Migrating.

In favor of more control over my blog, I've made the switch to Wordpress and a new location! I'm still setting everything up, but it's totally functional. It probably looks better than Blogspot already, even though I haven't tweaked everything yet.

Sorry for confusing everyone again, but you can now find me here.

Update your links accordingly!

Breaking the Silence.

Happy REAL birthday to me! Half of the two of you who read this will get that!

I should have known I was dooming myself when I decided not to post again until I could say I had a job.

I guess I got one, though! I'll be starting next Monday at Novartis. You might recognize some of the things they make. It's not quite in the IE field, but it's a great first step and they've got some killer benefits, so I'm pretty happy either way. On the down side, it's second shift (2:30-11:00pm), so I'll hardly see Lex and there'll be no more Old Chicago on Thursdays for me.

On the up side, that fits in nicely with my regular sleep schedule!

Lex and I put in our application for an apartyment in Gretna which we should be moving into shortly after Labor Day, so I'd say things are looking pretty up.

I'll try to throw more up here when I'm actually feeling inspired. I think that's all I've got for now!

Who'da thunk it?

Pretty sweet.


"Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes"

Politics and Bushisms.

This is me trying to set up a party. It's why I'm much more comfortable with Lex at the helm when it comes to planning that wedding thing.

In other news, last real week of classes! Yay! I think that means I'm graduating! A- Anyone looking for an Industrial Engineer?

I usually try to stay away from politics (well, publically commenting on them, anyway), but I'm in that special mood tonight, so let's clear the air before I begin.

I think the people who read this on a (semi)regular basis know me well enough to have an idea of where I stand politically, but, for those who don't, be warned! I rant hardcore and I don't descriminate when it comes to political parties.

I've got two stories to go off about today, but they have a strange similarity. See if you can spot it!

Bush Gets Math, Part One:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/24/gas.investigation/index.html

I couldn't find a full news story yet, but Bush has decided to go ahead with the probes into gas prices.

Let me see if I've got this straight. Gas prices are, what, about twice what they were at this time last year and he's just now figuring out that maybe gas companies aren't playing us straight? I guess he must listen to Rush Limbaugh. That brilliant pillar of democracy said the other day that it's all "capitalism" and that we should really be paying even more for gas than we are, given inflation and a host of other factors.

Now, I'm willing to admit that taxes (mostly state taxes, to be specific) are part of the problem, but I learned about collusion in 10th grade freakin' econ. Apparently, some people missed that day of class. It's when companies that are supposed to be competing under a capitalist system act as a monopoly (in tandem) towards a mutually beneficial situation. Yes, I know the definition is more general than that, but I thought I'd add a bit of application.

With, what, three major gas companies all having nearly exactly the same price and raising prices together, rather than vying for the low price and the jackpot of customers, I don't think it takes a genius to realize that it's probably not all just the "war in Iraq"!

So Americans are buying less gas, but oil companies are still posting profit increases.

YES IS SEE HOW THERE IS PROBABLY NO FOUL PLAY INVOLVED


Bush Gets Math, Part Two:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1883500

This one really gets me irritated. First of all, let's have a pop quiz. When the government releases an estimate of a negative factor, regardless of who is in office, what usually happens to that number?

Right! Its severity is usually somewhat moderately underestimated!

So, when the government says we have 12 million illegals in the US right now, what is the number closer to? Probably 20! I'll be kind and give them 16.

Either way, Bush knows numbers! He knows that we don't have the manpower to round up all those illegals and drop them off back at the border. Thank you, Captain Obvious!

But wait! There's more! Bush gives that as his reason for wanting his amnesty program. What's he missing? Math, of course!

But first, another pop quiz! What will happen to illegals' families if they are given amnesty and citizenship?

You guessed it! The law allows said family to legally join the previously illegal alien.

Now for the math! 16 million immigrants times (a conservative estimate of) 2 immediate family members (defined as spouses and any children who are unmarried and under 21) equals 32 million immigrants! If this number were to be closer to 3? 48 million! What if it's closer to 4? I think you get the picture.

Congratulations, politicians! You have a new voter base! And they're even legal this time!

So far, I've only defined the problem. Of course, we can't find all the illegals and deport them, but what if we started enforcing our own laws? What if we paid a little more attention to businesses who would hire illegal aliens? With the INS now belonging to Homeland Defense, that's not likely, but there are still things we can do: Stop spending money on them. Stop spending public money for their children to attend our schools. Stop letting them cross to get "free" treatment in our hospitals - not only is it costing huge amounts of money, but it's beginning to overcrowd hospitals near the border, taking care away from legal citizens who need help. I'm not saying we should let them die on our doorstep, but there are people who come here specifically for it and recieve treatment before our own citizens. There are women who cross the border illegally and have babies (who are then given full citizenship)! Stop the welfare! If those things were ended, it wouldn't take two weeks for half of them to go back and apply to come here legally. But why come here legally when we're offering them a way to skip to the head of the line? This policy won't control our borders. It will increase the flow.

And another thing - they're not doing jobs Americans won't do! They're stealing jobs from our lower class citizens (who, in turn, really do have trouble finding work) by appealing to filthy businessmen who would rather pay pennies to illegals than pay a fair wage for the job. This denies good Americans opportunities to live independently and advance themselves.

These companies want slaves, so they exploit illegals, who have no legal retort to mistreatment. Illegal immigrants are the child labor of our generation. They work in deplorable conditions for next to nothing, and our government is endorsing it!

Bush Knows Números.

A Conspiracy Theory.

You may want to have a look at this site for background on the comic's somewhat political motivation, but the comic's funny either way!

I know! Another post already! I wouldn't normally, but I wanted to mention this here, as long as no one minds a conspiracy theory that I found sort of interesting.

