PATRIOT Act Again... will it never end?

When will it end? I can't believe that the conservative right is calling democrats wimps on security because we don't want our right to privacy taken away. Will it help make the world safer to have unrestricted access to our homes, phone conversations, e-mails, internet-activity. No. Basically any aspect of your life you think is private can be montiored by the government legally under the USA PATRIOT act. What's next, camera's in the bedrooms, bathrooms, and elevators? If the government has some suspicion of wrong doing they should be forced to get a warant from a judge to pry into that persons life, that way there is a check in place to make sure the government is not abusing its rights. Call us wimps, tell us we flip-flop on issues, say whatever you want but do not take our right to privacy away. To anyone that reads this: please post on your blog, post responses on other blogs, or post anywhere to spread the idea that invasion of privacy under the PATRIOT act is not going to make the US safer, and is only going to bring us closer to totalitarian government.

Nostalgia in Photographs

Here are some photos I put up last night:

From left/top to bottom/right:
1. Chris at the top of Mt. Pilchuck in the Cascade mountains. 2. Amber and I in New York, where did that double chin come from? Am I really that fat, my God I have to get on some diet. 3. Brent, Jim, and I infront of the statue of Stalin in Fremont. 4. Jennifer and Derek at the Gorge in George to see Pearl Jam. And what an incredible show it was also. 5. Brent, me, Derek, Troy, Jim, at the Red Door in Fremont for my going-away party. Sad. 6. My Brother and I standing ontop of the wall surrounding the city of Dubrovnik, Croatia. That was an incredible little city and the beachs nearby were some of the most beautiful I have ever seen. 7. Me, half naked in the Adriatic Ocean, just outside of the city of Split in Croatia. 8. Marching Isreali troops at the Aushweitz concentration camp in Poland. They marched to the opposit end of the campground to play music and give several speeches to morn the death of all of the Jews, and others killed there and else where during the Holocaust. I put this picture up to remind people of the tradgedy that occured and also to remind people that coming up soon is the Jewish holiday of Hanukka, not just the Christian worship of Santa Claus known as Christmas.

You can see these pictures and more on my Flickr site here.

Ninjas in Boston?

I'm not sure why ninjas have decided that Boston is their home town, but I have seen so many ninjas in the past few days that I thought I should let the rest of the world know about them. My theory is as so: It is so cold right now in Boston (well really the entire New England area but I live in Boston, and have not been outside to see if the ninjas are as bountiful, so we will stick with Boston as their home town) that the ninjas must feel that we are so weak that they no longer need to turn invisible and kill us with numchuks and ninja stars. Instead they are free to walk around the streets in plain sight. Unbelievable. If the ninja elders knew what was going on in this progressive ninja city they would not approve; I assume. Another part of the theory is that it gets darker here in the winter quicker than further south so they feel more comfortable. Even if they aren’t completely invisible they are not easily noticeable.
For your consideration I have posted a rough sketch of what I consider to be the most common forms of ninja walking the streets of Boston (click on the image for a larger veiw):

The first sketch on the left is of a female ninja as can be seen by the thin eye brows and lighter shade of gray for the eyes. The second is a pretty common ninja that has holes in the mouth area to help him breath. I’m not sure of the reasoning for this other than this type of ninja must do a lot of running and jumping from roof-top to roof-top. The third is drawn as a male ninja but actually appears in this area as both genders equally, and I call this ninja the “Snow Ninja”. Snow ninjas tend to wear big jackets with the fake fur lining in the hood with a scarf wrapped around their face up to the nose at which point the eyes are visible and then the rest of the head is covered by secret, proprietary, ninja garments. Please, if you have any more information on the ninja concentration in Boston please let me know.

Update: I have been told that these are not actual ninjas but instead just stupid Harvard/MIT kids that are trying to prevent the cold from reaching their faces as they walk to class. Of course that is ridiculous, I know what a ninja looks like first off because I was raised in the wild by a ninja for a year when my parents couldn’t look after me. And secondly, how dare you second guess me! This is my blog damn it.

Why is Chuck Norris Awesome?

So some of this was posted a while ago, and some of it I just recently read from a MySpace bulletin. All of it equals funny.

- Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

- When Chuck Norris has sex with a man, it is not because he is gay, but because he has run out of women.

- Macgyver can build an airplane out of gum and paper clips, but Chuck Norris can kill him and take it.

- Chuck Norris once roundhouse kicked someone so hard that his foot broke the speed of light, went back in time, and killed Amelia Earhart while she was flying over the Pacific Ocean.

- Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

- If you ask Chuck Norris what time it is, he always says, "Two seconds till." After you ask, "Two seconds to what?" he roundhouse kicks you in the face.

- Chuck Norris only masturbates to pictures of Chuck Norris.

