But that's not what happened.

For one, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize around that same time. That's got to be awkward. And two, were his supporters not listening to him? Obama said he'd send more troops there if elected. All of a sudden, they freak out. Obama panics and ignores the order for more troops. How long was it? 9 months? McCrystal asked for the troops sometime around the beginning of spring and Obama stalled until December. Then he decides to only give McCrystal half what he asked for and gave him a time table of 18 months to win. So McCrystal does what he can with that, but, well, if you pay attention to the war at all, you know how that's going. Some progress is made, but we've lost the initiative. I'm not a war analyst, so I don't claim I know exactly what's going on, but it does seem like we're at a stale mate.

The impression I get is that Obama is incompetent(shocker, I know), has no idea how modern war strategy works(not that I know either), and McCrystal is frustrated at having his hands tied. Finally, McCrystal and his staff vented about Obama's incompetence to a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. Obama, who notoriously has a glass jaw and can't take criticism, of course, got angry at the article. He fired McCrystal and replaced him with, yep, you guessed it, Bush's war general, General Petraeus. MoveOn.Org has completely removed all of their anti Petraeus articles from their website and are now pretending they never existed.

Now, I can say that I agree that Obama should have fired McCrystal. You can't have your top war general publicly criticizing the president. It makes us look disorganized which gives hope to our enemies. If the Taliban thinks, "Just hold on a little longer. The US is starting to crack," then that's bad. After all, the Taliban can't beat us on the battlefield. All they can do is wage a PR war against us, hoping the American people can no longer stomach the war and put pressure on our politicians to bring our troops home. And any division is a victory to them. I don't like Obama(policy wise), but I would like him to "win" in Afghanistan. As an arm chair president, it does seem to me he should listen to Petraeus and give him what he asks for and to hell with what his base thinks. After all, I think the Libs would much rather be able to claim that "they" won the war in Afghanistan than claim victory in pressuring Obama to send the troops home and abandon our mission.

Poizning the Well

2010-06-09T07:53:00.000-07:00

Well, I voted for Steve Poizner yesterday. I knew it wouldn't do any good. But it's just a primary. Looks like Prop 14 is going to pass. Maybe we can start voting out some of the radicals now in the state legislature. I don't know how I missed voting for Carly Fiorina. I realized after I turned in my ballot, I didn't remember voting for the senate. At least I still get to vote for her when it counts in Nov.

I'm luke warm about Meg Whitman. I think the only thing I like about her is that Condoleezza Rice supports her and she doesn't want to mess with property tax caps. I thought her negative ads against Poizner were highly misleading if not plain wrong. I don't take her as genuine, but considering the alternative, just about anyone with a pulse would be better. I have a feeling California will become the unemployment capitol of the world if Jerry Brown wins. His supporters are saying that things were fine when he was governor. Yeah, but Brown is a maintainer, not a fixer. The state seriously needs to cut spending, cut education for executives that make six figures but don't do anything, break the stranglehold the mafia / unions have on this state, and lower taxes so businesses stop fleeing the state. Brown's not going to do any of the things we actually need done. Will Meg? She says she will. But will she? I don't know. I'll vote for her though and hope for the best.

I'm a lot more excited about voting for Carly Fiorina though. Boxer has been a long time embarrassment for this state. Hurry up November.

I walk alone

2010-06-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Every moment of everyday, at every second of conscious thought, we decide who we are. If we are kind or lazy, curious or miserable, it all depends on what we decide through the infinite number of decisions we are constantly making. It is empowering to think we are both nothing and everything at the same time. Every conceivable in between is at our finger tips to construct ourselves from anew at every instant.

Despite this, we nearly always choose to stay on the many paths we walk and to stay the course. I was reminded of this today. I made a post on this blog last year about one of my learning disabilities. The one that made it difficult for me to understand people speaking to me when I was a kid. I'm mostly over it now, but I'm left with the fears of not being able to understand people that talk to me. This strange and no longer justified fear manifests itself in a few ways. I think part of why I overeat is because I want to be over weight and unattractive. It means less people wanting to talk to me. I flat out don't like it when people I don't know try and strike up a conversation with me. I push them away.

Today was the first day of the summer semester at American River College. While standing in line for about thirty minutes to buy a parking pass, I had such an incident. I considered several times leaving the line and coming back in the morning when it wouldn't be at long, but I stuck with it. I was finally near the very front. An attractive young woman in front of me turned to start talking to me. I don't know why it annoyed me, but it did. Yeah, I'm well aware of why I have so few friends, but this is how I am. But she told me she was not feeling well. She was first in line now, and about to go soon. I told her the wait was almost over, but she kept looking at me. It stressed me out a little, because I didn't know what she wanted from me. I wanted her to just turn back around and leave me alone. She said again that she was feeling sick. Before I could say anything more, she slumped against the wall and passed out. I knelt down in front of her and caught her head before she bumped it against a steel beam.

She opened her eyes again. I held her head gently with my left hand against her cheek. She looked at me weakly, barely hanging on to consciousness. I felt her head and asked if she was dizzy. The people in line just started down at us confused and in shock. I asked someone to get a nurse. I knew they were close by, but no one in line moved. They just stared at us. She closed her eyes again and I felt for her pulse. It was weak, but steady. Her lips were pale and I was getting pretty nervous at this point. A person at the desk called for the next in line. It was like a dream and no one in the world cared about this woman. I called out for a nurse again. I didn't realize it at the time, but I felt very close to her, like I would have crawled through broken glass to help her.

Two nurses came. They eventually got a wheelchair and I picked her up and put her in it. She looked at me and said thank you. I didn't say anything back. I felt like I should be doing more, but I didn't know what. They wheeled her back to the nurses station. I wanted to go, to hold her hand and sit with her, but I thought I would be in the way. It was a weird feeling. I ended up just standing there, in the middle of the hallway, watching them wheel her away, not knowing what to do. She faded around the corner and someone asked me if I was in line. I don't even know her name. I just walked away. Here I am typing this, wondering if she's ok and feeling guilty that I didn't go with her.

It also got me thinking, why does a beautiful woman have to pass out at my feet before I'll take notice and care about her?

The first serious g/f I ever had was absolutely horrible to me. I had to end that relationship and reflect for a few years for it to really sink in just how awful a person she was. But I think she's left me very cynical about ever letting another woman that close to me again. And I've stayed the course ever since, walking the bitter, lonely path I walk. With every moment of every day, I choose who I am. It's time to choose a new path.

The Love Boat

2010-06-03T09:15:00.000-07:00

So Obama offered me a bribe if I'd agree not to post this blog, but I've decided to turn it down. But seriously, another one? Obama could make Richard Nixon go, "Wow, that's a little shady."

I read an article the other day that said that the Gallup Poll now shows the Republicans have the largest favorability over the Democrats at any point in the history of the Gallup Poll--since 1950.

It's not that Democrats can't govern. It's that they have in Obama, a radical, with radical ideas about the world, and instead of saying, "Wait a minute. This is not what the Democrat party stands for," the Dems just blindly go along with it. Healthcare remains unpopular and gets worse as more Americans lose their coverage because the bill causes premiums to go up, forcing employers to drop coverage. Now 70% of the country say they support Arizona's law and Obama says he opposes it and it will lead to racial profiling (hint: all laws can be used for racial profiling). Bush's approval rating shot up to a record breaking 90% approval with his handling of 9/11, but Obama's perceived handling of the BP Oil spill has caused his rating to drop. I don't really understand why, to be honest. But, Obama also has people that don't like him based on things that aren't true--secret Muslim, born in Kenya, closet racist, etc. And yeah, I'm embarrassed for all Republicans when idiot "birthers" demand to see Obama's birth certificate. Come on, really? Do you honestly think if there was even the slightest possibility that Obama was born in Kenya that it wouldn't be plastered all over the news constantly with hordes of journalists out snooping around? With all the actual real stuff to not like about Obama, people gotta make up crazy crap like this?

Back to bad stuff about Obama that's actually true... He had Bill Clinton bribe Joe Sestak with something they now claim didn't have tangible value, thus isn't technically a bribe. Anyone dumb enough to believe that? So now another candidate's come forward claiming Obama bribed him. Only this time, it was with a job that did have worth. Ah crap, how will they get out of this? So now they're spinning it that they didn't actually offer the jobs, only that they presented that the jobs existed. Huh, what?

So here goes. Andrew Romanoff applied for a job with the White House in 2008. He was turned down. Now, two years later, he decides to run against one of Obama's buddies for the senate seat in Colorado. The White House contacts Romanoff to let him know he can instead have that job he applied for. This is a federal crime to offer someone a bribe to drop out of an election for high political office. So the White House, having gotten caught committing another crime, is now trying to say that they didn't actually offer Romanoff the job. They just contacted him to make him aware of the job and that he could look into going for it... as if he wasn't aware of a job...THAT HE APPLIED FOR AND DIDN'T GET 2 YEARS EARLIER. These are terrible lies. They just insult your intelligence. Can Obama just go to jail now?

So I haven't been a big fan of Israel lately, but I'm cautiously on their side with this whole boat / blockage thing. New information could change my opinion, but so far, I agree with them. So here's the deal. Hamas took over Gaza a few years ago, and started firing rockets into Israel, right into the homes of civilians. So Israel invades, beats them up, takes their rockets, and leaves. Yeah, lots of innocent civilians got killed in the process, and that sucks, but that happens in war. So Israel blockades Gaza so no ships can get in. This means the people of Gaza would starve and die except that Israel gives Gaza massive shipments of food to keep them alive. Is it enough food, I don't know. But that's how this has been going on. Gaza is basically a large prison instead of a small country(well, it's not technically a country, but whatever).

So a bunch of activists decide to load up their boat and try and get through Israel's blockade to get "food and medicine" to Gaza. Israel offers to inspect the boat beforehand, and let them through if there's no weapons on board. The activists refuse and sail up to the blockade. So when Israel inspects the boat, the activists attack. Some of the activists admit to firing guns(there's footage to prove it and a few Israeli soldiers were wounded), but they claim they had to take the guns away from Israeli troops and fire the guns at them in self defense. This is complete bull.

The activists never had any intention of bringing aid to Gaza. They purposely tried to pick a fight with Israel in hopes of causing an international scene, which is exactly what happened. One activist was interviewed by Iran state run media saying he was ready to be a martyr.

Despite it clearly being a set up, even many European countries are condemning Israel. Obviously, nearly all the Muslim countries are strongly condemning it. Obama is in a bad spot here. He's made strides reaching out to Muslims, which I think is a good thing. But he's forced having to take Israel's side here. I'm not going to play arm chair president here. I'm glad I'm not president to have to make these hard and delicate balancing acts. I can't say I'm all that glad Obama is.

The Specter of Communism

2010-05-31T02:45:00.000-07:00

So looks like Obama has committed a federal crime and even the liberal media are starting to take notice. Joe Sestak has repeatedly stated that the White House offered him a job if he would promise not to run against Arlen Specter for the PA senate seat. Senator Arlen Specter, of course, was a republican and Obama convinced Spector to change parties to become a democrat, giving the Dems a 60 seat super majority in the senate. That is, until the Democrat that was planning to run against then republican Specter, decided he still wanted to run against Specter for the seat, only now had to run against him first in the democrat primary since they were now on the same side.

Looks like Sestak was offered a bribe if he would change his mind. A bribe he turned down. This is a federal crime to offer someone a bribe for dropping out of a race for high political office. The Obama's people have completely dodged all questions, hoping the issue would go away. It didn't go away and Sestak defeated Arlen Specter in the recent democrat primary in an incredibly embarrassing election for Obama and his turncoat friend. Specter is now only the second democrat incumbent in US history to lose the primary for a senate seat. Now the Dems have a problem. Either let their guy(who they didn't want, but are now stuck with) running for the Senate to look like a liar, or allow Obama to be the liar. If Obama is lying and that gets out, the republicans can push to have a special investigator look into it, much in the way that republicans did the same to Bill Clinton for lying under oath about having sex with interns. Of course Clinton got impeached, but not removed from office, and the whole thing backfired on republicans by a public that saw it as a cheap political ploy based on something no one cared about. Well, and rightfully so. But Obama bribing a fellow politician is a little different than cheating on a spouse. Congress has to approve a special prosecutor. The Democrat controlled Congress will never vote for that, so it means the President has a free pass to break the law as he sees fit and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Or as Alcee Hastings, Democrat Congressman from Florida famously said earlier this year, "There ain't no rules around here. We make them up as we go along." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHTJSu_2Lk& Why does it seem that only us "right wing nut jobs," care as our government moves closer to socialism and bothers less and less to even have the decency to try and hide it.

Speaking of Clinton, Sestak and Obama's people seem to have suddenly come out with the explanation that Bill Clinton was the one that offered "the bribe," and that it wasn't a bribe at all but rather an offer for an unpaid volunteer position on some meaningless board--thus a thing of no monetary value, therefore not a bribe. Come on. Anyone dumb enough to believe that? He said the White House offered him a job, and now the story is someone not affiliated with the White House offered him a non paying job. It insults our intelligence. So why is Sestak changing his story? Because he doesn't want to be going into an election as a democrat accusing Obama of a felony. All sides know it's a lie, but it's a lie that ends the debate. For now.

Speaking of Obama and lies, I've noticed more and more this repeated crap about blaming the recession on the republicans. Every economist on the planet agrees the recession was mostly caused by the falling of the housing market. The housing market collapsed because the federal government was paying private banks to gamble--give loans to people that had no clear means to ever pay it back. The federal government, unwittingly, directly worked to destabilize the banking industry. It had been slowly building for a decade and was bound to burst eventually. Imagine how different things would have been had to collapse happened in 2009 instead of 2007. Whose fault was it? A combination of people in both parties. But blaming all republicans... as if all of us conspired together to bring it down like we're all one people that all know each other, it's just so ridiculous and stupid. It makes me think that either Obama is flat out lying, trying to shift blame away from the fact that his "stimulus bill" turned out to be a colossal waste of money that accomplished very little as he tries to find a scapegoat. Or, Obama seriously has no idea what he's doing or how a capitalist system works. So liar or idiot. I don't mean "idiot" in the sense that I think the system is easy to understand. It's far beyond me in its complexity, but then, I'm not trying to run the country. I don't blame him for not being able to snap his fingers and fix everything. I believe he genuinely wants to fix everything. I just wish he'd stop the blame game and admit that Dems screwed up too. After all, they had control of congress for a year before the recession hit. They can't escape without blame on this. That's not reasonable.

Well, as a side note, it looks like Obama's approval rating is going down because of public opinion on the handling of the oil spill. While it's good Obama's numbers go down, I sure wish they were going down for the right reason like: socialism = bad, healthcare bill = job killer, big government = inefficient, opposing Arizona's right to protect itself = wrong. I have very little idea what it's like behind the scenes with everything that's involved there. My gut tells me Obama is probably doing all he reasonably can, and therefore should not be facing fallout for this. BP has massive financial incentives to stop the leak. No doubt they're doing all they can. Though, to be honest, BP's motivations are slightly different. Due to the laws passed after the Valdez disaster, BP can only be sued for up to 75 million in damages. The damages have already exceeded that. So BP no longer has motivation to stop the damage. Their only financial motivation is not in the mess, but in the loss of oil. Obviously, they can't sell spilled oil.

