While I'm hating on Texas

It's kind of old at this point, but why the hell not - there's never enough hating on Texas.

This is why I hate Texas and want the majority of their population to die horrible horrible deaths

What the hell:

Gonzalez had endured several break-ins at his trailer when the four boys, ranging in age from 11 to 15, broke in. Gonzalez, who was in a nearby building at the time, went into the trailer and confronted the boys with a 16-gauge shotgun. Then he forced the boys, who were unarmed, to their knees, attorneys on both sides say.

The boys say they were begging for forgiveness when Gonzalez hit them with the barrel of the shotgun and kicked them repeatedly. Then, the medical examiner testified, Anguiano was shot in the back at close range. Two mashed Twinkies and some cookies were stuffed in the pockets of his shorts.

Another boy, Jesus Soto Jr., now 16, testified that Gonzalez ordered them at gunpoint to take Anguiano's body outside.

That's terrifying. But it gets worse:

Many people in Laredo — a town just across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where drug violence runs rampant — defended Gonzalez's actions. In online responses to articles published by the Morning Times, comments included statements such as "The kid got what he deserved" and calls to "stop the unfair prosecution."

Jesus Christ in a bathtub, what is wrong with these people? Your constitutional right to property does not take precedence over another person's right to life, you under-evolved troglodytes! Shooting anyone at close range in the back is not self defense, it's an execution. Shooting a kid who stole some of your shitty snack food in the back at close range as he kneels on your floor begging for mercy is not self defense, that's murdering a child.

This guy should rot in prison for the rest of his disgusting, worthless life, as should every member of the jury that apparently is A-OK with shooting an unarmed, crying child in the back. The only thing I can hope for is that the family of the victim sues the asshole into oblivion.

And again

National League East champions? The Phillies, of course.

What does it say about me as a Phillies fan that upon hearing this news my reaction is not one of joy, but rather apprehension? I mean, great work so far, guys, but...you are the Phillies, so, uh, there's kind of some negative momentum going here.

I want to vote for her instead

Fight!

Reflections thus far: Boring. Isn't this supposed to be about foreign policy, not economy?

Please please please as McCain what victory in Iraq would be.

7:43 - Oh come on, stop it with the "make them pay for their own invasion" bull.

7:45 - "Tactic to control the damage." Thank you!

STOP TALKING OVER EACH OTHER YOU DWEEBS!

7:53 - here's the lesson from history: don't give money and guns to people who you know don't like you. Also, we don't announce we're invading Pakistan, we just send ground troops in without permission.

8:01 - Senator John McCain served in a war and has been in Congress since the dinosaurs walked the earth and tells long rambling stories about jewelry with no damn point at all.

8:06 - Oooh, juicy one, Iran. So far we've got "league", France, holocaust, Iraq, mandate...gaah.

8:10 - McCain will meet with anyone but will not legitimize people whose names he can't pronounce with face-to-face meetings? I think he had a stroke or something. Also, I'd go to a tea party with Obama.

8:14 - Out of the ballpark for Obama, I think. And McCain just threw out a dig at short people?

8:21 - McCain looked into Putin's eyes and saw the KGB and an oil pipeline and restraint = naive and what?

8:27 - 9/11 speculation ahoy! McCain was a trainwreck on Russia. Blah blah blah safer. What the hell type of question is that?

8:28 - I think I misheard, or McCain just said the Defense Department is a post-9/11 thing?

8:31 - Obama doesn't understand doesn't understand doesn't understand my friends.

8:35 - McCain pulled the age card again. Obama wasn't old enough to run for Congress twenty years ago, dude.

8:36 - Obama got his name from his father. Stunning.

Oh thank god it's over.

Also, upon reading some commentary about whether the debate may or may not happen - what the hell do people mean when they say the 'surge' in Iraq has been a success?

Seriously. I apparently need someone to sit down with me and explain what, exactly, success is in this context. (Because I've heard some theories about what's "working" and it's not really something we want to encourage. I assume.)

I grant it's ridiculous to begin with, since we're in a war against terror, and it's pretty hard to eradicate an emotion and I'm sure it's a lot harder to eradicate fear by shooting at people. But what do I know.

Let's roll, America!

I swear to god, if McCain refuses to debate tonight I will be deeply, deeply disappointed. It would be such a stupid, cowardly thing to do.

The alarms, oh god, the alarms

As part of their attempt to mismanage the college's money as efficiently as possible, the college went ahead and installed key-card locks on all of the dorms in the lower dorm complex (the upper area is mostly underclassmen and apparently we don't value their safety or something). They're keyed to our student ID cards. So far so good - I'm not sure about the cost-value benefit, but okay.

There is also an alarm system built in, because we no longer are allowed to prop the door open. Why? I don't know - apparently we can have the door unlocked during the day, but not open. This is very strictly enforced, because if the door is open for 30 seconds, an alarm goes off. A loud, high-pitched chirping that echoes very nicely in the open stairway in the hall. After maybe ten, twenty seconds of that, it changes into a louder, even more obnoxious, car-alarm-like siren.