- Rather than being birthed like a normal child, Chuck Norris instead decided to punch his way out of his mother's womb. Shortly thereafter he grew a beard.

- Chuck Norris lost his virginity before his dad did.

- Since 1940, the year Chuck Norris was born, roundhouse kick related deaths have increased 13,000 percent.

- Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn't stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.

- Filming on location for Walker: Texas Ranger, Chuck Norris brought a stillborn baby lamb back to life by giving it a prolonged beard rub. Shortly after the farm animal sprang back to life and a crowd had gathered, Chuck Norris roundhouse kicked the animal, breaking its neck, to remind the crew once more that Chuck giveth, and the good Chuck, he taketh away.

- Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

- Chuck Norris built a time machine and went back in time to stop the JFK assassination. As Oswald shot, Chuck met all three bullets with his beard, deflecting them. JFK's head exploded out of sheer amazement.

- Chuck Norris is not hung like a horse... horses are hung like Chuck Norris.

- Chuck Norris was the fourth Wiseman. He brought baby Jesus the gift of "beard". Jesus wore it proudly to his dying day. The other Wisemen, jealous of Jesus' obvious gift favoritism, used their combined influence to have Chuck omitted from the Bible. Shortly after all three died of roundhouse kick related deaths.

- To prove it isn't that big of a deal to beat cancer. Chuck Norris smoked 15cartons of cigarettes a day for 2 years and aquired 7 different kinds of cancer only to rid them from his body by flexing for 30 minutes. Beat that, Lance Armstrong.

- There are no disabled people. Only people who have met Chuck Norris.

- Chuck Norris does not have AIDS but he gives it to people anyway.

- Chuck Norris uses ribbed condoms inside out, so he gets the pleasure.

- There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist.

- Chuck Norris once lined up to kick the winning field goal of a high school football game. When the football went flat, he persuaded the referees to let him kick the field goal with a 3 month old child. Chuck roundhouse kicked the baby 60 yards through the uprights and then proceeded to bang every girl in the stadium.

- The original theme song to the Transformers was actually "Chuck Norris--more than meets the eye, Chuck Norris--robot in disguise," and starred Chuck Norris as a Texas Ranger who defended the earth from drug-dealing Decepticons and could turn into a pick-up. This was far too much awesome for a single show, however, so it was divided.

- The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain.

- Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.

Drug-a-licious

Last night I went to the People's Republik here in Boston. I got all in the mood to discuss ideas of socialism, democracy, revolution, etc. Instead, however, me and a friend, and one of his friends nerded out and talked about the future of Google and Microsoft and other such computer-nerd stuff. But revolutionary thought was still on my mind and I went to meet up with some other friends at the Common Ground on Harvard Ave. There the conversation quickly turned to how I have to act in Boston to be able to pick up girls, which is not one of my favorite topics because everyone says the same thing and it never makes any difference. Anyway, I really wanted to get back into intellectual thinking so a friend and I smoked a lot of weed after we left the bar and stayed up listening to my improve rap and his drumming. That was good stuff, well really bad stuff I should say, but fun to listen to. As high as I was I thought maybe my creativity would be at pak performance... oh how wrong I was. Here now, for your viewing pleasure is a small fraction of what I wrote last night at 3:30am while stoned out of my mind:

Forever away. Locked in the smithies room. Where could I have come from, where will I be. Here amongst the giants[sic] past the time of the greats. I’m locked in a sphere of octagons.

Triangular is the shadow that falls past your head. Cylindrical is the free weight hanging above your head? What shall we do?

What shall we do indeed! The question bestows the indolence from which it deserves. For no man can resist the temptation of the holy vessel.

The insolence of man will be justified by the presence of sulfoxides and chlorobenzines. If only the.

Holy half past the time of despair. Where in the love of god am I, definitely not at the keyboard. Never to go near the key board again. When shall this become important?

Is this proof that weed does not stimulate creativity but instead inhibits rational thought? I think so.

Halloween Party

Here are some pictures from the Halloween party I was at last night. I'm the guy wearing the Girls Gone Wild shirt and on the back it says Crew. I have a really red tongue from all the Jell-O shots. I don't remember who the guy pointing at the camera is but I thought it was a cool picture so I put it up.

New To Boston

There are few things in life more relaxing to me than the infinite number of white specks of snow stretching up, seemingly an infinite distance, to the sky. I can sit here at my desk and stare out the window for hours at a time watching all the white flakes fall, conjuring up strange ideas of my life and the world around me. Recently, actually only three days ago, I moved to Boston from Seattle. I finally got my Internet connection set up here at home and I was thinking of something to post and I looked out the window only to find it was snowing. It’s not as if I have never seen snow before but it was not common in Seattle and almost completely absent in California, so I get very excited.