I've read that other countries have closed offshore, gushing wells by using explosives to plug the hole. BP doesn't want to do that because then they're have to drill a new hole to get to the oil again. And that costs money.

Now, to delve into the conspiracy side. BP has given more campaign contribution money to Obama than any other candidate in US history. How much "hardball" can Obama really play to keep his "boot to BP's neck" as one of his aids put it? After all, Obama is in BP's pocket. Well, there's probably nothing to that. Just enough to raise a brow of suspicion.

I thought it was interesting how many left leaning news outlets explored that side of the debate and pointed out that BP gave to the McCain campaign as well--though not as much. Does that really matter? Kind of a weird detail but more of the "Oh yeah, well it's the republican's fault!" mentality. I mean, McCain isn't president. Does it make any bit of difference how much bribe money BP gave to people that ended up not being president? Isn't that completely irrelevant? I can promise you that if McCain was elected instead and the issues was raised, no where in the news would anyone be saying, "Well, they gave Obama money too, and more of it!"

Healthcare is still making news. The CBO came out and said that HC was going to cost a couple hundred billion more than previously estimated. This puts it well over the "deficit neutral" claim Obama made that no one seemed to believe at the time anyways. Why the recent change? Well, because as employers decide more and more that it's far cheaper to pay the fine than to provide insurance, more and more people are losing their insurance and being pushed into government programs thus turning this into socialized medicine--exactly what the Dems in charge kept lying to us, claiming wasn't going to happen and now it is. Are they idiots that didn't see it coming or did they know exactly what they were doing and wanted to move us into an unpopular socialist system through lies and deception?

I hate injustice. And I hate knowing that we have politicians that can flat out lie and think they can get away with it. I guess we'll know in November how many people are still falling for it.

Meg, Steve, and Me

2010-05-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

I take voting pretty seriously, even though it's often a lost cause. California voters are dead set in this death march off the cliff. Decades of reckless entitlement spending has turned the state into a Liberal paradise. We have the third worst education system in the country, and yet also the most expensive. We have the second highest unemployment rate in the country. The highest taxes on businesses of any state in the country which is why businesses flee the state / are not hiring. The highest state and sales tax.

California is the posterboy state for why Liberalism does not work. And yet, you can't get the damn Liberals out of the state legislature to save our lives. I looked it up. The Democrats have controlled the State Legislature since 1970, controlling the creation of all bills and laws not otherwise voted on by the people. Now, I'm not trying to suggest that Democrats are bad in a general sense. Most aren't. But when one group stays in power too long, the radicals in their party--who would never get elected otherwise--start to creep in.

Had George Bush served a third term, and the Republicans not been voted out of congress in 2006, I'll bet you they would have seriously been working on a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman, thus banning gay marriage at the federal level--for a very long time. Not cool. So see? I'm even saying is not good when my own party stays in power too long and the radicals from our side start to creep in.

Anyway, we get Republican governors, and every time I get my hopes up that they'll fix the mess in this state, but they go to take on the Liberal State Legislature and they cave. Schwarzenegger ended up being a fairly big disappointment. Still, he's a lot better than Gray Davis. Wow, he sucked. I think Jerry Brown has been an awesome Attorney General, but I would not want to see him be governor again. I'm too young to remember the last time he was governor, but I fear what would happen if he was, with no one to stop the Liberals from making our problems a lot worse. Arnold has atleast tried to stop the bleeding. I voted for his proposals during the special election. But he grossly under estimated the stupidity of California voters who prefer the march off the cliff.

Margret Thatcher once said, "The problem with Socialism is you eventually run out of other people's money." We've run out of other people's money, and when Arnold makes cuts that people fight like mad to oppose...I don't know what the hell is wrong with people, it's like they don't get that we can't keep spending. Like voters think, "I can't be out of money. I still have checks left!"

Look, I really hate the cuts in education. I was going to apply to Sac State, but I can't. They had to close their doors to people like me who already have BA degrees who are seeking another. His cuts affect me directly, and this really sucks for me. But I acknowledge that it has to be done. So I go to a JC for a couple years and hope things clear up until then. You make due without for a while.

I was hanging outside one of my classes talking to a fellow student. And this guy walks up to us asking us to sign a petition to increase spending for parks and libraries. The young woman I was talking to immediately took the clipboard and signed. I asked the guy how it would be paid for. He told me it was free. I pressed him on that and he told me this whacked out story about how drug dealers living in Columbia wanted to give back to the community so they were funding the bill. I really wanted to call the guy a moron for actually believing such an idiotic story. But you know, this woman I was talking to already signed it, and I didn't want to make her feel stupid, so I let it go.

But this in the mentality of people in this state. Tax dollars does not mean 'free money.' How many Liberals would have even asked the guy what the extra spending was going for? What if the petition was to pay for the state to pave all the parks in asphalt and turn them into dodge ball courts? Does it even occur to dumb ass Liberals to even ask these kinda of questions before volunteering to spend other people's money on crap we don't need?

Anyway, back to the governor situation. Putting aside the fact Steve Poizner has a really terrible last name, I'm leaning towards voting for him over Whitman. Whitman might be closer to my own political views--she's more of a social moderate like I am, but I get a sense that she's more likely to cave and side with Liberals. She also doesn't articulate herself well in "what I would do as governor" speeches. Most of what she says is meaningless "we have to get America back to work" bs fluff that they all say. That might not be an indication of the type of leader she would be, but it does make it more difficult to really judge the direction she says she will go versus how she'll really go. That, and I'm really not happy about the fact that, by her own admission, the only reason why she got into politics and registered to vote a couple years ago was because she didn't like what government policies did to her business.

Poizner is a lot more concrete in what he has to say in his speeches. Both seem to know the issues, but as much as people hate politicians, I think it really takes a politician to do a politician's job. Arnold is a good example of a non politician that means well, but just couldn't get it done. Alright. I made up my mind. I'm voting for Poizner in the primary even though he's way behind in the polls.

Words from the Otherside

2010-05-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

This oil spill just plain sucks. It is interesting how political it's become. Sarah Palin is getting backlash for "Drill, baby, drill," and, although Obama recently flipped his long standing position on off shore drilling to now agree with Palin and others, he's mostly getting a pass on any backlash for it. What he's going to do now, I don't know. He's damned either way, I think. His environmental supporters on the left might not give him a pass if he still supports off shore drilling despite the accident at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. On the other hand, if he caves to populist pressure and announces no new drilling, he'll appear weak for flip flopping twice.

Keep in mind, there's over 5 thousand off shore oil rigs operating in the world right now. Thousands in the Gulf of Mexico alone. If *we* decide to stop drilling, the other countries in the area that are already drilling are just going to fill the void. So the drilling isn't going to stop just because we choose not to.

But if we could stop everyone from doing it, which we can't, what would the alternative be? Well, we can stop driving our cars and grow our own food. Yeah, that's not going to happen. We can continue to buy oil from the Middle East which means our money ends up in the hands of people that hate us. Or we can invest in nuclear power. We still need some fossil fuels to put in trucks to haul the food from the farms to the stores.

Some people think we can just build windmills and solar panels. Here's the problem with that. Both take a lot of energy to build. And the ratio of energy to create versus energy created, is not very good. It's a positive number, sure, but would be a massive undertaking. Windmills are also expensive to maintain. And since they cover a wide area, you need a small army of techs in gas powered jeeps driving around fixing them all the time. Still, it's a positive gain, so it's not a bad idea. It's just that the amount of wind power we would realistically create would end up being a drop in the bucket compared to what we need.

This brings us back to oil. There's a lot of misinformation floating around by different people spinning their propaganda for political gain. Why the hell is oil such a political issue? Why do people care so much? I've heard people say that we'll eventually run out of oil and if we haven't moved to solar / wind / nuclear by then, we'll end up in the dark ages. And yet, we find new reserves of oil all the time. There is a finite amount, sure, but we're not going to near the end of it for centuries. It's certainly not a bad idea to have a back up plan, but the obsession with hating oil is silly. This all goes back to some whacked out liberals who hate big business and want to break the back of capitalism. Same with the global warming hoax.

No blood for oil! Remember that? I was in high school when people were mad at GH Bush for going to war with Saddam after Iraq attacked our ally Kuwait. A few years before the invasion, Saddam was making news for using weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds. I remember reading about it. I used to cut class and go to the library and read news articles. Yeah, I was a weird kid. But I remember all the Liberals at the time mad about the human rights violations of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction and the US not doing anything about it. I saw a political cartoon--I don't know why I still remember it years later, but it had a picture of some arabs yelling out "Help!" and GH Bush shrugging, saying, "Sorry, I don't speak Kurdish."

So a couple years later, the Kuwait thing happens and we go to war. The Kurds, seeing us as liberators, rise up to help fight Saddam. But as soon as Kuwait is freed, we turn our backs on the Kurds, and leave. Saddam, weakened, but not defeated, vents his frustration on the Kurds for rising up, and we see one of the worst cases of genocide in my life time.

Fast forward a decade and this time it's GW Bush as president. The UN has since passed a resolution ordering Saddam to destroy all his weapons of mass destruction, and he claims he has. He stalls and plays games with UN weapons inspectors, not letting them verify it to be the case. Bush said he thinks Saddam still has his weapons and pointed to evidence that he was deliberately hiding them. I remember when this was happening too. I saw the photos on the news of the weapons taken with aerial photos and satellites. It made sense to me. I was right along with him saying Saddam should be stopped. GH Bush should have done it back when Saddam was using weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds. Now his son will finish the job.

Only, one problem. Saddam actually did destroy his weapons and was complying fully with the UN resolution. Huh? Why the hell was he hiding it then? Well, Saddam kept a sort of journal. And it turns out, he was scared of Iran--his enemy--finding out he didn't still have his weapons. After all, Iran has a more dangerous army, and the only thing that kept Iran from feeling like they could wipe out Saddam, was the fear of Saddam's weapons. Wow, the irony. So Saddam pretended to still have his weapons to scare Iran away from attacking, and yet that had the exact opposite affect on the US who did exactly what he feared Iran would do.

Of course, Saddam said at his trial, he complied completely with the UN resolution, and that Bush was the one that should be on trial. As much as this sounds like, "a simple misunderstanding," thousands of people died in this "oops." It's hard for me to defend W Bush for this, even though at the time, I was right on board with it. Saddam's death is a great thing for the world, and although Iraq has had a tough time of things during this period, they're better off now. Still, a lot of innocence people had to die. And was it our place to play God with which leaders live and which die? It's a hard question to answer even you believe the result was worth the loss.

As a side note, of course Liberals objected to the war in Iraq--including Obama. It is interesting that some Liberals were mad H Bush didn't go to war with Saddam after he used weapons of mass destruction. And ten years later, when W Bush goes in to finish the job, Liberals were mad. Come on guys. Which is it? Of course, Liberals are not some monolithic group that all think the same. But it's still sort of funny. Well, the war wasn't funny.

I was thinking about all this the other day because I recently saw another anti capitalism propaganda film. I've seen several of them. But it was another about how the US only goes to war over oil. This one guy on there even said Bush purposely lied as Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction in the first place. I couldn't help but laugh. Such blatantly wrong information for what looks like an otherwise big-ish budget "documentary."

It reminds me of people that finish watching a Michael Moore movie and think it's real. Just frightening. Of course propaganda is used by all sides of every issue. The times you spot it the most is when it's used by "the other side."

My counter to the no blood for oil thing, I'm not aware of too much oil in Afghanistan. But on the same token, when the Taliban violently took over major cities there a couple years before 9/11, no one seemed to care. I actually don't even remember seeing anything about it in the news at the time.

Oh, something else. And this might make people mad. But during Clinton's administration, he was using predator drones to attack Afghanistan--a country we were not at war with. These same people we were bombing, decided to put together the 9/11 plot. I really don't want to make people mad here, but it's not factually accurate to call 9/11 an unprovoked attack. They definitely took it up a notch, but the notion that they attacked us first isn't entirely true. The difference is we were trying to avoid civilian casualties. They sought to maximize them.

My beliefs are rad

2010-05-01T23:25:00.000-07:00

Obama gave a speech yesterday in which he insulted and denigrated Conservatives, and then asked for both sides to quit insulting and denigrating each other. Hypocrisy is nothing new in politics, nor is it something one side does any more than the other. But is this political spin, trying to reshape public opinion of conservatives into radicals, or does he genuinely believe his position is the mainstream and everyone else is the radical?

He said that he's concerned about the rhetoric of one side distrusting government or considering it inefficient or bad. I watched his speech in utter disbelief. There's a name for Republicans that trust government to solve our problems. That name is Democrat. His speech was about as stupid as me standing in front of a crowd and saying, "The problem with you Christians is you don't follow the teachings of the Buddha." How does someone as intelligent sounding as Obama seem to be so blinded by his own ideology that he not only cannot see the opposition side nor understand the justification of its existence?

He commented on a Tea Partier's sign that said something about keeping government away from medicare. Ok, so that is a little funny / ironic. That's sort of like asking to keep religion out of the Bible. But I'd imagine the person holding the sign is actually trying to say is that the government should not further alter Medicare from what it presently is and does. That probably doesn't fit on a cardboard sign on a stick as well, nor is it all that catchy in a protest chanty kinda way. Or, of course, maybe the person with the sign was just stupid. But in either case, the President using that instance to insult someone for a sound bite is childish.

I've heard a lot of liberals try and insult Republicans by saying things like, "If you're against Socialism, how come you use the Post Office, Social Security, Medicare, Public Transportation, Public Schools / State Colleges, Government funded roads..." etc. This is an argument based on pure demagoguery. It reminds me of the argument creationists use to say, "If we evolved out of monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

The reason why Republicans are not against those socialist programs I mentioned, is because we're Republicans. There's a word for people that are against ALL socialist programs. That word is Anarchists. Republicans are not Anarchists. We believe that government should be as small as possible, while only providing the bare bones services that benefit the country. Now, you might say that also describes Democrats. And it does, but where that line is of what's beneficial and what's wasteful is different for everyone.

It's also interesting to think about what political party we ascribe to is influenced by what the country currently is. For instance, I'm a Republican because I think the government is currently too big. But if the country were to radically move towards the right--passed Republicanism and into the realm of Anarchy, I would have to become a Democrat at that point and argue for why we at least need basic law enforcement and roads. And in such a bizarre world, I might be called a Socialist by all the Anarchists for suggesting such a thing. Of course, I will never be a socialist, but to an Anarchist who doesn't know just how far to the left I would go, I could very well seem like one.

But for the most part, I think Moderate and Conservative Democrats are ok and not all that different from Republicans. Of course, I'm most definitely NOT a social conservative, and agree very little with most conservatives on social issues. That's probably more because of my religious beliefs. Conservatives are overwhelmingly also deeply religious(I'm one of the very rare ones that are not). As a side note, fiscal conservatism and social conservatism are radically different things--and even seem to ideologically oppose each other. For the life of me, I can't understand why they tend to go together in most people. Like, "I want government to stay out of my life, but I'm ok with people using the government to force their religious beliefs on others--as long as it's the same religious beliefs I value," and "I want religion out of my life, but I think government should tax and oppress us however a group of politicians see fit," seem to describe most people. These are radical combinations in my mind, but yet seem to be one of the two categories that fit the bulk of Americans. Libertarians are one of the few groups out there that are in nether camp, wanting to keep both out of our lives. In some ways, I'm more a Libertarian that a Republican.

