The Results are In…

While I make no secret of my political beliefs, I ordinarily try to shy away from outright endorsement of candidates. I used to think that politics was kind of like religion: something that’s a very important part of peoples’ lives, but something that’s bound to offend people if you talk about it much. Plus, I really don’t like to divulge too much in the way of significant personal information, and who I supported (or how I prayed) was no one’s business, I thought. But to me, my vote on January 8 is going to be one of the most important things I’ve ever done.

And I’m going to break with tradition and tell you who I’m voting for. I’m going to case my vote in the primary for Barack Obama. And I’d like to encourage you to do the same.

If you’d asked me a few years ago, I’d have told you that I was somewhat unhappy with politics. I was sad when Kerry lost the 2004 elections. But I’ve gone from “somewhat unhappy” to being truly afraid for the future of our country, and for being truly disgusted with some of the betrayals of the American people. I’ve been exploring jobs in other countries. Not because I want to send some sort of message that I don’t like politics, but because I don’t think I’m living in the America I was so proud to belong to. I hate alarmists, but, well, sound the alarm bells: America is in crisis.

Maybe about six years ago, I started getting disappointed every time I turned on the news. Something bad was always happening. And it’s happened every day for all these years. Most of the world hates us. Not all of it, but huge parts of it. While much of the world is already suspicious of our motives, we start a series of wars in Islamic countries and then go and issue proclamations expressing our support for Christianity. We seek to teach the “backwards” world about the benefits of freedom and democracy, by capturing them, transporting them to secret prisons, abusing them, and then torturing them in barbaric fashions. Does no one see the blatant hypocrisy? And when we point out that we already outlawed this, and that it flies in the face of everything that is America, we debate it. We’re at war against people who torture people and defy democracy, and we need to be able to torture people and defy democracy in order to do it, after all. The kings of democracy also have a whopping one state that permits same-sex marriage, something that more advanced countries have been permitting for years. And when we started calling it unconstitutional to deny people a basic civic right, we changed the Constitution in many states, and tried to change the Constitution. Forty-two states, and the Federal government, also passed laws explicitly prohibiting gay marriage.

When I graduate from college, I’ll have no health care until I get a job that offers it. But I count myself as lucky, because millions of people just don’t have health insurance at all. We tried to pass a bill ensuring that poor children could get health insurance, but we struck it down. Twice. We spend more than any nation on health care, and yet our system is among the worst. But people argue that there’s no problem, or that, if there is a problem, we shouldn’t pay for it.

Oh, and the American economy, kings of capitalism, is in the toilet. No offense to Canada, but it’s pretty depressing when the Canadian dollar surpasses the American dollar. We had an investment banker come in and talk to us a while back. He moved all of his money out of the country a few years ago.

I want to turn on the news and smile once. I want to stop looking at jobs in the Netherlands.

I want to be proud to be an American again.

I’ll admit that, at first, I didn’t want to support Obama. As much as he blew me away every time he spoke, I was really concerned about his lack of experience. Foreign policy is going to be huge, and he’s a one-term Senator. Why should he be the guy?

I think it’s the same reason that I’d be an amazing police chief, or an amazing president of my school. No, not hubris. Because he has a fresh experience. You spend too much time at something and you start to maintain status quo. Look at a lot of the businesses, especially small ones, that have been around for decades. What are they doing? Nothing new! Where are they going? Nowhere! They’ve built themselves a fabulous box in which to think, in which there’s really not a lot of room to maneuver. They found something that works and stuck to it. But this box–these blinders–prevent change. It’ll help you keep things going, but it won’t help you change the direction things are going on.

And if there’s anything we need, it’s change.

But don’t take my word for it. While I strongly support him, you owe it to do your own homework. Check him out. Read about his stance on the issues. And, living in New Hampshire, go see him speak. I always go in with high expectations and leave with them surpassed. And I’m firmly convinced that he’s the right man for the job. We’re not picking some arbitrary thing. We’re choosing our fate for the next four years. And we have an obligation–not just to ourselves, to our neighbors, and to the world, but to future generations–to make sure we elect the best person for the job.

If Facebook Voted…

Top Presidential candidates, and their current number of supporters on Facebook:

  • Barack Obama, 174,650
  • Hillary Clinton, 56,935
  • Ron Paul, 45,906
  • John Edwards, 26,255
  • Mitt Romney, 23,155
  • Fred Thompson, 19,311
  • Dennis Kucinich, 18,587
  • Mike Huckabee, 17,161
  • McCain, 15,320
  • Rudy, 13,043

The numbers are interesting. Obviously, this isn’t a scientific poll, but I think it’s useful as a straw poll of where young people come down. And Obama is dominating, with about three times the support of his next rival, Clinton. Ron Paul is close on her heels.

And then there’s a huge gap, with Edwards at the front. I’m somewhat surprised to learn that Romney is right behind him, and even more surprised that Fred Thompson is next on the list. No offense to him, but I’d never considered him a viable candidate. He just slightly nudged out Kucinich, who’s about as likely to win as Thompson in my mind. Rudy and McCain, who I’d thought would be front-runners, are way down at the bottom. (Technically, it’s not the bottom, but I left off people way down there… Poor Richardson, who I would vote for in a heartbeat, has 8,272 supporters.)

Of course, we know that young people have the least voters of any age demographic… But imagine if we changed that this election. I hope to.