My first night in Boston I went to a birthday party for Ian and his girlfriend who are my friend Ben’s friends. We went to the Cambridge Common and I proceeded to get a little too drunk because I didn’t know anyone there and I felt I needed to be social in order to make some new friends. Needless to say, I don’t really remember anyone’s name anymore. Oh well. The next day I just relaxed and watched comedy shows on HBO in order to get ready for the next night when I would get to see my friend Heather. That night we went to some bar/restaurant to get dinner and a few drinks. Then we went and met up with Ben’s girlfriend at another bar. Before even going out I took several shots of whiskey and then once out I had a few more drinks. It was a lot of fun. There weren’t too many people for me to have to meet so I got a chance to hang out and talk to Heather for a while, which was nice. I am now in my room about to get ready for a Halloween party tonight where I will be wearing a Girls Gone Wild: Cameraman shirt. I’ll also bring my digital camera so hopefully I will have some interesting photos to post tomorrow. If anyone has any suggestions for bars or places to visit in the Boston area then I would much appreciate hearing about it.

The Beautiful Washington Coast

Troy, Jeremy, and I went to the coast this last weekend and had some fun taking pictures using a high shutter speed to capture us in mid air jumping off a little sand dune on the beach. Here as some of the pictures click on them to get the larger size photos from flickr.com.

Old Journal Entries After September 11th

Some of these are depressing, ignorant, or completely usless to most people but I was just going through some of the files on my old computer and found a lot of old journal entries that I found interesting and seeing as this is my blog I thought I would post some of the less boring ones.

9/13/01:
Sorrow and fear fills me because of the recent New York terrorist attack on the 11th. Around 5000 people are presumed dead, all of them innocent people. I have no connection to anyone in New York and this makes it a little less traumatic. I can not believe that there are so many people saying shit like, " bomb them all." I mean come on people what would that solve? It might get rid of Osama Bin Laden but not the source of our problems, which is the hatred of America for oppressing Muslim people. However, I believe that the majority of Muslims that hate America are raised to think that we are doing far worse to their way of life than we really are. The US has killed many people also for the sole reason of keeping “unruly regimes” from coming to power, just look at our history with South and Central America. Of course the Taliban is different, they have attacked us multiple times and have declared Jihad against us, so I can understand the need to break up these terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. These governments form purely from ancient religious beliefs, especially concerning the occupation of the West Bank in Israel. The Muslims believe they should have the land and the Jews believe otherwise. I believe that it is all worthless land, historically interesting but no more than a museum. This war over the West Bank has been long and hard fought, and what will be the outcome of one side winning? Nothing but a lot of dead people. This brings me back to the point of why some Muslims hate America so much, they think we support another religion (the Jews), and they think we support them against the Muslims, but really we support them for completely non-religious reasons. Our reason for support is to protect and spread the influence of capitalism and democracy to the rest of the world. This, in my opinion, is a very noble cause as long as we don't kill many people to force this ideal on others. However, supporting democracy by supporting Isreal with weapon power will also not succeed for the sole reason that religion controls the governments of many other countries and that needs to be taken into account when developing a foreign policy. Religion, as much as I despise it, can be a good thing for people as long as they use it as a way of understanding themselves and their life. Also, it can be good as long as it is not used as a way of segregating people, which is what has happened constantly throughout history. The United Nations will most likely attack the Taliban and in response they will attack us again through terrorism. Many people are going to die, and unfortunately this can not be avoided now unless the US decides to change its foreign policy.
On a lighter note, I believe that _______ is getting closer to me. I have been infatuated with her for a very long time and I would really like to be intimate with her. I say she is getting closer to me because of the feelings, or vibes, I was getting from her at the bar a few nights ago. She always seemed to be close to me and even asked for a hug at the end of the night. Ahhh yeah, she has some pretty incredible breasts that got rubbed up against me that night. Oh the things that turn us guys on that girls don't even think about, or at least don't lead us to believe they think about.


9/19/01:
To let wind blow through my hair, while standing on top a hill full of the history of England. Or to watch the waves break on the beaches of Maui, as the sun goes down. This is all I ask for in life. I do not ask for riches or power, all I ask is peace and enjoyment. The world seems as if it is against these goals of mine. No matter how hard I try I will not have the simplicity of life that I want unless I undergo the hardships of an extremely complex life first. This is not how humans should live. We are here, as Aristotle puts it, "to meditate and contemplate." Not to gain power, but understanding; not to fight, but appreciate; not to hate, but to love. I hope one day I attain these most simple of goals, and until then I will meditate and contemplate the means by which I will gain them.