I understand that being an Atheist makes me a radical. Not that I'm crazy or anything. In fact, my "radical status," has as much to do with what I believe as it does with what percentage of people believe something else. If half the religious people in the world were to convert to Atheism, I would no longer be a religious radical, despite the fact that I personally have not changed.

My point here(yeah, I get off on tangents) is that I don't have a problem with Obama for being a political radical. My point is that he's either trying to get the mainstream to reject the other side, or he's completely unable to understand the other side.

I'm able to understand Liberalism. On the surface, it sounds like it's about helping people, working for a cleaner environment, and building a stronger world. Who the hell would be against that? I would argue that Conservatism shares this goal, something Liberals would laugh at. I just don't agree that giving entitlements to people encourages them to work more efficiently. I believe the opposite is true, and decades of soviet rule has proven as such. People need to be challenged. It's unfortunate that Liberals like to think they've got the "caring market" cornered and that conservatives must be heartless bigots just because we've figured out free handouts don't always motivate people.

I do agree with Obama that people who listen to Glenn Beck should spend sometime reading the Huffington Post and vice verse. I've actually read a few articles there I agreed with. Most of the Huff Post is childish Republican bashing. Much of what Rush Limbaugh says is childish Dem bashing. But people really should at least listen to the extreme and middle views every now and then. Even if you don't agree with the other side, you can not understand what your position is unless you truly understand what your position is not.

I think this works for religion as well. If you don't understand the fundamentals on hinduism, buddhism, or islam, then you are not really a christian. Can you imagine the first time you ever fell inlove and thinking this was the person you'd spend the rest of your life with. Everything about her just felt right. Then after you break up, you think, "What the hell was wrong with me? She was horrible to me! Why did I put up with that for so long?" I've been there too many times. Sad to think that most religious people will only know and accept the first religion they're exposed to, think it's "the one" and never leave it no matter how silly or illogical it is. Bah, anyways.

Speaking of agreeing with Obama on a completely different topic, playing hardball with Israel might just pay off. If he can get Israel to stop construction in East Jerusalem, and hand it over to the Palestinians, then I think he'll be the first American since Dr. Martin Luther King, jr to genuinely deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm really hoping he succeeds there. I don't know if he's playing Iran the right way at all though. I guess we'll see.

Migrating Headache

2010-04-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

It's funny how online news pieces often have a section after where people can leave comments. This is so you can read about how dumb people are. Most of the comments are frightening. Originally, our founder fathers only allowed rich, educated, land owners to vote. I don't think we should return to that, but it does make you wonder if they were on to something.

I find it amusing how creative people try and get with their name calling in these comments. Names like "Libtards," "Repubithugs"--that one's kind of a stretch, "Democraps / dummycrats," and of course the "Tea Baggers." Although people throw around that last one so often, I don't think most people realize it's an offensive term.

Being a Republican living in California, I'm used to the dumbest people on the planet trying to pick political fights with me. I sometimes wonder if most people even understand the most basic principles of politics in this country. Case in point, the stupid "Oh yeah, well the Republicans ruined the economy!" argument. I'm a Republican. Did I ruin the economy? Political parties are not sports teams. The only thing that makes someone a Republican is because they say they are. Yeah, Bush wasn't exactly the greatest political mind of our times, and if I were to name Republicans I think personify the party, he wouldn't be on my list. But on the same token, Ted Kennedy murdered a woman. What if I said, "You can't trust Liberals. They kill people." Does that make any sense? That's just as stupid of an argument. Btw, the Republicans are not "the ones" that ruined the economy, though many of them had a hand in it(and have since been voted out).

The individual does not define the political outlook they claim to ascribe to. If George Bush wasted money, it's not because he was a Republican. It was because he was a poor leader. If a bunch of Republicans in Kansas vote to ban the teaching of evolution in the classroom, it's not because they're Republicans. It's because they're a bunch of idiots. There is absolutely nothing in the political ideology of Republicanism that dictates any thing that threatens the credibility of a particular religion should be banned. In fact, this position runs contrary to the Republican idea that government should stay out of our lives(including what our schools can teach our kids).

The Tea Party movement seems to be vastly misunderstood by most people--including the media. Tea Partiers are conservatives who are angry at Republicans who've turned their backs on conservative principles. They're also angry at Democrats who've caved to the Liberals in their party and stopped fighting for what they believed to be responsible governance. Of course, there's also people in the Tea Party movement that are just idiots and are along for the ride, but I think they're a small minority.

Obama recently said that the Tea Partiers should thank him. After all, if they care about taxes, he's lowered them for most people. The original Boston Tea Party was a protest on taxation without representation. But the modern day movement has morphed considerably since then into a protest against big government(sort of the opposite cause). Obama isn't stupid. This was a calculated statement--one he knows is highly misleading. Because the Tea Party has no leaders and can't fight back, many Liberals who see them as a threat would like to marginalize them and mischaracterize them into being a bunch of angry white people mad at a non issue. But while Tea Partiers are mad at Republicans and Democrats that haven't been representing their conservative wishes, they're even more mad at government spending. And although taxes haven't changed much, they're going to explode soon. Obama is talking about a national sales tax--something that has decimated the economy in Europe. In Obama's first year, he will have spent more than Bush did in his first term. At this rate, before Obama's first 18 months, he will have outspent Bush's entire 8 years. And don't forget, yeah Bush spent a lot of money fighting this war in Afghanistan. Obama voted to go to war there. This is as much Obama's unfunded war as it is Bush's. Everything Bush did wrong, Obama is doing several times over.

I've seen a few dumb people mention that Obama's health care plan isn't much different from Mit Romney's or Richard Nixon's, therefore, what are the Republicans so mad about? First off, "If Nixon thought it was a good idea," is probably not a very strong argument. After all, Nixon felt it was ok to bomb Cambodia--a country we were not at war with--and lie about to the UN when the Cambodian government complained. Second, bad ideas are bad ideas no matter which party the proposer is from. Not to mention, Federal mandates are contrary to Republican ideology. Having those ideas come from people calling themselves "republicans" doesn't change that. Bad ideas are bad ideas.

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Over 40 of the biggest employers in the country have announced to their share holders(as required by law) they might start dropping health insurance for their employees. The bill that was supposed to lower premiums have instead caused them to rise--well duh, force insurance companies to take on high risk patients(pre-existing conditions) and they have to charge more to cover a higher risk of loss. And employers have done the math and determined that it's cheaper to pay the fines than it is to provide insurance. So the bill that was supposed to cover more people, might actually translate into less people covered. Obama's people are now admitting that the bill will not lower the deficit, but will actually increase it. So on all three fronts of controlling government costs, lowering premiums, and insuring more Americans, this bill might just make things worse for all three. The health care bill is Obama's only "accomplishment" so far. In a way I'm happy. 8 years of people bashing me because I voted for Bush, now it's the Democrats' turn. Not so easy, is it?

I guess the other big thing in the news is the immigration thing. When I first heard about Arizona passing a law allowing cops to stop anyone they felt like who looks like they might be an illegal alien, I wasn't happy about it. But then I did some more research on it. Turns out if a police officer stops you without probable cause, it's still illegal under this bill. So as Obama incorrectly said, police can't harass you as you go around with your kids to buy ice cream. The only thing the bill does is make it against the law to be here illegally. Huh? That wasn't already illegal? Apparently not. The law is now that police may not check to see if someone is an illegal alien until after they've committed another crime. Now with this new law, being here illegally is a crime in and of itself, and law enforcement can now deport you based solely on the fact that you're here illegally--something they can't do now. Now, if a cop pulls you over for driving while Mexican, you can still sue the state of Arizona for harassment and violation of your civil rights(racial profiling). This new law doesn't change that. I'm sure cops *are* pulling people due to racial profiling now, just because some cops are racist jerks. This law will not increase or decrease that. But you can bet the publicity will cause cops to be a lot more careful about it once the law goes into effect. It will still probably happen though, and will no doubt make the news when it does.

Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco, has declared(out of ignorance) his city will be boycotting Arizona businesses. So some conservative states / cities have been talking about doing the same to SF. I'm all for civil rights. I think Cesar Chavez was an American hero for standing up for the fair treatment of migrant farm workers. But I'll bet you right now that Mayor Newsom's hasn't even read the bill. I haven't either. And my conclusion about it might be wrong. But then, I'm not a mayor putting my own ego above what's best for the people I represent.

I respect Newsom's fight for gay marriage equality in California. I've long been a supporter of civil rights on all fronts, but either the Liberals making a stink about this are alarmists or they're just trying to score cred with their Liberal voter base. Ignorance or posturing?

Still writing

2010-04-25T00:29:00.000-07:00

So writing's been going slow. The reason, I think, is I've been taking the unreasonably hard route. This is a common theme for me. I do everything the hard way. It's usually because I need to challenge myself. This is something I do with school projects as well. I tackle really hard problems or issues that sometimes goes over the heads of my professors who give me a B, then someone who does a brain numbingly easy project skates by with an A just because they colored within the lines.

I'm pretty excited about this project. I've been working on it for a really long time now... since 1998. I took a business calculus class then, and while bored out of my mind, I began sketching out notes for this universe. A good vs evil story is too over done. Also, dragons and elves in fantasy is about as fresh and original as a vampire story. Not saying that a story needs to be original to be good. Just saying that I don't like coloring within the lines.

The other thing I really like is hard fantasy. This is a really rare and unusual combination. Some might even say an oxymoron. Basically, it means you still have fantasy elements: be it unicorns, dragons, vampires, or magic, but you give a scientific explanation for it. It's not that fantasy writers are incapable of doing so. It's that few feel the need to do so. Really, what weirdo watched Lord of the Rings and said, "Hold on a second, there's no such things as hobbits," and walked out of the theater? No one cares if it makes sense. The story and the characters is what sells it. But I like hard fantasy anyways. Here's why.

I think giving the reader a feeling like the world you create has more impact if it's plausible. I used to play dungeons and dragons a lot as a kid. I know. You're shocked. But when I was the dungeon master, if I played strictly by the rules, my players would use those rules as a standardized tool kit to solve mysteries in the world. In other words, let's say there's a murder mystery. The victim was killed by lightning, indoors. That means it's not a druid(they can only cast lightning outside). It's not a cleric--they don't cast lightning at all. It's no other spell caster, but a magic user. The Lightning Bolt spell is from the school of Evocation. A Necromancer specialist doesn't have access to Evocation. So the players can use these clues to narrow down their suspects and unravel the mystery. Maybe, if they're really good and one of them knows an awful lot about magic, they can judge the power of the spell by examining clues and find out if the killer is a lackey or something more dangerous.

Now other DMs might think, "The rules are too restricting. They hamper my creativity." And I watch these DMs work, and when they give tasks to their players to solve, the players try a few things then give up. Why do they give up? Because since the DM doesn't play by the rules, they cannot use the rules as a toolkit to narrow down leads, so in a sense, they're wasting their time even trying. The world now has no structure and no meaning. It would be like an episode of CSI where DNA evidence, finger prints, etc, are never completely reliable. After a while, you'd just give up.

So, I've tried to make a world that's physically plausible. The "planet" itself is a flat world where the sun rises and sets in the same place. Ok, so that's a challenge. A number of things wrong here. If the earth was flat, gravity would cause us to all slide towards the middle, just as our round earth pulls us to the center now. But a flat planet is plausible if the people live on one side, and on the other, a distance away, is an object of incredible mass. The flat planet essentially becomes a shelf keeping us from falling into the massive object on the otherside. But what keeps the shelf from falling?

What keeps the earth from colliding into the sun? After all, the sun does pull us towards it. What pulls us away? You've probably heard about centrifugal force. It's that thing that keeps water in a bucket, even when you spin it upside down. So at the same time the earth spins around the sun, causing the earth to want to fly off into outer space, the sun pulls the earth towards it due to gravity. The two forces exactly cancel each other out. Now before you think, "See? Only God could have reached such an amazing balancing act!" Keep in mind, this is the same thing humans have figured out how to do to keep satellites up in the sky by orbiting around the earth. If a satellite didn't spin around the earth, it would instantly start plummeting towards us. Sometimes satellites do come crashing down. But the earth took billions of years to work out its balancing act. No doubt other planets weren't so lucky and crashed into our sun long before life started here. But I digress.

The sun rising and setting in the same place in my world is a hard system to explain, but I'm happy with how I have it. It has to do with the creation of the planet and the final mystery--and that, I'm keeping under wraps for now.

Ok, but on to what's been causing me the issue. I cut out 3 other main characters and just focused on one. She has a lot of crap to deal with, and she transforms throughout. It's a very emotional journey for her. I'm happy with her and the issues she faces. But I picked a really hard narration style to do this story in--Third Person Objective. It means the narrator is an objective reporter that only mentions what can be observed. No "In the character's heads" kinda stuff. So if a character is sad or angry, instead of saying so, I describe what the expressions look like and assume the reader knows those signs. It's basically like script writing. It works ok 80% of the time and allows the reader to be a more active participant, coloring in the story with their own interpretations along the way. Unfortunately, it's not a story open to a wide variety of interpretation, so readers keep coming up with weird conclusions that wreck the enjoyment of the story. I feel like I'm wasting too much time trying to micro manage details to shape reader perceptions of scenes.

This writer's group I'm in, I'm pretty happy with them, but they're just not feeling the impact from the story like I want them to. So I'm going to play around with it, and write with the exact opposite narration style--First Person Stream of Consciousness. Hell, I'm even putting it in present tense. It's similar to how people write blog style only for events happening in real time. In this blog, I'm assuming that I'm writing conversationally to another person. In this case, no one's actually reading this blog, but it does help me if I pretend like people are. Keeps me on my toes and in practice giving out as much information as possible with the least amount of words.

The narrator in the story is a little different. She's not assuming she's talking to another person, but rather trying to sort things out in her own mind for herself. Also, events interrupt her thoughts. I like this because Stream of Consciousness writing can fall into a trap of losing sense of time. Time is really important in fiction. I'll give you an example of writing that loses time:

"The detective scanned over the crime scene, her trained eyes soaking up every detail. Suddenly, she noticed something the other investigator missed. Is that a tiny spot of blood on the hallway? Would it match the killer's or the victim's? Carefully, she crept towards the spot and took a sample. Not a match to either. She shook her head at the lab results. An accomplice or an unknown, second victim?"

Wait, what the hell? What lab results? Is she still at the crime scene or is this several days later after a lab did a DNA test? You, as the reader, have no idea. What it is, is bad writing. If the problem instead is a lose sense of rhythm, then that can be equally jarring. Ok, more bad writing:

"The Space Commander looked over the palate of carbonite transductors in Storage Room 4. How many Nebulons could have been saved had only his crew been able to reach Orion IV and deliver these sooner?