The Definition of a Game

I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 a bit lately. Not so much now that finals are here, but it’s a fun way to pass the time. When the mood strikes, I’ll sign on and play one of a few different classes of people… I’m usually either Pyro or Engineer. As Pyro, I go around with a flamethrower. It’s a good weapon, as it sets enemy forces on fire. It’s also the only sure-fire (no pun intended) way to see if someone who looks like a teammate is actually a spy disguised as a teammate: if they burn, they’re a spy. So I’ll run through my own team with the flamethrower periodically, since it’ll only damage enemies. As Engineer, I set up teleporters, so people that die and respawn can get to the front lines faster to keep up the attack. I also set up Dispensers, which dispense health points and ammunition. And, my favorite, the sentry guns, automated guns (which I usually upgrade to include rocket launchers), letting us cover areas without having to be there. They’re a good way to protect our assets.

The process of going through and doing all of this, to defend against enemies, is really fun. And, even though it’s just a game, there’s a certain sense of accomplishment when we capture the enemy bases.

Last night, I installed a new piece of software on my server, a web-based file manager. They have a wiki (powered by MediaWiki, the Wikipedia software), but it was overrun with spam. So I signed up and started reverting back to spam-free versions. It’s a skill I picked up on Wikipedia, and it’s super-easy. In about 20 minutes time, I wiped out weeks, sometimes months, of spam. As time went on, I took out more and more. This morning they made me an admin, and I’m now deleting spam accounts, blocking persistent spam IPs, and deleting pages that are nothing but spam.

Is this a game? Volunteer work? Work? I’m not sure, but I’m getting at least as much enjoyment out of it as I get from setting enemies ablaze in Team Fortress 2. And I’m actually accomplishing something.

Is Congress Insane?

There are a lot of issues that I really understand both sides of. Most anything with money will benefit some at the expense of others. I don’t think gun control or drug policy have “clean” answers: I’m not at all comfortable banning guns, but I’m not at all comfortable allowing felons to own automatic weapons; I don’t get why smoking marijuana is a crime, but I’m not at all opposed to putting heroin dealers in jail. And I still struggle with the issue of abortion.

But there have been some really strange things going on…

  • In 2006, the military established a policy manual describing what was–and what wasn’t–an acceptable interrogation method. In particular, it banned:
    • Forcing detainees to be nude for interrogations
    • Engaging in sexual acts, real or simulated
    • “Beating, shocking, or burning” them
    • Mock executions
    • Waterboarding
    • Starving or freezing them

    In my mind, this is a no-brainer. We’re not some backwards third-world nation led by a cruel military dictator. (Well, snide comments aside…) We’re the freaking United States of America, and we pride ourself on being ‘advanced’ past barbarism. The 2006 military policy confirmed this.

  • A bill that would require the CIA to follow the same rules got struck down in Congress. Of course, don’t be so quick to fault Congress–if it had made it through, the Administration said it would veto it anyway.
  • So what did Congress pass? I’m glad you asked! The House passed House Resolution 847. It’s a non-binding resolution, which is a nice way of saying that it’s utterly pointless and carries no weight. It contains lots of feel-good stuff endorsing Christmas. But a lot of people seem troubled by the fact that it also “recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world.” I mean, I’m a Christian, and, if you define “great” in terms of numbers as opposed to quality, it’s a fact that Christianity is one of the “great religions.” But I’m still left with an uneasy feeling about this. Even if “it’s true,” why is Congress giving Christianity its stamp of approval? It just seems really strange. And our Founding Fathers were uneasy about it, too. (Of course, the First Amendment bans Congress from establishing a religion, not endorsing it. But a case from the 80’s gives us a clarification that government endorsement of a religion still construes an Establishment Clause violation.)
    But of course it’s a moot point, because the First Amendment starts off with “make no law,” and this isn’t a law. It’s a Resolution. And it doesn’t really do anything except proclaim to the world that the United States likes Christianity. And frankly, I’d like it if our proclamations to the world were kept in line with our Constitution.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not against Christianity. I just find it really, really weird that Congress is endorsing it. Especially when half the world thinks we’re in a war against Islam, where endorsing Christianity is only going to further that misinterpretation?

Raise your hand if you think that Congress has lots its mind!

Guantanamo Bay

With all the talk about the torture in Guantanamo Bay, it’s easy to lose sight of another fact that I still find really strange.

It’s in Cuba. We’re renting the space from them, despite an embargo on trade with their country.

Why don’t we move it somewhere else, even if it’s just over to the Dominican Republic or something of the sort? I just find it really bizarre that we’re paying them (and that they’re taking our money) when they’re our sworn enemies. Why are we in Cuba?

Ultimate Boot CD

Ultimate Boot CD saves the day again! This time, my 500 GB drive with lots of important stuff backed up to it randomly wasn’t being detected. Windows saw it as a raw, unformated disk, and Linux wouldn’t mount it citing disk problems.

Of course, I had some problems at first… It’s a 500 GB drive, which is greater than 137 GB. It’s also mounted over USB, thanks to this brilliant piece of technology. So DOS-based file tools were understandably a bit confused. I ended up throwing the disk in my old desktop machine, where it was used as a “real” IDE drive instead of a USB external drive. And it turns out that most of the programs can cope with it being 500GB.

Of course, this is one of those classic problems where I have no idea what actually “fixed” it. I ran a bad block check (which takes forever on a 500GB disk!), and was actually somewhat irritated when it finished having found nary a bad block. But as I poked around looking at other options, I found that filesystem tools were showing me files on the drive. All my old data? Intact!

Seriously, burn yourself a copy of UBCD and keep it with your computers. It’ll save the day. Previously, I’ve used it to reset computer passwords for a professor, and to fix a broken (err, missing) bootloader.

A Suggestion

Dear News Media,

Please stop covering senseless shootings. They just make people depressed and encourage more people to do it. Sure, it assures you more material to cover, but we prefer a world where people don’t get shot for no reason. And dear jerks on the Interwebs: when someone gets shot in senseless violence, it’s really in poor taste to spin their deaths into an argument in favor of free open carry laws.

Sincerely,

The World