9/23/01:
It seems as if a lot is going through my head, but, really, the same thoughts keep passing through. I need to stop drinking so much alcohol. A glass of wine here and there is okay but drinking so much that I forget the night and can't control my behavior is not acceptable. I fear that tonight I had a break down. It wasn't a real one though, it was completely fabricated by me for some unknown reason. Maybe to make others appreciate me more, but I think that the real reason is that I wanted to feel some sort of love. A false love is better than no love at all. To be alone without any prospect of a good future is more than anyone can handle. Some might say that I have a good life, my parents are wealthy, I don't work that hard, and I have a nice house but let me list the things I feel as if I don't have: a future, love, good friends, peace. These are all things that most humans should have, sort of as a guarantee for being born. I feel as if I have nothing. I had a girlfriend but I didn't love her, and for that I should go to hell if there is such a place. I did love her sometimes. After making love, I would look at her and fully appreciate everything about her, or even when she would come home, depressed, and I was able to make her laugh. But it was not unconditional love, I did not feel as if I could spend my life with her, or even more than the year. I did do things for her, I did them in order to make her want me more, a sort of trap to make sure I wouldn't be the one with a broken heart in the end. Despicable. She attempted suicide, her only way out. My trap had worked far better than I could have ever imagined or wanted. The only redemption I can get is that she is still alive. Tonight I will sleep a restless sleep for the knowledge that my life is far less than significant.

2/3/02:
And the end seemed near. No. I could never end it like this; depressed beyond mortal comprehension, blurry eyes from despair, and my stomach felt as if I hadn't eaten in three weeks. It was bleak, no doubt, but I would not kill myself. Most people would have died by now, but not me, I felt stronger than most, yet weak at the same time. My mental durability was strong enough that it would last forever, even through the hardest times anyone could possibly imagine. Sure there have been people to endure more than me but it is a person to person problem. I feel as if the world has taken a shit on me and left me here to clean up its mess. A mess that I have no control over, yet it is all my fault. The turmoil inside is much worse than a roller coaster, and yet so much quieter and unknown. I fear that I have entered the abyss, point of no return, I can no longer appreciate life, nor death. I am nothing, a complete waste of space and time, though I do see an end, the tunnel of light so-to-speak. That light comes with love, and love is long forgotten by me but not completely. I need companionship, not necessarily a woman, though that would be nice, but friends that I feel I can trust completely, that I get to see all the time and that enjoy seeing me as much as possible.

Religion

Well, it’s time. Time for the world to admit that they were wrong about religion. How far are we really going to takes this? I mean we still have fanatical groups claiming that Jesus will be reborn in the year 2016! When they are wrong then we will have similar groups that say 2027; it will never end until we start to treat these types of people the same way that we treat insane humans that get locked up in a treatment facility because they believe something absurd such as Elvis is still alive and has been telling them to do incredulous activities. This is all just ridiculous. Belief should be based off of what can be predicted, i.e. we believe in the theory of gravity because when we drop a ball it will fall to the ground at a speed that can be predicted. This is still a belief, it is not fact: someday a ball may fall faster than it does today, in fact it is likely based off of the new physics that are being calculated everyday. But! And this is a big BUT! We are still going to be able to predict how the object will fall, regardless of the gravitational variable that changes extremely slowly over time.

Okay so what about the unknowns? What happens after death? Well, let’s watch the fourth grade tape again that we've all seen of what happens to a fox in a field as it decomposes. It decays. Bacteria and all sorts of parasites consume the body and soon there is hardly anything left but bones. This is because once the heart stops beating blood no longer flows and antibodies and immune cells are no longer able to reach the parasites, nor is oxygen able to get to the cells and they quickly become destroyed. Is this proof that there is no God? No. There will never be proof that there is no God and there will never be proof that there is a God, I am simply pointing out what happens with death. Notice I didn't mention that we see a soul float up out of the body and walk up a fleet of stairs to some pearly gates where that soul then gets judged by a saint for all its wrong doings. Nope didn't see that in the video did we? That is because it does not happen. Similarly, there will never be a proof that a rock will fall at a constant speed forever, there will only be a theory that it will fall at some predictable speed. The difference between theories of gravity and the idea of God is that the first helps us make predictions of the future, the latter does nothing to help us at all with anything other than to make some, extremely paranoid, people feel better about the idea of death. Death will happen to us all and should not be feared nor should it be revered, it is simply the end of life.

So the moral of this post: lock up the loonies because we have to do something about this epidemic that doesn’t seem to want to go away. Although there is a new cult spreading that involves an intelligent creator of the heavens that is a Flying Spaghetti Monster that seems to be pretty interesting... maybe there is something to religion after all.