It took three weeks for the Star Gazer to reach the jump point. Orion IV was now on screen. The Commander paced in front of his command chair. He rose his hand ready to give the order to plot course when the tactical office spoke. Nerubians. Not now!"

Ok, first off, he was in one room, then three weeks went by, I think, now he's on the bridge. I say "I think" because I don't know if the author's saying in the past it took three weeks and they're there now, or if he looked at the transwhattawhats and then it took three weeks. But even if we take this as sequential order, it's like the writer is yanking the reader through time. The pace is unpredictable and causes the reader to slow down and try and figure out what's going on. Any time the reader has to stop and go, "Ok, what's going on now?" it means reading your piece has become work.

Time cannot always flow at the same speed in writing. Characters sleep and do other uninteresting things that do not and should not be explained or detailed in real time all the time. But rhythm should still be predictable. What I like to do is pick real time scenes and use scene breaks to separate them.

Speaking of that, I should get back to it. Trying this new narration style, I should be able to crank through this faster and have a book with the emotional impact I was shooting for.

Dems: 1, Americans: 0

2010-03-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

Well, the health care issue took a turn for the worst. Some people had thought that Obama would get how unpopular federal mandates are and reject this. I knew better, and I've posted as much. Obama is so convinced that Socialism is the way to go, that he thinks once Americans experience it, they will like it as much as he does. I don't fault him for this. I feel that conservativism is so good, most people will like it if they experienced it. Unfortunately, we keep getting Republicans that are not conservatives.

In terms of the game of politics, this was a good move for Obama. It gives him the ability to say he's actually accomplished something. And it gives him momentum. Of course, the health care bill isn't the end of the changes. It's going to get more and more radical as time goes on. They'll be tweeking it more until the Dems get voted out. What's somewhat unfortunate is that many of the Dems that voted for it, don't actually like it. They made a political gamble. That's pretty sad to think about it. I mean, this should be about what's best for the American people. But that's been lost. It's a game.

The Republicans are in a difficult bind here too. Though the overall bill is unpopular, many parts of it are well liked by most Americans, including Republicans. After all, the Republican health bill and Obama's did have some of the same goals. It reminds me of what happened during the Great Depression. FDR, who was also a Socialist, massively expanded government. The Reps ran against him, but supported many of the same ideas FDR was using to get us out of the Depression. The Reps had their hands tied. The "guy that got us into this mess," was Hoover. Hoover was a Republican who was not a Conservative. Hoover cut taxes, but didn't cut spending. In fact, Hoover greatly increased spending--Hoover Dam, for example. So despite actual real conservatives running against FDR, voters were still mad at Hoover (seeing all Republicans as all the same). And of course, FDR managed to stay in power, getting re-elected 4 times.

Fast forward to today, Bush cut taxes but didn't cut spending. Now people are mad at the Republicans and a socialist was able to get in the white house. Real conservatives are coming forward to oppose him. Will Newt Gengrich, Mike Huckabee, or Mit Romney be able to beat him in 2012? Or will we see more socialism until we're on the brink of collapse?

It's interesting that Dems often get unfairly labeled as "Tax and Spend Liberals," when there's a few republican presidents who've been spenders too like Hoover and Bush. The Rep and Dem labels, perhaps, aren't as important. Maybe we should be lumping people by conservative or liberal.

Now, I've been a Republican all my life. But if I saw a Conservative Democrat like JFK on the ballot against a Progressive Republican like Hoover... yeah, I think I'd have to go with the Conservative in that case.

Anyway, back to the health care thing. So Obama and the Dems gave the Congressional Budget Office a bunch of bad numbers and highly hypothetical cases and asked them to score it to see what the healthcare bill would cost. The CBO wasn't given the whole bill. That's too much to read. They were given "what the bill will do," crib notes. The Dems didn't like the answer, so they kept going back--not changing the bill each time, but changing the crib notes. Finally, they got an answer and now claim the bill will actually lower the national debt. Yeah. No one with a brain actually believes this. I highly doubt even Obama believes this claim. The CBO says the bill will cost almost a trillion dollars, but will save slightly more than it costs. Keep in mind, the Dems went to the CBO years back to get Medicare passed. The CBO scored what the bill would cost years later. The real numbers of what it really cost ended up being 13 times what the projected costs were.

Now, we spend 43 cents of every dollar paying off the national debt. Imagine it the Dems projections for the Healthcare bill is just as off from reality as it was for the Medicare bill. So instead of a trillion, the bill costs 13 times that. That would double our national debt.

So instead of paying 43% of tax dollars just paying off the debt, we'd be spending 86%. That would absolutely bankrupt this country. Now, of course even the Libs wouldn't want that to happen. So if they stayed in power, they'd have to do what Liberals always do when their grand utopia ideas end up not working in the real world--massively raise taxes, massively cut services, or commit genocide(as the most infamous of Communist / Fascist leaders have done).

Obviously, I don't think we're going to be committing genocide in this country(again). So where does that leave us? Let's look at a Conservative approach instead. Cut spending by a lot. Before FDR, federal taxes were around 5%. Now they're around 35%. 7 times more taxes, government spending has gone up more than 7 times. Here's what I think. Massively cut government spending by privatizing schools, medicare, and social security. Eliminate the Post Office too.

Elementary schools get paid money based on performance and attendance. Parents can choose which schools to send their kids to(it's free to them), so those schools had better make those parents happy if they want government money. Schools might even advertise on tv to attract more numbers. Imagine that. Opening up a well run school would even be profitable by the educators who were really good at it. Keep in mind, good neighborhood or bad wouldn't matter. The money comes from the government--not the community. This is important because a lot of intelligent, talented kids grow up in bad neighborhoods with little to no opportunity to escape poverty. This is why African Americans are disproportionately represented in sports, dance, and music. Not because they're not smart enough to be physicists and doctors--but because they either don't have the opportunity, or have lost hope to try, so they feel basketball and rapping is their only option.

Statistics now say that most newborns in this country are not white. This means if half our population will grow up feeling discriminated against, we're throwing away half our leaders, scientists, teachers, innovators, etc. Think of what well funded schools in poor neighborhoods could do for this country 20 years from now.

With a richer, better educated nation, we wouldn't need socialized medicine because more Americans would be able to afford it on their own.

Summit, spelled S. E. T. U. P.

2010-02-26T18:03:00.000-08:00

So I watched the seven hour long, televised Health Care Summit yesterday. I actually thought it was fairly interesting. Although I agree with Republicans(duh, I am one) there, I thought the Dems did a better job at framing their vision and scoring political points.

The health care bill is vastly unpopular, despite the fact that most Americans want reform and really like some elements in the bills being discussed. Democrat voters generally highly favor the bill and are deeply irritated at Democrats in office unable to use their majority to make it happen. So the Dems needed to accomplish a few things at this summit. They needed to paint Republicans as obstructionists while building a case for why their bill was needed.

Republicans, on the other hand, needed to portray themselves as defenders of the people's will in fighting against an unpopular bill, while suggesting a different approach that will bring down costs and not raise taxes.

Again, I think the Dems did a better job. I still don't agree with them, but they were really well prepared and the Republicans just didn't shine. I'll give you an example. The philosophical differences between the two approaches are massive. Obama's plan raises taxes, forces people to buy insurance or they go to jail, and makes no clear promises to keep rates from increasing. Not to mention, the Government Option, which might lower consumer costs, could be massively expensive if manages by the inefficiencies of government.

Republicans don't want to force people to buy anything. They aren't raising taxes. And would clearly cause rates to go down. The catch; The Republican plan isn't going to do much to provide insurance for more people, other than to bring down costs. And because of this, Dems reject it. I could argue that the bad economy is the cause for why many Americans *choose* not to have health care. right now they're choosing stuff like food and car payments over insurance. But fix the economy and many of them will get coverage again.

Now, with such huge differences, you might find it weird that the Dems kept saying how close both sides were to agreeing. This is a ploy. It's a "We've made so many compromises to Republicans. We're just an inch apart. All they have to do is budge just a little bit, and pure magic will fall from the skies and everyone gets free ice cream and ponies," gimmick, and Republicans just didn't stand against that tactic. They just let the Dems get away with doing it over and over.

Obama even slipped in a comment that hinted at, "I guess you Republicans just don't care about all the people that die each year because they can't get coverage." Again, I was pretty disappointed the Dems would just wail on Republicans like that, and Reps wouldn't stand up for themselves. If I was there, I'd point out that it's true Americans might like certain elements of the Dem's plan and would like to see everyone get coverage. Then they are presented with how much it's all going to cost, then they're not in favor. After all, a major contributing factor to people not having insurance is because they can't afford it--not because it's too expensive, but because the economy has left less money in people's pockets, and has forced insurance companies to raise premiums to account for less costumers. The *last* thing Obama should be doing is passing a health care bill that hurts the economy. Let's not forget too, the benefits on the Dem's plan don't kick in for a few years, though the taxes start immediately.

Obama made one really good point against the Republican's plans, one they didn't have a counter for. If insurance companies are allowed to sell across state lines, they will relocate to the state that has the least restrictions on them, and they be able to get away with more things. Of course, nothing is stopping them from doing this now--a point no Republican challenged him on.

But in all, I would have rather Obama been more objective as a moderator. Of course, then he ran the risk of looking weak. He's already suffered politically with the belief that he let Congress do all the heavy lifting, crafting the bill in the first place, so to let his colleagues make his arguments for him, might have made him look bad. Obama needs to make his base happy. Republicans and Conservatives aren't going to like him no matter what he does. That, I think, is unfortunate. Not that I think Obama should be liked(in terms of his politics). But it's a sad reality that no president will ever be able to unite the country. We will always be polarized.

I've been thinking a lot lately of what the US would be like if you did split the country in half. Let's say we make all the left wingers move to the left half and the right, to the right. That means I have to move from California to somewhere else. Now, let's say that people don't have to stay on their side after the move, but that if people do move, they can't run for elections--thus, the leadership on each side remains.

Several things would change. Though some things, like Social Security, that might not have come about by Conservatives without Liberals creating it, will probably persist in Conservative Land. But I would bet that rulings like Roe v Wade will be over turned. In Conservative Land, Creationism will be allowed to be taught in some schools--something I would be pretty unhappy about, but that's for another rant. The big war would be between Progressive Republicans and Conservatives, but without Dems to support them, the Progressives would fail to win elections. Welcome Citizen McCain--politician no more. Conservative Land would have low taxes. Public schools would be phased out for charter schools and private run schools. Parents would get vouchers, thus forcing schools to compete for federal money. Competition would drive up efficiency. The poor would get poorer because they would get left behind without government hand outs. The rich would get richer because they'd have less taxes and restrictions. The middle class still make up most the voters, so politicians would have to be able to keep them happy, so government benefits wouldn't go away for them.

Meanwhile in Liberal Land, the country moves towards Socialized Medicine. Everyone is covered. Welfare is expanded. The poor and hungry are taken care of. Taxes sky rocket, especially for the rich, and executive salaries are capped. (sounds crazy, but Obama has been pushing for that--if you don't know that, you're not paying attention to the news.) Banks are already partially owned by the Government--that increases. GM Autos isn't the only large manufacturing company that gets bought out by the government when it fails. The Gov buys out more companies as they fail. Liberal Land has now passed every single definition of the word "Socialism"--something the US is already close to now.

Ok, what's inevitable? Well, the rich people in Liberal Land look at how awesome life is like for rich people in Conservative Land so they move there. Poor people in Conservative Land are jealous of how well poor people in Liberal Land have it, so they move. Now you have the rich and educated moving to Conservative Land, and the poor moving to Liberal Land.

Liberals, using rich tax payers as ATMs, are having a harder time doing that. This is compounded by the huge migration of the poor and uneducated that need more benefits. The economy is booming in Conservative Land, but Liberal Land is a different story. They are forced to do one of the things that every Liberal, big government has had to do through history. Russia built a wall to keep people in and committed genocide against the poor. Nazi Germany committed genocide. Communist China committed genocide at first, and slowly moved to Capitalism / Conservativism. Socialist South American countries commit genocide and wallow in poverty anyways. You get the picture.

Pure Capitalist countries haven't always fared well either. Someone might ask why Conservative Land doesn't fall back to Feudalism. We've seen many cases of countries with massive divides between rich and poor due to Conservative. This is true, but all of those situations lacked democracy. Democracy is the key.

In either case, we can see that my hypothesis isn't so far off. I live in California which is swimming in Liberalism. Despite having massive advantages over other states in terms of resources--farmland, ample port access, and huge population of skilled workers, we lag behind many other states. Oppressive taxes force businesses to often look elsewhere. Obsessions with making teachers unions happy and promising teachers job security without any incentive to be good at teaching or anything, coupled with massive salaries to super intendants and other school executives, which as far as I can see, don't actually do anything, makes California's school system one of the most expensive per student of any system in the world, and yet is dead last in terms of results among industrialized nations. Y'all know that? We're dead last. Most expensive. Worst results. Now you can see why Liberals piss me off so much.

Remember that special election Gov Schwarzenegger held to try and cut out all the crap we waste our money on? All the unions that get rich off tax payers blanketed the air with negative campaign adds and all the stuff that would have fixed the mess we're in got defeated. So now we're stuck with one of the worst economies California has ever seen. We're in a lot worse shape than the rest of the country.

Well, if I really had my way, we'd ship all the Liberals off to Europe where they can have all the socialism they want. The US is the country we are now because of Conservatism.

Recovery or Calm Before the Storm?

2010-01-30T23:58:00.000-08:00

Some economists are now predicting a double dip recession. That means, a brief period of relief like we're starting to experience now, then a second, worse recession soon after. Why is this even happening in the first place? Well, like most things in macro economics, it's complicated.

Many blame Bush. And why not? The recession started around mid 2007. He was President at the time. Clearly, anything that goes wrong is the fault of who ever is president at the time. So what is it that Bush did that caused it? If you ask people, you'll either get a "i dunno" or people will tell you that Bush spent tons of money fighting two wars unpaid for and cut taxes across the board(that means for everyone poor to rich). So, he essentially hired tons more soldiers and pumped a lot of money into bomb, gun, and tank manufacturing companies increasing jobs then he cut taxes for all Americans so people had more money in their wallets. Well, I can certainly see how that results in deficit spending and increases the national debt(which is bad for the government). But that should actually HELP the economy, not hurt it. So how on Earth could that have possibly created the recession?

Ok, then how about the fact that the greedy wall street bankers... um... did something and got rich in some way I don't understand and Bush just let them do it? Huh? How about that?! See, what actually allowed banks to give so many loans to people that couldn't otherwise pay them bank was the lifting of restrictions that occurred during the Clinton administration. Of course, it's a stretch trying to blame Clinton for something that happened about a decade later. But that's the thing with macro economics, it's not just one thing that causes a problem. It's a chain of things.

I recently watched a couple of interviews from Ben Bernanke. In 2006, after recently replacing Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, he predicted that 2008 would see huge growth in the economy. Keep in mind, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, this is the top and most respected economist in the world. Even if Bush was a rocket scientist, how could he possibly doubt what Bernanke was saying? Keep in mind also that the Democrats had taken over control of Congress by 2006 and everyone was predicting growth in the housing market.