It goes like this:

While there's probably not any direct communication between the major players in the current Iran nuclear conflict (for the sake of simplicity, let's call them the "United States of America" and "Iran"), both groups are using the conditions that exist and manipulating them towards the same religiously-motivated end: Armageddon.

Now, before you laugh it off, think about this: Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad desires to call back the 12th Imom, named Mahdi, who supposedly fell down a well as a child sometime in the first century. It is believed that it will take massive loss of life to call him up from the well.

Actually, here's an article that sort of explains his beliefs in more detail, but if you want the quick and dirty, a good quote is:

He sees his main mission, as he recounted in a Nov. 16 speech in Tehran, as to "pave the path for the glorious reappearance of Imam Mahdi, may Allah hasten his reappearance."

According to Shiites, the 12th imam disappeared as a child in the year 941. When he returns, they believe, he will reign on earth for seven years, before bringing about a final judgment and the end of the world.

What does that remind you of?

It's pretty well-known that there are extremist Christians who are interested in speeding about the coming of end times as well. It's also pretty well-known that our President is a pretty Christian dude. The conspiracy theory takes its stretch at this point:

It asserts that President Bush and possibly many members of his staff are aiming to bring end times about as well. In the Bible, there's an event, given as a precursor to Armageddon, in which 1/3 of the world's population dies rather abruptly.

I'm sure by now you can see where this is going: Iran wants to trigger a game of nuclear football to bring about the end times, and it is asserted that other major players (ie. the US) wants to bring them about as well - we're all heading toward an event of catastrophic proportion.

I can certainly dig up more information if people would like, but that's the gist of it.

What do you dudes think? It's interesting, to say the least! The more I think about it, the creepier it gets!

W- Will Blog for Employment?

I, too, loathe car alarms. Ryan North is right again!

I know, I know, my 3.61 person mean readership is totally dying for an update. Okay, probably not! Besides, if you're reading this for any kind of personal news about me, you should probably just read Alexis' blog instead.

Every time I think about posting something, there are either too few or too many things that need to be said. After that, I think about how everything I post will look like a terrible mass of text because I can't put two spaces behind my sentences and I find myself utterly unmotivated. I'm totally seething right now. Maybe I should use underscores instead._ Yeah._ I almost like that._ Almost.

Either way, I've been pretty busy, and when I haven't been pretty busy, I've been playing a little Suikoden, which maybe I can touch on a bit, since I'm just ignoring homework and sitting in the Union anyway. Suikoden is a decent game, but it does maybe have a bit of the usual RPG feel to it. It has a few more uncommon types of battles (one-on-one and army based), but it really breaks down to the normal party-style battles, where you have to tell each character what to do 30 times, even though it's always the same thing. To its credit, it has a "Free Will" selection in party battles, but it's really only useful when there are one or two weak enemies left to finish off. Any more than that and there are simply more efficient ways to dispense damage than each character simply doing a regular attack on a random target.

Other than that, it's a pretty swell game, even if it feels a bit primitive for the PSX, and I'll leave it at that, because I'm pretty sure Jason's the only one who really cares about Suikoden 'round these parts!

In other news, they're doing a remake of The Ten Commandments. Now, your gut reaction, like mine, might be "What was wrong with Charlton Heston, you commies? He's only the friggin' man!", but then you'd be discounting the other original. So I guess what you really should be asking is "What was wrong with the Bible, you commies? The Word of God's not good enough for you anymore?" I think the only solution is to continue to freshen and remake every aspect of our society every, say, 30 or so years. We're already doing it, and Heston's version was totally pushing 50 anyway. A- And let's not forget that Hollywood's pretty much out of original material at this point - everything's been done. All I'm saying is that it won't be as good!

Some of you may have heard about a random dog that showed up on our deck that we very nearly adopted before finding his owners. He was pretty sweet. I guess he showed up again yesterday or something and then left later of his own volition.

I know I'm forgetting a lot of things that I planned to say in this post, but this is getting long again and my palm keeps bumping the touchpad and moving my cursor up into my Charlton Heston paragraph, so I'd say this is all you're getting for now (and probably more than you wanted).

Also, is smaller text okay? Better? Worse? Too hard to read?

I might have to watch Cocktail tonight._ I'm totally in the mood!

PS: Bee Boxing!

Too bad I didn't take a camera!

I don't think I've ever cried at a movie either.

Dallas was a fun time! The trip was longer than anyone expected it to be, which means that we were all pretty much burned out on Texas, but we had time to do everything we wanted. The teams mostly played night games, so we had more than a few days to waste walking around aimlessly.

The "X" on the street where Kennedy was shot is probably the most underemphasized historical marking imaginable. It was almost like the dude painting the lines in the street had to stop really hard or something because it was the same white paint and was even wearing off from the pavement. I guess I was expecting at least tacky Christmas lights and a small casino. And when people say "the grassy knoll" I guess that's a cool name and all, but it's seriously the size of most suburban front lawns. Some things about that assassination were put into perspective for me!

We went up Reunion Tower for awhile - it was very windy and pretty boring until we figured out that the Frisbee I had with me would hug the outside and fly pretty much all the way around the thing. Good thing there were no security people up there!

There were a lot of tasty eats for reasonable prices, which we weren’t expecting, so I guess I’ve got some eating advice for people going to Dallas now!

We stayed up way too late in the pool and hot tub pretty much every night and only got caught twice.

Also, the men’s team made it to the semi-finals in the tourney, which was totally awesome (they haven’t even won a game in this tourney since ’99). I guess they’re in the NIT, which is better than nothing!

This got long fast, so that’s enough for now! Maybe I’ll post more later if I can coerce my friend into sending me some of the photos.