Wearer's of Black and Brown Unite

Why is it that a black shirt and brown shoes don't match? Or the fashion police tell you that a brown belt and black shoes is against the law? I say: Fuck that. Brown looks great with black. Not to mention Navy blue looks awsome with black as well. Some stupid fashion freak, an ultra elitest, pretentious bitch, once tried to hit on a guy that was wearing black and brown and he wanted nothing to do with that slutty ho-bag and so she took it upon herself (or himself if we want to flip the gender roles, but it is women that have been giving me a hard time about the colors I choose so I will stick with the female gender for now) to spread the inane idea that those colors (or lack of color if you are a physicist, or all colors if you are a painter) do not match. This idea is ridiculous and propagation of this irrelevant and ludicrous fashion trend should be halted immediately. Black looks good with anything. In fact the only colors that do not match are hot pink with anything else. Well I guess any of the neon colors of the 80's don't match with any other colors but I could be biased against them because of my hatred towards the 80's. It was the worst decade in human history, as far as creativity is concerned. Obviously the wars durring 1914-19, 1939-45, 1957-75 made for some pretty horrible times but a lot of good things did come out of those times. Try to think of one good thing that came from the 80's? Yep, thats right there wasn't one good piece of art, music, or major scientific breakthough in all ten years. Oh sure people will say, "what about the personal computer? Or the internet?" but what good have they brought about other than free and better porn for us? Not that I'm saying I don't like some porn now and then (okay porn is great but...). Okay I've started off on a tangent that shouldn't be followed. I might have digressed to the point of no return I fear. For some reason I still want to rave about porn... bad idea I'll stop now.

USA Patriot Act Revisited Again

Provision 213 authorizes “surreptitious search warrants and seizures upon a showing of reasonable necessity and eliminates the requirement of Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that immediate notification of seized items be provided."

What is reasonable necessity? Is it reasonable for the government to be able to obtain information from an Internet Service Provider without a Judicial Warrant? Anything posted to the internet (e-mail, websites, FTP sites) can be investigated without warrant. This is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the FBI and CIA act perfectly conscionable, but the world is not perfect and the USA Patriot act has no checks or balances to make sure that what it used for is conscionable.
From Wikipedia:
“The FBI ordered a handful of journalists that had written about computer hacker Adrian Lamo to turn over their notes and other information under the auspices of the PATRIOT Act.[18] Supporters of the PATRIOT Act reply that journalists—like all other citizens—are not privileged from being subjected to subpoenas when they possess information relevant to a criminal investigation.
The ACLU filed a countersuit on April 6, 2004 claiming that a section of the USA PATRIOT ACT was unconstitutional because it allowed the FBI to demand financial records and other documents from small businesses without a warrant or judicial approvial. The specific action in question was the request of the FBI for the account information for users of an Internet service provider.
Citing possible secrecy provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Justice barred the ACLU from releasing the text of a countersuit for three weeks. [19] After judicial and congressional oversight, sections of the countersuit that did not violate secrecy rules of the USA PATRIOT ACT were released.”

“Reasonable necessity” could very easily begin to limit our free speech. As more people are becoming afraid to search for and distribute new ideas that are contrary to the governments position we will see less diverse thinking and less distribution of ideas, which further empowers officials to do what they please because people will be too afraid to speak up against them.

Also, if the government seizes items in the search for criminal activity but does not charge that person with any criminal activity then no notification of the seized items (or in this case, most likely: seized information) need occur. That is extremely disturbing. The government can now tap any phone line, receive information from any ISP, or get DNA samples from your house, without you ever knowing about it, and it is legal. There is, as far as I know, no regulation on how that seized information can be used either, as long as the owner of the info is not put in jeopardy. The government could begin tapping phone lines to get information such as relationship affairs, your admitted weaknesses or fears, etc. This could then be used against you in the future in ways that could never be traced to misuse of the USA Patriot act. Of course the government was capable of doing all this before the USA Patriot act but it was not legal, people had the right to deny the government information without worry of prosecution. No longer.

Off to Europe

Well, I am off. My flight is from SFO tomorrow at 9:00 am, so I will be at the airport at the un-Godly hour of 7 am. My brother and I will land in Paris on the 10th around 10 am (we have a lay-over in Texas unfortunately; unfortunate because I try my hardest to stay away from that ultra conservative state that spawned our current President), there we will meet up with my friend Chris. I cannot wait. I have not had a month to do whatever I felt like doing since before I was 16 and old enough to work so this will be an incredible experience for me. I have felt so weighed down by work (I hated my job) and the monotony of life lately that I feel I have become a really boring person. Usually life exudes from my being but as of late I just talk about how shitty the world is and how there is no hope for enjoying one’s self unless you are not working and living on a beach somewhere with a lot of money. This trip, I hope, will change that mentality even though it is only one month away from work.