Many Democrats, meaning well, wanted to see poor people that couldn't otherwise afford a house, be able to buy one now before homes increased in value. Banks were being subsidized(that means our government gives them tax payer dollars to do something) to give loans to people that couldn't otherwise pay. This was a crazy period of time. I knew a couple people that were buying multiple houses--people that wouldn't otherwise be able to buy one, now had several. Some banks made loans for no money down. That means literally homeless people could get loans they'd never be able to pay back. Banks didn't care. The government was giving out "free money" to make it happen. How can you argue with that?

Also remember, Congress does not need Presidential approval to sign off on the federal budget. In fact, if Bush wanted to stop the Democrats in Congress from doing whatever they wanted with the budget, he can't. Restrictions on banks had been lifted for a decade now under a Democrat president, and now Democrats in Congress were bankrolling loans to people that couldn't pay them back.

So what went wrong? The buying frenzy ended and houses plummeted in value. Instead of increasing, homes were now worth less than the money people paid for them. These same people that put no money down in the first place, had nothing to lose for walking away. That meant banks got stuck with the balance, owing a lot of money for homes that were no longer worth what they cost.

In short, banks lost their butts and went into survival mode. That means, they stopped loaning to anyone else, and just tried to hang on. When the banks stopped loaning, existing businesses could no longer expand and new businesses could no longer get the capital to start up. Meanwhile, the natural attrition of existing businesses collapsed meaning more lay offs with no new jobs for people to move to. This started driving up unemployment and thus, here we are now.

It's interesting how the recession has been blamed on Bush when, if you have even the slightest idea about what's going on, simply isn't entirely true. It's also interesting that Obama talks about how he didn't create this mess we're in. But he, and his Democrat colleagues controlled Congress at the time and they were the ones subsidizing banks to give out loans to people that couldn't afford them which created this mess. I can try and make the argument that Obama is actually more to blame for the recession than Bush was. Well, the Senate is half of Congress and Obama was just one of 100 senators, so that only made him 0.5% responsible for what Congress did. Heh, ok, so it's a really small percent, but still...

But who really knows? As I said, the truth is usually a lot more complicated. Not to mention, I'm obviously not able to go through all the bills and budget sheets that Congress votes on(some of which isn't always public), so I have to rely on what journalists say--and I've made a recent blog about how biased they are. I'm well aware that journalists push their agendas and cherry pick facts to make their stories more interesting even if it means object (boring) truth suffers. I highly doubt the issue is as simple as "The Democrats did it! Get 'em!" as I've made it sound. All I'm trying to say is that idiots who've barely done any research on anything need to stop going around like they have a clue. And all you damn Democrats in California, stop canceling out my votes! Heh.

Oh yeah, and Ben Bernanke, the top economist in the country that was so horribly wrong about predicting growth in 2008... Obama just appointed him for a second, four year term. It's very possible that Bernanke wasn't wrong. Rather all things considered, 2008 would have been prosperous only he didn't predict Congress(the Democrats) messing around with the banking system and causing the crash. I recently read that Obama's bail out of the banks, although eased the economic pain in the short run, might lead to the cycle to repeat itself in the near future. I mean, after all, the Democrats are still bailing out the banks and subsidizing them to make loans again. The banks know no matter how reckless they remain, Obama will still bail them out. This leads to another economic principle known as Tragedy of the Commons.

Normally ToC means a group of companies that share a common resource. Let's say timber logging companies that cut trees from the same forest. Take away all restrictions, and the faster a company cuts down the trees, the more trees they will get before their competitors get them. Now, if it was just one logging company, they'd be able to conserve the trees. But since it's many companies, going slow is economic suicide.

Now not all banks gave out loans recklessly. Many stayed responsible, but in this climate, being responsible is economic suicide. After all, if Bank A gives out loans to everyone with little restrictions, why would you go to responsible Bank B? Why would Bank A be responsible if they know Obama will just bail them out? Can responsible Bank B compete against banks like Bank A that can be as reckless as they want? Keep in mind, Obama isn't bailing out all the banks, just the big ones that gave loans recklessly are being "rewarded" with bail outs. Isn't that some messed up backwards crap?

It's like, we're never going to get out of this recession until the Democrats learn to leave Capitalism the hell alone and let it work on it's own, or we get Republicans in Congress again. I really don't care which party has the White House(that doesn't seem to matter that much), just get the damn Democrats out of Congress before we become a third world country.

More polly rants

2010-01-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

I often talk to people a lot about politics. One of my favorite topics is to ask people what their party stands for. I find it very interesting to note that despite the person claiming to be a democrat or a republican, they will often give me the same answers. For example, they will say their party is the one of prosperity and responsibility. They care about helping people... for getting America back to work. I ask them about the opposite party, and they'll often say the "other guys" hate America and hate the Constitution. The other guys are often racists as well, if not just plain evil.

I met two ladies at some convention I went to for Sci Fi writers held in the bay area and was talking to them about this phenomenon. Any time you're in the bay area or any other highly Liberal concentrated area, you're probably better off staying away from politics but I brought up the subject anyways. They were both shocked that any Republican could possibly consider theirs the party that cares about helping people. I'm equally shocked that people seem to be so oblivious to reality that this is a hard concept for people. Had it not been for the Republicans in congress, Lyndon Johnson never would have gotten his two Civil Rights Acts passed. Despite Liberals being convinced that Republicans are all racists, it was Democrats that were split on Civil Rights, and Republicans that overwhelmingly supported it. In fact, Lyndon Johnson had to break with his own party and side with the Republicans, which ultimately cost Johnson the support of his Democrat base, forcing him to be unable to run for re-election. Ironically, many of those southern Dixiecrats that supported segregation and opposed civil rights ended up changing parties and becoming Republicans, which is why Republicans now control the south. This is also why the Republican party is a mix of progressives like John McCain and southern conservatives like Strom Thurman. Though no where near as diverse as the Democrat party.

This gets more confusing as you look at JFK. Kennedy famously said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." He also said, "No nation in the history of the world has ever taxed its way into prosperity." These are defiantely not things Democrats say. These words to a Liberal are like garlic to a vampire. I was talking about this with my dad tonight. Kennedy was clearly a Conservative, as anyone would agree. But I would even argue further that he would probably fit in more the definition of a Republican than a Democrat.

Ok, so what's the difference? Simply put, Republicans want less government. Democrats want more. Easy enough, right? Ok, so what's a Conservative vs a Liberal? This gets a little more tricky, mostly because different people have different definitions. Not only that, but there are a lot of radically different ideologies that all share the same names. Let's look at the term "Liberal."

Obama is a Liberal. I posted a youtube video a couple posts ago linking that speech from 2003 where Obama says he supports Socialized Medicine and says something like, "You can't tell me that the United States, as rich as we are, can't afford to provide health care for everyone." In other videos, he and his allies, have admitted on camera that the public option is just a ruse to destroy privately run health care insurance and force people into buying healthcare insurance from the government. Realizing this isn't popular with "Commie hating Americans," Obama has dishonestly back tracked trying to say that if people really think the government is so terrible at running things, they can't also believe that the government can be a threat to private insurance companies by competing against them.

As a side note, this is a ridiculous argument. Let's assume Little Suzy has a lemonade stand and she sells lemonade for 10 cents. Now I put up a stand right next to her and sell mine for negative $5 dollars. That's right, I paid people $5 dollars to drink my lemonade instead of Suzy's. I put Suzy out of business. How can I afford to do that? Easy, I'm using an "unlimited supply" of tax payer dollars. I don't have to be efficient. The Post Office isn't efficient. It loses money, and yet it also doesn't compete well with private industry--making it the worst of both worlds. The Public Option would either be a massive waste of tax payer dollars when private businesses can do it more effectively, or it would be a massive waste of tax payer dollars AND take away our freedom to choose plans, aka the worst of both worlds. Unfortunately for Obama, voters are figuring this out. The election of Scott Brown, whether Obama likes it or not, according to surveys, hinged mostly on the fact that voters felt like Obama had been dishonest about the healthcare issue and were tricking people. They are right. From Obama's speeches since then, it doesn't seem like he gets this.

Which is sort of strange because all the rest of what Obama had been saying has been pretty consistent. His supporters are mad because he sent additional troops to Afghanistan. Well, Obama has been pretty upfront and honest about this. He supported it when he was a Senator. He said he would during the campaign. He said he would after getting in office. And he eventually did.

He also said he would talk to our enemies and try and make friends with them. He hasn't always been successful, but he's certainly done a lot of work in that area. I'm one Republican that was very happy with his famous speech in Cairo. I really liked the things he said. I'm also really happy that he's chosen to stress the US is not at war with Islam and will never be. He refers to the terrorists as people that twist Islam into something it's not. That's great too.

As a side note, this rarely gets mentioned, but in the treaty of Tripoli--the first war the US ever had outside our borders, we wrote that the United States was not a Christian nation, and thus is not at war with Islam. You can imagine why this tidbit is rarely ever brought up. But it's true--many of our founding fathers opposed Christianity. Some even considered passing laws to ban it, which of course never happened, but what a strange thing to think about today.

Ok, back on course. Liberals. Right. You've probably seen images of Tea Party organizers(a small number of them) with signs that link Hitler to Obama. Silly, right? Actually, yeah that is silly. But Hitler was also a Liberal, but obviously a very different kind. Liberals aren't just Democrats. They're people that want to grow the Government to such extremes that the Government takes away your social and economic freedoms in order to re-distribute wealth to who they want.

This sounds really dark and ominous, and it's hard to know exactly when you've passed Republican, passed Democrat, passed "Sane Liberalism," and gone to the dark place. Insane Liberalism is not sustainable. This is why Insane Liberals often resorts to Fascism or Totalitarianism. These are big scary words that means the Government is now in complete control and the people are merely slaves to it. I've often said that Communism is the best form of government ever created. The only problem with it is it's impossible to achieve with human nature being what it is. Everyone has to share equally. This works on a small scale(at which point we call it Egalitarianism), where when someone in the village doesn't share, they get kicked out. But it's impossible on a large scale where people can easily cheat the system and get away with it. If you have people not contributing, you're always going to have a shortage. Taxing the rich more to make up for the difference(like we do), will only get you so far before something has to be done about the cheaters(or government has to cut spending).

Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Che Guavara, etc, all had the same way of dealing with the "cheaters." Murder. Mass murder. Hitler was a Socialist, but he's often not referred to as such. He was one in every sense of the word, except one. See, as Karl Marx and Engels laid out Communism in the Communist Manifesto they stressed that religion and ethnicity must be forgotten. Religion and cultural differences cause wars and conflict. Clearly, we can see this is true. From the Sunnis and the Shiites killing each other to the UDA and IRA car bombing each other whether the Northern Irish are Irish or British, what would they do if John Lennon's song Imagine became reality and there were no countries or Religion? What would you fight over?

Heh, ok, that's a whole other topic. So Hitler was a Socialist, but he wasn't about to give up Catholicism or "German-ness" for it. Where as the other Socialists / Communists were killing people based on low social class(getting rid of the uneducated and impoverished), Hitler was killing people based on ethnicity and religion. He was essentially killing off Jews and taking their stuff to feed his Socialist / Fascist empire. Hitler was an evil guy, but he genuinely believed that once he was done, he would have created a Utopian universe for the deserving(German Catholics) and forever eliminated the impure elements from humanity.

Recently Obama had his one year anniversary as President. It's obviously gone very bad for him and he often points out that he started off with a bad economy that he inherited and can't fix in only a year. But is Obama even trying to fix the economy? Everyone assumes he is, but let's look at it from his perspective. Let's assume he's cloned and is now President and every Congressman. He has every seat in government. He doesn't have to wait for Blue Dogs and Liberals to agree. He doesn't have to fear if Republicans will filibuster. He has complete control in this hypothetical situation. Can he fix the economy now? Again, I don't think he's interested in that. Not because he's evil, not because he doesn't care, but because I believe that he thinks he's working towards something bigger. He's working, not on fixing things, but on transforming the country into a Liberal Utopia because he thinks that once all the pieces of Socialized Medicine, strong unions, high progressive taxes, loads and loads of government run work projects, and free education for all, are in place, that we will reach Utopia. Once Americans see his vision in reality, they will fall inlove with it and all will be well. What happens in the short run along the way is irrelevant. I honestly think he believes this. He's not interested in working with Republicans because they don't share this goal so he knows they're a waste of his time. He's also said in speeches that we might not get there during his Presidency, so this is clearly a long term goal that he believes many others share.

Now, if he generally believes in this stereotypical Liberal Utopian dream, he will not move to the center(despite campaigning that he would all along) like Clinton did when Republicans took back Congress 2 years after his election, and will continue to push his Liberal agenda. If he does move to the center, then I will have to admit that I'm wrong about him. But I've been watching his speeches for a while now and really listening to what he says.

I don't think this dream sounds bad. Hell, I wouldn't mind free education and healthcare for all, but how can you pay for it? I'm sure we all agree Obama has taken genocide off the table as an option, so what else are we left with? I just don't understand why Liberals think this Utopian dream works when it's failed every time it's been tried.

Blah, anyways, so what's a Republican? Well, Republicans want economic freedoms. Businesses love this. Of course they want the freedom to do what ever they want. Let's not forget that this goes both ways at times. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, made it illegal for businesses to force people to work more than 8 hours at a time. He passed far stricter laws greatly reducing the amount of hours children can work as well. I imagine many big businesses actually liked this, because it made it so the smaller businesses that they competed with, couldn't drive their employees into the ground in an effort to keep up. Big business doesn't mind regulation if it's something they can survive but it knocks out their smaller competition. This is also, I suspect, why many big businesses like the minimum wage--because it hurts small businesses who struggle to make a profit and thus go out of business. The minimum wage is actually a really, really bad thing that does a lot of damage, but that's for another topic.

Republicans tend to not be big on Social Freedoms. Mostly, this is because Republicans tend to be Conservatively religious. But these are two very different issues. I realize my being a Republican and an Atheist is a really unusual combination--not that it's strange, because it's the most logical of things in my mind, but for some reason, it's very rare to see in others. But as such, I have a very different outlook on this. This distinction mostly comes into play around the issue of gay rights and abortion. Religious fundamentalists are not in favor of gay rights. John McCain's wife and daughter have been in the news lately for being supporters of gay rights--including marriage, so there is some variation of views among Republicans. Vice President Dick Cheney announced a few months back that he also supported gay marriage--which is interesting because Liberal Barack Obama does not. VP Cheney's daughter, Mary, of course is a lesbian, which plays a role in his feelings, I'm sure. I bet it must be tough to say to your own child, "You don't have the same rights as everyone else." This is why, ultimately, gay rights will one day be realized as more homosexuals are out of the closet and more people realize who their neighbors and relatives are. It's easy to hate that creepy "other." It's harder to hate people once they have a face.

Mass-acre

2010-01-21T23:35:00.000-08:00

If you're one of the now almost 70% of Americans that do not support Obama's health care bill, you've got to be happy about Scott Brown's victory. I have to admit, I've been giddy over it. Even many Democrats in office have admitted relief that they will no longer be forced into supporting a horrible health care bill that just about no one thinks is a good idea.

It was pretty interesting switching back between Fox News and CNN during Brown's acceptance speech. The reporters on Fox News had big smiles as they announced the news. Click over to CNN, and they mournfully recounted the dreadful events as if they bore burden of tragedy. Pretty entertaining stuff.

I've been watching both sides a lot. Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of a news junky. But if you are into that kind of thing, this is great. From Rush Limbaugh to The Huffington Post, the opinions are fast and furious. Each with arm loads of spin, you'd never know they were talking about the same thing.

On the one hand, you have Democrats saying the upset was due to their base of voters unhappy because they're not doing enough. That was Howard Dean's ridiculous assessment. Massachusetts had record breaking voter turn outs for their special election, and according to Dean, Democrats, who out number Republicans 3 to 1 overwhelmingly voted against their own Democrat candidate to protest the Democrats not being Liberal enough.

Other Democrats are saying that the voters are just stupid. This was Obama's message, though he hid it well. He basically said that the Democrats haven't done a good enough job articulating and detailing their vision well enough--aka, the American people are stupid and can't think for themselves, and our ideas are vastly superior, thus, if anyone disagrees with us, it's because they're ignorant.

Republicans, obviously feel differently. Many are quick to say, "See? The voters are rejecting politics as usual and seeing us Republicans as the underdogs and the everyday man's party."

The truth, as it usually does, probably lies somewhere in the middle. I doubt people have "come back" to Republicans. I think people are just mad. They don't feel like their elected officials are working for change that will help them. The Democrats have controlled Congress for over 3 years now. Is that long enough to fix a recession that started with them taking office in 2006 and only exploded under their leadership? Have the Republicans proven they would have done any better? These are complicated issues. No one really knows how to fix it, and if they do, they're not the ones in charge. Voters are mad at everyone in office. That's the real truth. Obama was counting on the voters thinking he was different. He was wrong.

But the news coverage got me thinking about the pure stupidity of Obama making the claim that Fox is not a real news station and the many idiots that agree with him. People that genuinely believe this fail at one of the most basic and fundamental tests of intelligence--non egocentric thinking.

If you're not really a news fan or you also fall into this trap, let me first explain to you what a news media source is. It is NOT the job of a news organization to inform you. News sources are not interested in keeping people informed. That's not their job. That's not their responsibility. That's not their function in life. Their job is to get viewers. Their job is to locate and target their market of customers and give those costumers what it is they want to buy. CNN, Fox News, etc, are businesses.

People don't want a dry list of facts. People want to hear what other commentators think... commentators that spend all day gathering information and now have an argument about it and want to make their case for their point. That is what news is. All news is opinion. All news.

Here's the Egocentrism part. If you're watching news and "agree" with what they're saying, then it's because they're stating an opinion or catering to an agenda that you also ascribe to. You are part of their target audience and the very sort of customer their are selling their air time for. If you are incapable of discerning this between opinions you agree with and dry boring facts that don't amount to anything without an argument to unite them, then you fail at this most basic tests of intelligence.

I, do not. I'm perfectly capable of watching Fox News, being highly entertained by their news pieces and realizing I'm not getting objective truth. You will never get objective truth from one new source because no one really wants objective truth. I do, but I'm a weirdo. For me, it means I have to watch several different news sources, and even then realize I may still only have a fraction of the information to know what the real story is. I have opinions, but mine tend to be fluid and adaptable to new and changing information. I have caveats. I believe that a war against _____ is just on the condition that my information about ____ is accurate. I rarely think in absolutes.

Why Fox News is a shock to the system for many people is because there's always been a conservative market out there for a television news station, but for a long time, there's never been anything to fill its needs. Now, if you've grown up watching only mainstream news that caters to the left, and thought this was norm / fair / objective, then Fox News is a rather rude surprise.

In either case, as happy as I am that Democrats will no longer be able to put me in jail just because I don't have health care insurance--which I don't, and do not want--the cold hard reality is that after the joy of this event wains, Republicans will remember that voters are unhappy with both parties.

I was thinking about this the other day. I know George Bush was pretty unpopular and many think he was stupid. He actually wasn't stupid. In fact, I'd say no President in modern history was stupid. But as much as I am a Republican and believe in the basic principles of the GOP--free market solutions and small government, I think it's actually bad if too many Republicans are in control of the government at once. I think that was more of the problem with Bush's administration than anything else.

I'll explain it this way. You know the saying two heads are better than one? This isn't always true. It's not true when both heads think the same way. Then two heads ARE just as good as one and only as good as one. The Republican party doesn't have as much diversity as the Democrat party, and what little variety it does have, gets filtered out even more on the way to higher office. Many Republicans are pro choice like me, supporters of gay rights like me, but are not the kind of Republicans that make it to higher office. No one has good ideas all the time. That's why you want people that think completely differently from you around to challenge you and see things you never would have thought of. This is what the Republican party misses out on. I think we need a little chaos to shake things up a bit.

The Dems... they need a lot less chaos. They're actually a couple different parties all sharing one name. They're not organized at all. If someone tells me they're a Democrat, it means nothing. Are they pro choice? a segregationist? fiscally conservative? against war? for civil rights? ...you literally have no idea where they stand on anything. From Blue Dog Democrats to Howard Dean, the word "Democrat" doesn't mean anything. All it means is you get too many of them together, and you're going to see a lot of infighting and bickering.

Bush, perhaps, also failed the Ego Centric test. If you feel that your way is "the best" way to such an extreme that you need not listen to people that think otherwise, then you are doomed to surround yourself with heads just like your own. You no longer have advisers but more and more mirrors to regurgitate your own thoughts back at you.

The United States is one of the most ethnically and ideologically diverse countries in the world. This is a strength and a valuable resource. Perhaps our best.

Socially Awkward

2009-12-30T03:48:00.000-08:00

Right now the House and Senate are looking to combine their versions of the Health Care Bill. These are scary times. I've been keeping a close eye on the debate since the summer. First off, let's look at what the bill does.

The only popular feature of the bill is that it makes it so insurance companies can no longer deny people for pre-existing conditions. This really made the insurance companies mad, and rightfully so. Imagine what that would mean if everyone could drop their insurance, wait til they got sick and then get insurance, rack up huge amounts of medical bills until they got better, then drop their insurance again, leaving insurance companies with the bill. So the insurance company fought back, threatening to cut campaign contributions to Democrats(who get huge amounts of money from them). The Dems panicked and rethought things. The insurance companies fund Republicans too, to keep them in check as well. Think about that for a second. Insurance companies give contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. They play both sides to guide law how they want it.

Anyways, so the Dems said ok, we'll keep the "no denying people based on pre-existing conditions" thing, but we'll make a law saying everyone has to have health care insurance or they pay a big fine. If they can't pay the fine, they go to jail. They give low income people lots of breaks and lots of loop holes to get out of having to pay the fines, but the fact remains that now all Americans are forced to buy a product from a company.

This is especially frightening considering that many states have only one or two insurance companies(monopolies are generally illegal, but by law, Health Insurance companies are exempt). Imagine if Coke, Pepsi, Snapple, etc, all merged into one company. They now own a monopoly on soft drinks and can charge as much as they want. Maybe most people will still pay $5 bucks for a soda, but if it went to $50 bucks, people would start drinking tea or water. Now imagine if the government forced you to buy soft drinks or you went to jail. I think people would spend $50 bucks for a soda to stay out of jail. Meanwhile, the hypothetical Cepsipple Soft Drink company gets filthy rich!

At this point in the bill insurance companies can massively raise their prices because people have to buy their product. They absolutely love the Democrats. The Dems are going to make health insurance companies rich!

The Republicans have a pretty brain numbingly simple fix for this. They want to make it so that health insurance companies can now compete against each other across state lines. After all, car insurance companies can. This would create a massive amount of competition. There's hundreds of health care insurance companies. Forcing them to all compete with each other, would drive down prices considerably. Not to mention the entertaining commercials. Can you imagine the next tv lizzard tell you that 15 minutes could save you 15% on your health care insurance? Or health care insurance is so easy, a cave man could do it! How about Flo, the Progressive insurance lady that has prescription drug coverage on isle three?

I used to own a couple websites. At first, there were only a couple providers and website domain names cost a hundred bucks or so. Webhosting was another $50 bucks a month or more. Then a bunch of other companies started doing it. Now you can get a domain name for $9 bucks, and hosting for a buck a month. Imagine how cheap health care insurance would be if the number of competing companies went from a couple to hundreds. Imagine the extra services they'd start to offer. After all, they have to make you happy or you can easily go to another company.

Why aren't the Democrats interested in that? Indeed, they won't even talk about it. Such a simple solution to their problem, but they avoid the subject like the plague. why? I even heard one congress woman dodge the question by making the ridiculous claim that competition would lead to rationing. Really? In what world does someone live on where they think companies skimp on services while trying to lure customers away from other companies?

Instead, to provide competition with insurance companies, they want to create a public option. This means the government creates it's own health care insurance company to compete with private insurance companies. History has shown that anything the government tries to run efficiently is a huge and costly disaster. Think of the three major postal service companies. Business is booming for the two privately run companies, but the government run post office is bankrupt. Why? You might say well, that's because people are emailing now instead of sending letters. Sure. But a privately run company would adapt to the times--only pick up/deliver mail twice a week, require people to come to their office, etc. There's certainly lots of ways a nimble private company could adapt and cut overhead. But consider that our government has been working on health care reform for 30 years and they're still not done--and what is done so far is overwhelmingly unpopular, I think that's pretty telling about to government's ability to do anything effectively.

So the public option is a really bad idea. It's clunky and clumsy. How could it adapt to fair market values in different regions in changing environments without being massively expensive? It really doesn't make sense that the Democrats would pick it over and obviously superior method such as what the Republicans are proposing. Not to mention, the public overwhelmingly supports bipartisanship with health care reform. The Democrat approval rating(along with Obama's) is slipping pretty fast. Obama's approval rating as dropped so much, so fast, that he is now the third fastest president in the history of our country to hit below 50% approval in less than one year in office. And he was massively popular when he was elected. This is the perfect opportunity for him and the other Dems to say, "We've considered the Republican proposal to allow insurance companies to compete across statelines, and it's a good idea. See America, we're coming together to make this a better country!" Cue patriotic theme music, American flags waving, and fireworks in the background for the finishing touch.

So it begs the question, why are Democrats simply not interested in that? Instead, they call the Republicans the party of no, blame them for being obstructionists despite the Dems having complete control over the government allowing them to do what ever they want. So why?

Ok, I'll tell you why. The reason is because the Democrats in Congress and the White House never cared about giving all Americans health care insurance in the first place. They don't care about bringing down costs. This has never been about helping people. Liberals are not interested in that. I know this is what they claim, but that's not what they want. They want socialized medicine, aka, a single payer system where everyone pays the government money and the government provides all health care insurance. They can't do that until they put all the privately run insurance companies out of business.

Now, if someone told me that, I'd think they're nuts. I mean, I know our government is shady at times, but I don't fall for conspiracy theories. But Obama has been clear on this. Consider his speech from 2003, before he was president...

Heh, ok, I got a little distracted looking up youtube videos. This is a good video though. It shows "The Plan," tricking the American people into accepting a "public option" long enough for the system to mortally wound private insurance companies so the government can take over health care.

Now, you might be thinking, "So what? Universal Healthcare isn't all that bad. How can you be against helping people and providing insurance for all." Or a better argument from socialized medicine, "We pay for it anyways. When people can't pay for hospital stays, the hospitals just pass the costs on to the rest of us anyways, so why not have a single payer system?"

I don't agree with that argument though it's certainly logically sound and one that should at least be considered. But in either case, shouldn't something so fundamentally massive as socialize medicine be talked about openly and honestly rather than like this? Personally, I think Obama and friends would have had much more success had they focused instead on cutting taxes on small businesses, let the bad banks fail so the good banks could take their place(which would have hurt a lot more in the short run, but been better in the long run once it was sorted out), and once the economy was stabilized, made a slow, steady case for Socialized Medicine and started a public debate. I don't agree with Socialism on any level, but there's certainly some positives in there. The fact that he had to be sneaky about it and lie to people, I think, says a lot.

In either case, I certainly haven't been happy with Republicans either lately. Republicans controlled both houses and the White house from 2000-2006 and despite having some pretty good ideas(school vouchers), did pretty much nothing useful. It would be nice to have some middle ground--free market solutions mixed with real reform. We need someone like Teddy Roosevelt--a Republican Progressionist that can get stuff done that people actually want done. So far, I haven't seen anyone running for 2012 yet that seems to fit that bill.

I'm not alone. In fact, less than 20% of Americans now consider themselves Republicans. This is why the Dems in Congress are pushing their unpopular healthcare bill. They don't think the Republicans have enough support to stop them. I guess time will tell.

Rigged

2009-12-24T03:01:00.000-08:00

This is the first Christmas I can think of where we had carolers. This year, our drunken neighbor who yells obscenities at 3am, blessed us with his take on an old Christmas classic. I awoke to "Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell cock," being screamed from next door. This went on for a good 3 mins or so. The best part was the 6 or 7 second pause towards the end where he stopped to think of a rhyme for "ball sack."

I know I just started writing again, but I took a break already. Not because I'm tired of it, but because I wanted to make some headway on learning to program. I started using a rendering engine called Irrlicht. I like it so far. To make games for a big company one day, I'm still going to have to learn how to load up models into an engine using OpenGL and DirectX, but for now, Irrlicht is a crutch that does that stuff for me so I can focus on easier things.

But first, I needed something to render. I'm not much of a modeler. Most models I have are high polygon stuff--great for web animations(or movies, if I ever got into that). But terrible for games were rendering and motion have to happen in real time. I thought an obvious choice would be to extract World of Warcraft models and use them. Turns out, this is pretty easy to do, only, Blizzard uses a custom file format and the animation and rigging for their models are harder to get at. I tried a bunch of different plugins and exporters I found through Googling, but only found a bunch of outdated and bug infested code. So I've taught myself how to rig and animate WoW models in 3ds Max. It's fairly time consuming, especially when I'm not that interested in doing game art--I want to be a programmer!

One thing that's a little satisfying is I can remodel WoW figures to look more proportioned how I'd rather see them. Like less freakishly huge muscles on the males, no slopping foreheads and brow ridges on females, etc. I'm thinking about re-proportioning the dwarves to make them look like humans just to see how that would look. I'm not an experienced programmer yet, though I'm driven. It would be nice to meet up with a modeler and animation artist that would collaborate with me on making games for the learning experience of it all. I have no illusions that I'm going to be making great games... yet. Though I certainly have a wealth of ideas.

I guess everyone has ideas. Ideas are the easy part. It's having the skill to make ideas happen that's the trick. Anyways, back to work.

Reason for the Season

2009-12-15T15:18:00.000-08:00

I watch the Discovery channel a lot--if I watch tv at all. About a month or so ago they had a program on about the historical basis of the book Angels and Demons. The premise for the book is that old rivalry between religion and science. According to the book, Galileo, tired of the persecution of scientists, founds the Illuminati, a group of scientists who decide to spend the next couple centuries devising a plan to blow up the Vatican with science. Pretty silly, but it got me thinking about the rivalry.