So, the itinerary is this:
Paris to Prague, Prague to Budapest, Budapest to Zagreb and down to Dubrovnik. From there we do not have any plans except that we need to get back to Paris by the 8th of June. I am thinking I will take a boat from Dubrovnik to Bari, Italy, and then head up to Rome for a few days. Of course, none of this is set in stone, the only hostel we have booked is Le d’Artagnan for the first night in Paris. After that we are free to do as we please. My brother has met a few people from Croatia and the Czech Republic online and has plans to go to a few Goa trance parties while we are there. I will probably not want to go to too many of those and instead get drinks with locals at a bar or club of some sort, but I think a few dance parties, intermingled with lots of drugs, could be fun a couple of times. There will be lots of pictures to post in June when I am back, and I will also have a journal full of thoughts and experiences to share with people at that time. I may post a little while I am out there at an internet café, but probably not much. I will also not send out any mass e-mails updating how I am because I am only gone for one month and I doubt I will really be missed that much in such a short period of time.

Yahoo! can not handle the traffic?

I posted those rap songs Luke and I made last Wednesday onto my Yahoo! Geocites account and half the time I try to link to the songs Yahoo tells me that the bandwidth has been used for the day. Is it really possible that many people are looking at this blog? I mean only two people have bothered to comment on anything in the near two weeks I have had it up and going.

Offically Nerds!

My friend Luke and I decided it was a good idea to have a BBQ at my appartment. That went all fine and dandy but what happened afterwards is for the history books. Maybe a list is the best way to run through the mistakes that were made that night. In order of occurence:

1. Purchased a fifth of vodka (potato vodka so at least we had some class).
2. Purchased a bottle of wine.
3. Luke brought a half rack of beer.
4. All of that alcohol was consumed, mostly between Luke and I. The girls had some beer and a little vodka.
5. The girls left to go to a bar leaving us on our own.
6. We decided it was a good idea to record a rap album.
7. Using GarageBand on my iMac G5 with a new microphone plugged in we recorded 5 songs.
8. Luke puked.
9. 5 am rolled around and we had just finished up track 5 and we were working on the piano line for the next track.
10. Luke puked some more and then convinced me he was okay to drive because he puked out all the alcohol. I am not smart.
11. I passed out on the couch.
12. I got up for work at 9:00 am giving me a good 3 hour night of sleep.
13. Before going to work I recorded the rap for the final track, number six.
14. Decided to share this with the world by posting a couple of our incredibly bad, white-boy, can't sing, really can't free-style, especially after finishing a bottle of vodka and a bottle of wine and some beers, raps.

In our defense it is pretty difficult to come up with something to say that rhyms. Everything in these raps was free style at first but we would mess up occasionally so we would re-record and we basically knew what we were going to say at that point. The only parts that were writen out were the chorus lines (if you can call it that).
So here are the links (Warning: this is really, really, bad rap, by two white boys who have never rapped before) Rap_2, Rap_3, Rap_5, Rap_6
or
Rap_5, Rap_6

The Fix

Okay, so my friend Jim solved the problem of putting tables and images into a Blogger site without having far too much space between the images and the text (as was the problem below that is now fixed). The way to fix it is to remove and returns in the html code since Blogger automatically inserts a break tag into the code. A genius? Maybe. My arch nemesis? Definitely. Thanks Jim.

US Socialist Democratic Model

I have been reading about Sweden's socialist democracy for some time now and I thought that I would try and consolidate some of my ideas on what I think should be implemented in the US. Here is a brief run down of those ideas (More to come later).

Raise taxes. Decrease the tax deductions for having children. Set up government funded day care services so all children age 0-5 will be taken care of so the parents can work. After school programs such as sports and day care will be made mandatory for schools K-8. Increase teachers' salary. This will neither reward nor punish people for having children. The children will be taken care of and educated properly and in a better environment more suited to nurturing ideas of self worth and the importance of knowledge than most inner-city schools are currently capable of accomplishing.

Establish more affordable housing neighborhoods and appartment centers. Set up social programs aimed at helping the poor get loans to purchase homes and learn how to manage debt and other money issues. Just because this is a socialist model does not mean that it is also a communist model; privately owned property is a key aspect of capitalism and should not be excluded from a democratic socialist model. What does need to happen in a socialist model is for the government to support the people who need help, thus the need for affordable housing and more social programs.

Lastly everyone should be insured for health care. Insead of following Sweden's example on this it might be easier to look north a bit at Canada. They have a higher life expectancy than the US and are about equally satisfied with the treatment recived by their doctors, as compaired with insured Americans. More information about this is found on Wikipedia. Health care is obviously important and the fact that there is no guaranteed health care system in the US seems ridiculous to me. Almost all other European countries have some kind of health care for all their citizens. The main argument against this is that most people would automatically get an HMO plan rather than a PPO because HMOs are cheaper. I still think it would possible for you to choose to have a PPO if you were employed. Your company could check some box while filling out their tax return that they have a specified number of employees that are recieving PPO health care package and in that case you would get a deduction. I'm not very familiar with how other countries' helath care systems work so that is all I can say on this topic for now.

Patriot Act Revisited

If the Patriot Act allows the government to tap phone lines without a warrant then what prevents them from keeping tabs on random people and their habits or from spying on private meetings much like the Watergate scandal? For example the government could keep tabs on waiters and how much tip money was made compared to how much was claimed for taxes by recording phone conversations near or after closing time for restaurants. While it is illegal not to claim all your money it is not necessary for the government to get that intrusive. Another example might be if you have a friend who happens to be Muslim and you are discussing fundamentalist Islamic beliefs you may be classified as a potential terrorist making it difficult to go through security at airports. Also, what prevents the government from spying on opposing candidates in an upcoming election? They could find out everything the candidate was going to say or discuss, which would give the President or government official an obvious advantage. Good bye Watergate, hello SS and KGB. All of this is made possible by the Patriot Act and I find it disturbing. Nixon resigned as president for spying; Bush made it legal to spy and for some reason the public seems to love him for it? Go figure. I need to move to France (I would say Sweden but it is cold up there).

Okay, Why is Blogger not Working

I created a table to put the images in the post below titled "Flickr doesn't give enough for free" but for some reason Blogger automatically puts a large break between the text and the table. Any ideas as to how this can be avoided?

The New Travel Plans

Jaguarman suggested going to Germany to see Muenster for the science, tradition, and future. Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be able to go there for monetary reasons. I will be sticking to the cheaper eastern countries. So right now the plan is: Land in Paris then take a train to Prague (maybe my brother and I could stop in southern Germany durring that time, possibly in Munich). We will stay in Prague for a while and then go to down to Budapest. From there our plan is to travel down to the southern tip of Croatia to see Dubrovnik. This is where our plan ends, if we have time maybe we will go to Greece. Maybe we will go to Italy (Rome, as per Jaguarman's suggestion). And, finally, back to Paris for our plane ride back to California.

Flickr doesn't give enough for free.

I want to post pictures and Flickr is a great site but it doesn't give enough free space. So I am forced into using Yahoo!'s GeoCities. I don't know how much space they give away for free but so far I haven't been told to stop uploading images. It is fairly easy to link to also. Here are some images:

Thug Life

I'm making a mixed cd of thug music for Jeremy, and I am having a hard time coming up with a title for the cd. Here are a couple of my last cds that I put together to give you an idea for what I am looking for:

- Bouncy Ass Mother Fuckin' Beats Bitch
- Thugish Rubbish
- 40oz of Thug Juice

Here are a couple of ideas that I have been tossing around for the new title:

- Tip the Two Eleven; Respect for the Crunk Ass Thugz in Heaven
- Thugz (crunk dos once mix); that one was Troy's idea

For those of you who may not know what the dos once is, or in english "two eleven", then I suggest you take a walk down the street, preferably MLK or Rainer Ave, and look for empty cans of malt liquor. What you will most likely see is a lot of Steel Reserve: 211. It is the most dangerous of malt liquors because it has one of the highest alcohol concentrations (8.1%) and it is the cheapest brand you can find. I have heard that the taste is not too delectable but I personally find it to be quite exquisite. I highly suggest getting three 22oz cans and drinking them as fast as possible and just see where the night takes you. In the recent past I tried a high dose of the dos once, two 40oz bottles of the 211. Let's just say that by the end of the night I was spraying random people with a stolen fire extinguisher and riding an old-school skate board as fast as I could down a really steep hill and scraping most of my epidermis off.

Good times.

A little rant about religious evangelicals.

The amount of news surrounding evangelical Christians and how they influenced the vote last November is staggering. Now, with a new pope who rallied for President Bush and against Senator John Kerry in 2004 as a cardinal, will the Evangelical Christians have too much political power? Answer: they already did and now they have more. It is really scary to those of us, including myself, who are atheist (me), agnostic, or spiritual in any other way than the evangelical Christians. Get ready for more demonization of the day-after-pill. Get ready for more teen pregnancies. More teen pregnancy means more poverty, which means more government spending, so why do republicans fight so hard against abortion? Oh right, because they are for a "culture of life". I am so sick of the abortion debate; just because a couple of cells have the ability to turn into a life doesn't mean that it is a conscious living human. Maybe we should ban condoms because it prevents the sperm from fertilizing the egg. Plus, I don't understand why there is such a huge push for abstinence only education for teens when the anti-abortionist conservative evangelicals want so much more life. Well, I guess it actually makes sense since abstinence only education will not work in cutting down the number of teen pregnancies so we will be getting a lot more poverty stricken children soon. Whoohoo! Go team Bush and evangelicals!