Galileo didn't, in fact, discover that the Sun--not the Earth--was the center of the solar system. Others discovered this before him. He was just the first person to write his findings down in a way that non scientists could read and understand it. Think of him as the Carl Sagan of his day. Of course, no where in the Bible does it say that the Earth is the center of the universe, but the church did. And that was enough to get him in a lot of trouble. Although the truth eventually got out and is now widely accepted, the church certainly slowed it down.

And it's far from the only time. It still happens today. Of course I have a different perspective on evolution having a BA in Anthropology. The thought that there are still people today that reject evolution is... well, just plain mind boggling. Of course, it's no coincidence that the people that do, are overwhelmingly deeply religious and completely ignorant of even the most basic concepts about evolution. In fact, the Pope(the last one) came out and said the evidence for evolution is overwhelming and that it does not contradict the Bible but rather was a long process guided by God. Genesis took place over millions of human years, but only 7 of God's days. So in this case, it's not the church suppressing knowledge, but rather a bunch of close minded Christians. Unfortunately, these close minded Christians can vote. About 10 years ago, the teaching of evolution was banned in the state of Kansas. It was only banned for less than 2 years, but the implications were certainly terrifying.

No one really believes we have separation between church and state in this country. We are certainly closer to it that most countries in the world, but it's far from absolute. I don't really care what people believe, but when people can use the law to impose their religion on the rest of us, then I have to say that's not only wrong, but it's un-American.

And again, it's not only that, but the issue of gay marriage. I cannot, for the life of me, understand how two gay people getting married can possibly harm anything. The only argument I've heard with any validity is that a gay couple can sue churches that refuse to marry them. Well, a lot of people didn't believe in interracial couples being allowed to get married. I don't know how many interracial couples sued churches that refused to marry them, but we got through that ok once it was legalized. Like the evolution issue, ask people that want to "protect marriage," and overwhelmingly they're religious. In this case, I can't say "Christian," because all the major religions but Buddhism have a problem with homosexuality. India recently decriminalized homosexuality. I'm not really sure, however, what Christians in our country hope to accomplish by banning gay marriage. Even put aside the fact that using the law to impose your religious beliefs on others to deny them some fairly basic civil rights, which quite honestly, is pretty darn messed up, but what do Christians really think will happen? If you ban gay marriage long enough, gay people will go away? No, seriously. What does banning gay marriage accomplish? And since when do we vote on civil rights? Since we out number gay people, can we vote that they can't have pudding, so we get all their pudding too? I mean really, since we out number them, we get to push them around and decide what civil rights they can have and what we'd rather they not have because their life style offends our religion. It's embarrassing to be a Californian knowing that Prop 8 passed. But hey, I voted against it. I did my part.

First off, I don't understand homosexuality myself. It makes no sense from an evolutionary stand point--which is strange since just about every part of the human experience can be explained through evolution. And homosexuality has been around for a pretty long time. I recently finally got around to watching 300. I love history, but I heard it had a lot of historical inaccuracies, so I had a feeling I wouldn't like it. I was right. I had to laugh when the Spartan King guy referred to the Athenians as "boy lovers." The Spartans were a lot more well known for being homosexuals than the Athenians were. the Spartans encouraged all their soldiers to be romantically involved with each other. After all, if a woman I loved was in danger on the battle field, I would certainly fight a lot harder to keep her alive.

I'm reluctant to talk about another "religion" that actively suppresses a field of science due to conflicts. Ironically, it's the one that has "Science" right in its name. I'm partially reluctant to mention it, for one, I know that people that bash it on the internet get hopelessly and obsessively harassed by its members(so I'm going to avoid using goggle search words here). I never back down from fights, which is a big reason why I try less and less to pick them. But this is not a religion. It's a giant pyramid scam that bilks people out of their life savings and destroys families. They're glorified snake oil salesmen that offer to use super natural powers to remove the spirits of dead aliens stuck in your body that make you sick. Their biggest competition? Real doctors.

You've probably heard about Tom Cruise and how he knows the terrible secret of the Psychology field and how it's a big scam. They're barbaric, he says, and still give people electroshock therapy, subscribe a near unlimited supply of drugs to kids in the ADHD epidemic scare, and prosaic to millions that only get worse. Well, if you look at the history of medicine in general, it's pretty frightening. Up until about a hundred years ago, doctors still believed in the theory of the 4 humors. These were the fluids of the body--one of which was blood. They believed that sickness was generally caused by an imbalance. Generally, this imbalance was too much of one of the humors--blood. Ironically, sick patients that would have eventually recovered on their own, were often killed by otherwise well meaning doctors trying to save them by draining out their blood. A big reason why Christian doctors knew so little about human anatomy during this period of time is because the church decreed it was immoral to cut cadavers up and study them. Really, how advance a people would we be today without religion hampering science?

If you keep in perspective the scary history of medicine in Christian culture, electroshock therapy doesn't look so bad. Psychologists are also doctors, only understanding the human brain is a lot more difficult. There's nothing to cut up and see. In time, the field of Psychology will get better. It has a lot of catching up to do. Another interesting thing about this "religion" is that it denies that medication actually helps people with mental issues. When their founder Ron H. died he had a sedative type prescription medication in his blood stream. How can you not laugh at that? A science fiction author invents a religion where, if you're sick, instead of taking medication, you give him lots of money so he can wave a magic stick over you to remove spirit aliens from your body, and he, himself is taking medication for his own anxiety issues. That's hysterical.

Anyways, I wanted to talk about more than just about science vs religion. Franz Boas established that the purpose of culture is to solve social problems that are unique to a people's environment. This perspective is incredibly useful in the understanding of culture, especially if you lump religion in with it. Religions always reflect the people and environments that create them. Like culture, religions change with environments and people, as their social needs change.

Consider Babylon. The most famous religious figure from the very ancient world from the oldest known writing ever produced by man--Gilgamesh. I think most of us read the Epic of Gilgamesh in high school. If high school was a long time for you, or you weren't so lucky to read it, the story is about a king that seeks immortality. In his search, he finds a couple that was granted immortality by the Gods because they built a giant Arc and put two of every animal inside to protect them against a giant flood. And Christians thought Noah was original? Anyway, the reason why Gilgamesh sought immortality is because the after life was a miserable existence. As I remember from my high school days, you sat around in dark caves eating clay as your bread. Why create such a dreary religion? You see, ancient Babylon(modern day Iraq) has two really big rivers flowing through it. Big rivers means water, and large amounts of water is something that was hard for large ancient armies to carry. What I'm getting at is that Babylon had a very long history of being invaded over and over.

Religious leaders wanted to create a religion where the after life was dismal, because they needed their people focused on the hard realities of this life. They needed people that would train to fight and survive against tough realities. They needed defensive walls built, vigilant citizens, etc. What they didn't want is people spending a lot of time praying instead of working or neglecting their responsibilities in this life.

Take an extreme opposite--Egypt. Egypt has certainly been conquered a few times, but they also had unusually long stretches of peace--highly unusual for the ancient world. A lot of this was due to buffer zones they had. In other words, if you want to attack ancient Egypt, you had to invade through other countries first. Egypt also had a really predictable and stable source of food. The Nile always flooded at the same time, the same way, with minerally rich and fertile silt and farmers spent thousands of years learning how to maximize food production. Even when Egypt was conquered by the Hixos, the Macedonians, Nubians, etc, their occupiers generally let the Egyptians continue on as is. Such a peaceful place(in context) had a massive fixation with a long and elaborate after life. Where Gilgamesh didn't want to die, the leaders of Egypt spent more time preparing to die than they did preparing to live.

Similar to the dreary religion of the Babylonians is that of the Jews. The Jews have had a tough history. I don't believe it's historically accurate to say the Jews were slaves in Egypt exactly(not all of them). It's probably more accurate to describe them as mercenaries for the Egyptian army. All was good and well until they decided to leave. Moses knew the landscape really well having lived in the area for years in exile. He knew which time of the year and day the tide of the Reed Sea went out enough so that he could pass a large group of his fellow Jews through, allowing them to escape. Hours later, the tide comes in, and by the time the Egyptian army catches up, the Jews are on the other side and the Sea of Reeds is too deep to cross. I know that silly Charlton Heston movie has Moses parting the Red Sea, but this is not the correct translation from the Bible. And yeah, I'm still amazed at how little Christians know about their own religion. Anyways, so the Jews spend 40 years in the desert training new recruits to conquer the lands of Kaanan to found Israel. Think of a homeless tribe of people, raising an army for 40 years. Of course, we don't really know if it's really 40 years. I forget why scholars assume that's the time, but the Bible isn't clear on that point. I would put it at a much shorter time span before I believed that Moses lived for over a hundred years.

Anyways, so Moses has got a problem. Thousands of homeless people in a desert, training for a long time to conquer what is now modern day Israel. How do you keep the people from revolting? Well, the Bible says at least once he caught some of the followers worshiping a golden calf. Moses ordered them killed as well as everyone in their family killed as an example. He creates the ten commandments. Four of the ten are all about not to doubt his religion or even consider "false gods." Clearly the "thou shalt not kill" is a throw away commandment that isn't really important. After all, he's raising an army to go kill the Kaananites and take their land. What part of "Thou shalt not kill," says "unless it's a bunch of people you don't know who you want to kill and take land from." The real meat of the ten commandments are the "you must obey me and not question me," parts.

He tells them about God being a hateful, vengeful God that hates humans for being imperfect. He implores them to be obedient and fearful and to constantly strive for perfection so that God might forgive them and allow them an after life of eternal bliss. He scares them with the idea of hell and eternal damnation.

In a twist of irony, the many years pass, the army is ready, and Moses reaches a mountain top where he can see the lands of Kaanan, the future Israel, but God does not permit him to set foot upon it. If I remember correctly, Moses offended God by striking a stone with his staff in anger. So Moses dies and David takes his place. I think it's more likely David was sick of Moses' crap, had him assassinated. The Jews had to be on the verge of revolt. That's a long time to listen to Moses about the promise land while they're sitting around in a desert training. If David did indeed assassinate Moses and tell the Jews that they were leaving the desert to go attack, he would have been massively popular. But in either case, the addition of "See? Even Moses messed up and offended God. You don't want to do the same, so you'd better obey," makes a nice touch.

Let's fast forward to about a hundred or two years after Jesus. Marcus Aurelius dies. He was the last of the great Roman Kings. He tried to make Russel Crow the next king right before he died, but Russel Crow became a Gladiator instead... ok, just seeing if anyone's still paying attention. Anyway, this was a confusing time for the Roman empire, especially for religion. Picture it. A crumbling empire. Nothing but bad leaders for the next couple centuries. Constant attacks by Germans from the north, the Huns from the east, and eventually by the Persians from the south east. The Romans were starting to lose faith in the classic Gods like Mars and Venus. They had a lot of religions to choose from. There were dozens of popular mystery cults. There was this one guy in particular. His followers believed he rose form the dead. He could turn water into wine. Of course I'm talking about Apollonius. Yeah, I know, there were a bunch of prophets at the time all claiming to be the son of God and performing miracles. Jesus certainly wasn't the first or last person whose followers believed performed the same miracles.

But the official religion of the time was for the god Sol Invictus. Sol Invictus was born on December 25th. Like Mithras, a similar God Romans believed in at the time, Sol Invictus was the god of brotherhood. I've heard a lot of conflicting information about if Mithras was also born on Dec 25th. But I think it's very interesting to know how extremely close we came to having to say "Merry Mithrasmas," every year. Try saying that out loud. It doesn't sound good at all.

A small group of Jews calling themselves Christians decided to work towards making their religion the official religion of Rome. They did two things right. One, they went to the German barbarians to the north who were constantly attacking Rome, and converted them(well, it took a long time). They also had an incredibly ingenious idea for converting the Romans. Now, clearly the Bible never mentions anywhere of any exact date that Jesus was born. In fact, most scholars point towards the Spring as the most likely general time. But the Christians decided to start telling the Romans that their God Jesus was also born on December 25th. Now why would they do that? Simple. They managed to convince followers of Sol Invictus that he and Jesus Christ were, in fact, the same person. Christianity eventually moved from being illegal, to legal, to the official religion of Rome. And to think, if Apollonius' followers had come up with the idea of claiming he was born on Dec 25th, I'd be yelling out "Apollonius, that hurt!" when I stub my toe.

The founders of Christianity did make one really big mistake. They used Judaism as not only an influence of Christianity, but as it's foundation. They really didn't have to do that. They could have easily said that Christianity was a fresh religion, with a clean slate. That Jesus was the first and only prophet of the one true God and avoided a lot of head ache. They didn't do that. I would say that the Old Testament is the number one reason that hurts the credibility of Christianity to this day.

Instead, they create a religion where God is a loving God. He accepts people for their imperfections as long as they believe in him and confess any wrong doings. Jesus is famously forgiving. At one point during Jesus' crucifixion, a criminal beside him who was a murderer and a thief confessed to Jesus right before dying and was absolved of all sin and went to heaven.

This is a very, very different God from the hateful, vengeful God of the Jews. Moses' ten commandments and The Torah / Old Testament was made for a very different time and environment. It should not have been used as the foundation of Christianity. The Old Testament and New are completely incompatible. This is a pretty serious hurdle that Christians today struggle with as they try and reconcile this impossible combination.

In either case, the Germans, now Christians, of course conquer the Roman Empire in 476 thus beginning the Dark Ages(this date is my personal opinion on what started this period)--the darkest time in European history as well as the height of Christian power. Literacy is nearly wiped out. Europeans forget their poems, stories, music, and history. Amazingly, this is also the start of the Persian Renaissance where Muslims learn European poems, stories, music, and history. Ironically, a thousand years later when the Dark Ages end and Europeans are reading and writing again, many would have to learn their own culture back from the Muslims.

It's also interesting to think about the iconic image of Jesus we see today. There's a reason why he's a pale skinned, straight haired, blued eyed German. The Germans controlled the birth place of Christianity, and spread their re-interpretation of Christianity throughout the rest of Europe.

Hmm, now that I think about it, it would be really interesting to know what other religions Europeans were practicing before they were conquered by the Germans and converted to Christianity. Possibly future research project? After all, we could have very well been doing a vast array of other possible things on Dec 25th instead had any number of events in history been slightly different. The act of putting dead trees in our home or painting eggs are, in fact, remains of other old, non Christian religions celebrating the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.

Anyways, what exactly is the Reason for the Season? I have no idea. I do really like pie and Egg Nog though.

Poisoning Truth

2009-12-08T12:01:00.000-08:00

Not all Native American shamans used their powers for good. In fact, some shamans in California tribes used their connections with the spirits to kill people. They were called Poisoners in their own languages. And although they didn't actually put poison in people's food, they asked the spirits to make their enemies sick. Now you would think that such a horrible person would be killed by a united tribe. A Poisoner is pure evil. Who would possibly want such a person around?

The chief would. You see, the chief would use his power and influence to keep the rest of the tribe from killing the Poisoner. And in exchange, the Poisoner would threaten to use his powers to kill the enemies of the chief. As long as the powerful Poisoner lived, no one dared oppose the chief. As long as the chief lived, the Poisoner was safe.