Thoughts on Free Will

If all particles in the universe are influenced in predictable ways by the same physical forces then it should be possible to determine the future from any given time because you could just compute where all the particles in question will be after a certain amount of time. From this argument we see that all life has been predetermined and that the future is not of our making but the mearly the logical progression of particles under the influence of the physical forces, right? Stephen Hawking, in his book A Brief History of Time, takes this stand point. But, he brought up the idea that an organism as complicated as humans is still not capable of computing the amount of data necessary to predict the future of anything larger than just a few atoms for a very short period of time in an isolated environment and even that is extremely difficult. So, if we can not predict the future, eventhough it is theoretically possible, then our actions can still be considered free will because unless you already know what the next step is you are still faced with making a decision and no one else will know for certain what the result of that decision will be. So until a computer is invented that can acurately predict the motions and interactions of all the particles in the universe then humans can still consider their choices that of free will.

Another topic that Stephen Hawking didn't really talk about is that of the Heisnberg Uncertainty Principle that states that the more precise the position of a particle is known the less you can know about its momentum. Heisenberg came up with the mathematical proofs for his Uncertainty Principle in 1927 and from that was born todays definition of quantum mechanics. Basically how this relates to the free will discussion is that even if you had a super computer it would have to make a yes or no choice at some point that would decide where that particle is exactly located and that is not entirely possible. It could give each particle a high probability of being in a specific place at a specific time and then make calculations based off of the highest probability but in the real world there is still a slight probability that the particle will be somewhere else at a different time and that makes computing all the possibilities impossible because there are an infinite number of possibilities.

New Digital Camera!

I just got a new Connon A95 digital camera. It has a ton of good features and comes with software that I didn't think at first would be useful but there is a program called PhotoStich that puts multiple pictures together for panoramic shots that I have found to be extremely useful. Here is my first attempt at using the panoramic feature of the camera. This is a picture of Troy standing on the bluff at Discovery Park.

If you want to see the larger version here is the Link.

Here is another panoramic shot from my backyard. I am having trouble making the city look as close as it does in real life. I tried zooming up as much as the camera would but still it doesn't seem right. Any suggestions?

See the larger version here.

Ethics

Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader, is facing accusations from the public and the House Ethics Committee about unethical behavior, and soon a decision as to whether or not he should remain in congress will be made. Here are just three (of many) points that lead to the DeLay controvercy that I think should be discussed:

1. He redrew the congressional district lines in Texas to possibly gain six more seats for the Republican majority when the lines weren't due to be redrawn for another eight years.

This speaks for itself. At first glance almost anyone who reads what he did would say it is unethical to change the boundries in order to win. Of course I don't know the reasons for why he changed those boundries, probably he would claim that the new districts better represented the voting pools. My guess is that he changed them solely to gain more republican seats in the House, but it is just that: a guess. However, it has been in the news a lot lately and most likely there is a legitimate reason to think what he did was unethical.

2. DeLay used lobbyist's and business' campaign and fund rasing money to cover his travel expenses to several places for non-congress related work, or as the media likes to say: junkets. As well as giving about $500,000 to his family for their help in the campaign with no documentation of what the rest of the family did to deserve that much money.

His daughter and wife were registered as empolyees for the campaign but the amount of money they earned was way more than necessary. This, of all the things he has done, I think, requires the ethics committee review. That is enough on this though.

3. Durring the Terri Schiavo media fiasco Tom DeLay was quoted as having said, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." This was said because federal judges refused to review the Schiavo case again even after a bill was passed by congress and signed by the President to reopen the case.

This situation is not quite as obvious as to why it is an ethical problem than the preceding two. The reason I think of this as a problem is because it shows how Tom DeLay and the republican majority are trying to abuse their powers and affect the Judicial branch of the government. It is not part of his duties as a legislator to try and force the judges to make legal decisions that have already been decided upon again, let alone threaten them when they do not take part in Schriavo case.

UN nuclear treaty?

Today on Salon.com there was an article about how the U.N. approved a global treaty against the possession and intent to use radioactive material. Is this important? What difference is this going to make in the fight on terror? I can't believe that any of the countries in the U.N. didn't already have laws agaist people trying to use radioactive material to harm others. I mean shouldn't there already be a law signed by the U.N. saying something to the effect of: using anything, be it radioactive or not, with the intention of hurting someone else is illegal? This is a strange world. My guess is that this new treaty will not change the minds of terrorists trying to purchase radioactive material what-so-ever. Don't get me wrong I am not saying that it is a bad idea to force countries to adopt laws such as this and I am definately not anti-U.N. but this just seems like a show rather than actual action against the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons.

Ideas for Travel?

If anyone has any ideas for where to go in Europe during June I would love to hear it. My plan, as of right now, is to Land in Paris (with my brother), stay there for a day or two then take a train through Germany to Prague. We'll stay there for a while, then go down to Venice, and Rome if time and money permits. We might also go to Greece instead of Rome but I haven't talked it over completely yet with my brother.