Whether you believe in shamanism, witchcraft, or magic in general is irrelevant. The partnership between magic / religion / science and the state is lethal. Think about science this way... new discoveries are rarely practical. Ardi has been in the news a lot lately(well, if you follow anthropology news), but other than being perhaps the greatest discovery in archaeology of this century, what does it actually do for anyone? Well, nothing. Ardi proves that humans didn't evolve from monkeys--something anthropologists have known for decades anyways--but do any of us feel different now?

My point is that science in general doesn't put food on the table. Just a tiny fraction of discoveries have actual practical applications. Certainly you might have put money down to help invent the television, radio, or telephone. But what about millions for the human genome project? It might be one of the most important feat in the world of genetics that we did it, but we might be long dead before any serious medical breakthroughs come from it. But since science generally is so unprofitable, the bulk of money that funds it comes from governments. But is that a conflict of interest?

One example is from Nazi Germany. Us Americans and our Eugenics Movement are partially to blame for for the rise of the Nazi party. We gave them legitimacy for genocide, even if we never took Eugenics past forced sterilizations. But Hitler eventually needed evidence closer to home. He either believed or pretended to believe that white Germans were racially superior people. Therefore anyone else that mixed with a German weakened the race. He needed the backing of the German scientific community for legitimacy. Well, who's going to pay for scientific research in the middle of a war? Hitler did. And scientists given grants by Hitler's government offered scientific "evidence" "proving" that Hitler was right and that non white, christian, germans were in fact inferior and should be removed from Germany, or risk mixing, and thus weakening the German race. How can you argue with that? The government is telling you it. The scientific community is telling you it. If you don't believe it, you're a fool. Right? Germans of pure blood could justify genocide was a matter of self defense.

We're not any better. Long before our Eugenics Movement, our government needed justification for slavery. It was immoral to enslave someone that was fully human, so if a black person was, we were in trouble. Who do you think funded the scientific community in this country to come to the rescue? With government grant money, American scientists fudged result in order to "prove" that black people had smaller brains than whites.

Today, we know there's no significant difference between people of different races on a genetic level. Skin color and nose shapes are close to meaningless compared to the vast amount of information required to make a human. In fact, there's more differences among people of the same race than of those outside it. Meaning, I could easily be more genetically similar to a black, asian, or hispanic person than I was to another white person. So from a "scientific" stand point, the word "race" is meaningless. It's important in understanding culture and social attitudes towards each other, sure, but that's it.

And although science is more ethical these days, it's still far from objective. Scientists are still given grant money by people expecting specific results. Let's look at Liberalism for a moment. Capitalism is the bane of Liberalism. Ever since the fall of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, corporations have grown to wield enormous power. Think of Walmart. Yeah, Walmart has happy, friendly commercials, but it wields more power than some small countries. The influence and financial might is staggering, and most people don't even realize it. These large corporations cripple the Liberals' agenda of big government controlling our lives. For years, Liberals have plotted ways to break up corporations and weaken capitalism in general.

I'm certainly not arguing that corporations are good. Why does our government spend money trying to educate the public not to smoke tobacco at the same time our government spends money subsidizing it? That's like running a heater and an AC at the same time and letting them fight it out. Meanwhile, we tax payers pay for all of it. And why? Because politicians get campaign money from tobacco industries. Worse still, Obama spent about a billion dollars in his bid to become President--a job that will pay him less than a 1/20th of that. Why would anyone be dumb enough to do that? Well, it wasn't his own money. He got donations. In fact, most of our politicians are only able to run with donations from corporations. Corporations have huge influence over policy in this country. And a lot of Liberals would love to see that end.

In the 70, scientists like John Holdren with liberal agendas argued that pollution from massive manufacturing plants were causing Global Cooling. The science is simple. Pollution blocks out sun light. Less sun light reaches earth, the colder we get. There was archaeological evidence too. After all, the vikings settled Greenland(back when it was green), hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. But those viking settlements are currently under blankets of snow and ice. This proves that the earth was much warmer than it is now almost a thousand years ago. Could industrialization and pollution be the cause of Global Cooling?

For years, the scientific community fought for pollution control arguing that if we didn't stop polluting, the earth would freeze up into a block of ice. If you didn't take the threats of Global Cooling seriously, you were an uneducated fool. Why, you must also believe the earth was flat. That's how dumb you are.

As the 70s turned into the 80s, Ronald Reagan was elected--a filthy republican--and the threat of Global Cooling was never taken seriously by the government enough to warrant change. That didn't stop the Liberals, of course. They've pushed for tax increases on the wealthy. They've pushed for reparations. They've pushed for grant money to other developing countries. But Republican Presidents have mostly told them no(though some Republicans have done this too). We had a Democrat President for 8 years named Bill Clinton, but he was a Moderate, and congress was overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans at the time. And Bill pretty much had to go along with what the Republicans wanted to do.

Then 2000 came along. 8 years of a fairly unpopular war time, Republican President lead to a Democrat controlled Congress in 2006 and a Liberal President in 2008. This is the first time this has happened in a very long time. Remember the Global Cooling alarmists from the 70s? Well, they've been waiting a long time for this. They've scrapped the Global Cooling idea and now it's Global Warming. And John Holdren who once argued the case of Global Cooling? He's now Obama's Science Czar arguing for Global Warming. That's right, the Liberal controlled state has joined with Liberal backed Environmentalist groups to fund scientists to "prove" Global Warming is a real threat. The science is simple. Sun light sneaks past the heavy pollution in the air, gets to the earth, and warms it up. Then when the heat wants to dissipate off into the atmosphere, the heavy pollution traps it so it can't leave. It's not crazy. This is exactly how an actual green house works to keep plants warm. Thus if this is how a simple greenhouse works, it makes sense that it must be how the vastly complicated planet Earth must also work. Therefore, we must hurt / weaken those terrible manufacturing plants spewing out pollution because they are going to melt the ice caps and flood the planet. If you don't take the threats of Global Warming seriously, you are an uneducated fool. Why, you must also believe the earth was flat. That's how dumb you are. Hmm, that sounds familiar...

But there's a few problems with this latest theory. One, there's definitely not a consensus among the scientific community that this is true. In fact, even people on the "Global Warming side" admit that there's really no evidence that it's true but that we should "do it anyways, just in case." Worst still, since none of this can be tested in a lab because not all the variables are understood, even the alarmist scientists have to admit that they don't fully understand how it all works. All they have are untested theories. And two, scientists on all sides of this debate acknowledge that 80% or more of the earth's greenhouse gases(the nasty culprit) come from the over 500 volcanoes that surround the Ring of Fire of the pacific ocean's edges. Another over 15% come from other sources of nature--wildfires, rotting vegetation, people and animals exhaling, cow farts, etc. This means that human pollution accounts for less than 4% of all greenhouse gases at the most. Some scientists have published papers claiming that human produced greenhouse gases make up less than a tenth of a percent of the annual greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, no scientist can prove that if humans never existed, the earth wouldn't heat up and cool down exactly how it's doing now.

Of course, with "Climategate" recently coming out, this makes it more shakey for Liberals. I mean, here you have leaked emails of some scientists panicked that the data doesn't show that Global Warming is happening and that they've been faking or hiding contradictory evidence. Just when you thought we had learned our lesson about faking science for political agendas. In fact, most of the earth has been in a cooling trend for the last several years. Hell, this weekend, it snowed here... here, in the Sacramento valley. You know how rare that is? We're barely much above sea level, and it snowed here. But as it turns out, we're still back with the Chief and the Poisoner. The Chief wants to break Capitalism so that the government, not corporations, has more control over our lives, and the Poisoner will talk to the right spirits to make it happen. The only thing getting sick in this case, is the truth.

Now, the earth certainly does heat up and cool down. It's such a complicated system that of course it fluctuates pretty wildly. Consider a few thousand years ago, nearly all of Canada was a giant ice cube. A rash of volcano activity might have been what helped thaw it out. We also know that there's archaeological sites of Native Americans off the coast of California. No doubt they were flooded out when the ice caps melted and the ocean rose. But sorry, that didn't happen because of man made pollution. It's actually a big balancing act. As the earth gets warmer, there's more water on the surface. As water warms, there's more kelp and algae. As there's more kelp and algae, there's more oxygen being produced and more greenhouse gases getting eaten up which makes it colder. As it gets colder, the water cools, there's less kelp and algae meaning the earth starts to get warmer. This process has gone on for a billion years. We're pretty arrogant if we think a couple aerosol cans is going to change that.

The real thing to be scared about, is not what humans can do to the earth, but what the earth can do to us.

Autistic License

2009-11-27T10:19:00.000-08:00

I've had more than one person determined that I'm autistic. People that are autistic are socially awkward and unable to relate to others or have empathy. Autistic people often seek repetitive tactile sensations and become insatiably curious about a narrow focus of topics. A third common symptom is extreme sensitivity to sensory input--loud sounds, pungent smells, bright lights, etc.

I used to have a really twisted idea of how people thought. For instance, I used to think that if people offered you food, that they didn't really want you to take their food. Why would you *want* someone to take things from you? I mean, I was a kid at the time and I used to think a lot of weird things. But even into my teen years, I was so incredibly out of touch with what people thought, that I became obsessed with trying to figure it out. I used to go to the public library to read psychology books. Unfortunately, I studied B. F. Skinner too much not knowing at the time how wildly disproved he was. The Brits figured psychology out while us dumb Americans had our hands tied with backwards Lamarkian thinking from otherwise smart people like Franz Boas. More anti-Darwin, religious, rejectionist thinking that wrapped up American psychology into punishment and reward learning rather than through environmental coping. To put simply, how do you learn how to speak a language using only reward and punishment? That was thing big point Noam Chomsky used to break down the entire American psychology paradigm in the early 1900s. But that started my curiosity in people.

By the time I was out of high school, I used music to communicate and express myself. I avoided talking to people if I could. I still do that, and I don't really understand why I do. But it was worse in my 20s. I had a learning disability that made it difficult for me to decipher human speech. But I eventually over came that around my early 20s and now I do fine. Am I still afraid people will talk to me and I won't understand them? I don't think that's it. For some reason, it just really bothers me thinking that people will talk to me. I'm ok talking to people if there's a function to it. But "How are you? Good to see you," conversations, I really try and avoid even to the point of hiding from people in hallways that I think might spark up such a conversation. I like chatting on the internet though, since I don't have to use my ears.

I've heard that some think Albert Einstein couldn't have been autistic because he was noted as having a great sense of humor. But was that natural or learned? I'm pretty good at making people laugh. In fact, I actually love giving class presentations or teaching in general. When I taught computers at Twin Oaks elementary school to 4-6th graders, one of the other teachers told me she could always tell when I was teaching because the kids laughed a lot. I used to go out to dance clubs a lot with friends, and I would do really silly dances not at all afraid to embarrass myself for a laugh from my friends. But I'd avoid talking whenever I could. It was so relaxing for me, not to have to concentrate hard enough to be able to understand people. People around me used to act like I was deaf and ask my friends about me as if I couldn't hear them. That's pretty weird to think about that. For my foreign language requirements in college, of course I took American Sign Language and enjoyed it.

Whatever social skills I have, isn't natural for me, but are a result of a lot of study and effort. I think about this sometimes as I watch The Big Bang Theory. It's the funniest sit com I've ever seen. The command Jim Parsons has over his facial expressions, timing, and control is amazing. His character, Sheldon, really doesn't seem strange to me. I identify with that character a lot.

As for repetitive motions, I'm not going to admit to what it is exactly I do, other than I've poured over tons of abnormal psychology journals and texts, and never found any other example of it. It's probably just a strange OCD thing I have. No one has ever caught me doing it, so it's obviously pretty slight. It makes no sense to me, but does make me feel better to keep doing it. It's not really a routine exactly, more of a reaction. I do have routines, but probably nothing more unusual than what most people have. Everyone has something weird that they do. The only really common one I have is hand washing, though it's not obsessive. When I used to be a brick layer, I used to keep a bucket of water by me so I could wash mortar off my hands about every 20 seconds, but that's an extreme example. Otherwise, I only wash my hands if there's dirt on them or I'm about to eat--probably only 10 times a day on average.

Sensitivity to sensations is a big thing for me. Even if I have my windows rolled up in my car, I just about always have to cover my ears if an emergency vehicle passes baring a siren. If someone close to me yells unexpectedly, it can hurt my ears. Certain frequencies of power tools bother me. When I worked construction, I refused to use a skillsaw. I'd either cut steel rebar with a hacksaw or ask someone else to do it. And if someone else used a skillsaw to do it, I'd cover my ears and move away. I still really hate that sound. When I go to the dentist, I had to ask the dentist to stop using a certain drill attachment because the sound frequency of it drove me crazy.

It's not just sounds. Bright lights bother me. I hate going outside during the day. If I wasn't part native american, I'd probably be really pale. Sunlight rarely touches my skin, and if it does, it doesn't for long.

Some smells really bother me. I don't mean because they smell bad. But I'm really sensitive to some perfumes or scented candles. Flowery smells can make me feel like my air pipe is swelling up and I can't breathe.

Put these things together, and I do fit the category of a high functioning autistic. But there's a few reasons why I believe I'm not one. For one, autistics are very detail oriented and have trouble seeing the big picture. I'm the opposite there. I'm really good at figuring out how large groups of systems fit together for an over arching concept, but I can easily get lost in details. Also, I sometimes have difficulty focusing on things unless I'm really interested in them. Although not all autistics show signs at childhood. I certainly didn't. But when they do, they're generally difficult for parents to deal with. I heard a story of one parent that used to threaten to sing to her autistic child unless he started behaving. For the child, the sound of women singing was deeply upsetting, so it was a threat that worked. I didn't have any kind of symptom like that as a child. I was the exact opposite. According to my mom, she forgot about me a lot because I always played with blocks and cars without making a sound. In fact, even to this day, I can sit in complete silence for hours at a time. That's pretty creepy, actually. Solitary confinement probably wouldn't bother me at all. In fact, if I was ever falsely convicted of something horrible and went to jail, I'd keep breaking rules so I could go there instead of a cell with others.

But if I was autistic, it might explain why everyone in the world seems so weird to me. And why I so very, very rarely find people I can remotely relate to. When I was really young, my father taught me the principles of Buddhism. Concepts like honor, honesty, justice... they made a lot of sense to me. These are not buddhist concepts exactly, but they work nicely with it. They seemed like universal truths to me, and I had a deep sense of the world, thinking that everyone must feel the same because it was manifest. As I got older, and better able to understand others around me, I grew horrified when I'd see people lie or cheat. It still really bothers me. And my father who taught me these values? Turns out they're not any more important to him than most people. Growing up, he used to tell me to lie for him and I refused to. This might seem silly, but I dated this woman, and it really bothered me that she cheated on her taxes. I didn't say anything to her about it, but it really did.

I make mistakes. I believe in honesty, but sometimes I slip up and say things that aren't true. I sometimes do it when I feel insecure and exaggerate something about me to try and make people like me. It's futile. I mean, if I say something superficial in hopes of getting someone to like me for a superficial reason, then they don't really like me for me, and thus, it brings me no comfort.

Ok, enough stalling. I'm still on Chap 1 of my novel. Getting the setting right is hard. Once I have that, the rest should go fast.