That's kind of annoying. The really, unspeakably annoying part is that the door to my dorm does not work properly. Unless you pull it shut all the way, it won't shut all the way. They 'fixed' it this morning, which means it now sometimes will close all the way but sometimes it doesn't. So there's about a 50/50 chance that when someone has the audacity to, you know, enter or leave the building, we will all be serenaded by angry, amplified crickets after thirty seconds. Obviously, in a school where every single student is enrolled in an academically intense program, this is exactly what you want in the dorms where people might be getting crazy and studying.

Thoughts on the senior essay

Rousseau provides a very rigid definition of freedom to the people of a state ("You're free to do whatever you want to do within this box"). The Constitution turns that on it's head: "The Government is free to do this, this, and this. The people can more or less do whatever they want. This is all up for debate."

I think the openness to debate in the Constitution, and the perhaps inevitable evolution of what exactly what this 'freedom' nonsense consists of is an important difference. The Constitution, as a practical document, needs to be able to bend to the General Will, and I *think* Rousseau would agree on that. The exact parameters of American freedom aren't positively defined in the Constitution and have constantly changed since; what does this say about freedom? And what does it say about representative government, which Rousseau is totally not cool with?

If Rousseau had addressed the concept of state's rights my life would be much easier right now, because I need to figure out how to deal with that.

I don't want to pay your bills!

I'll be the first to say I know nothing about the stock market, or banking, or economics, or really anything more than "large, positive numbers are generally better than negative numbers."

But as I understand it, the past week of "aw crap time to stuff your mattress with cash" can pretty much trace it's roots back to the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe, in which banks were stupid by offering people loans they couldn't afford, and then consumers were even more idiotic by taking out loans they couldn't afford to pay back. So to sum it up in the crudest terms possible, Americans are idiots who can't do math and think they have some god-given right to own a house.

And now the government is putting together some sort of jaw-droppingly expensive plan to try to fix this by buying up all the worthless loans. No, I don't understand it in any more depth from that, but what I do wonder about is: is this not a catastrophic failure of the idea of personal responsibility? For both the individual consumer who is about as smart as the bricks their McMansion is made of, and also for the leadership of the banks?

I mean, I understand the need to do something to try to stabilize the market, because everyone panicking and running out of money is generally a bad thing. But as a taxpayer who has the common sense not to take out loans I can't pay back*, why the hell is my money going towards bailing out these dipshits? Why aren't we first tapping the CEO's who got obscenely rich off these schemes, then involving the government? In short: where is the outrage over this?

And additionally, to everyone, everywhere: You have the right to a place to live. You do not have the right to a mortgage, you do not have the right to own a house or a condo or anything like that. Home ownership, like driving, is a privilage, not a right. If you can't pass the drivers test you can't drive; if you can't afford a house you can't buy a goddamn house!

*insert student loan joke here.

???

Dear Mr. Hegel,

What the hell are you talking about? Seriously, that's an honest question. Could you please explain, in plain English, what exactly you're talking about?

Sincerely,

A befuddled reader.

Things that shouldn't amuse me quite so much...

But really, really do:

In the hallway outside the cafeteria, there were two tables representing various groups.

One - which was announced well in advance in the college's weekly bulletin of events - had two representatives from JET. There were a decent number of people there. In fact, at first I thought that it was the line for the cafeteria, but it was in fact just the group around the table.

The other table, just on the other side of the wide hallway, had three uniformed representatives from some branch of the military, with a table full of pamphlets and such. There was no one at that table, and all three of them looked rather bored and a bit lonely.

Happy Constitution Day, everyone!

A baffling theft

Someone, sometime between about 1:15 pm and 5:30 pm today came into my room and took my desk lamp away. They left the lightbulb sitting on my desk.

I'm assuming it was B&G, since my door was locked, that's a terribly odd thing to steal, and I said on my room inventory that my desk lamp did not work. You would think that they maybe could have called and left a message, or left a note, or something. Right?

Dear Obama campaign,

Please stop torturing me with opportunities - apply for this internship because we need slave labor! Come see the senator speak in a nearby town! - that I simply cannot do owing to transportation problems, time limitations, or both.

(Yes I would love to be an intern for the campaign. No I cannot commit at least twenty hours per week, since I, apparently unlike other college students, have homework and need to earn a paycheck.)

Shocking.

Apparently Pakistan is getting a little pissed off at the US.

Hmm. Can't imagine why that might be.

Continued

Also, please, please, please read and/or watch this.

Happy "Patriot's Day", you idiots!

Now to celebrate, let's invade Pakistan!

WASHINGTON — President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

I'm no military nor political expert, but isn't sending troops into a country to do raids and stuff, without the permission of that country's government, generally referred to as an invasion? I mean, say Egyptian or Syrian forces decided to go into Jerusalem or one of the Israeli occupied territories and conduct some raids - both Israel and the US would be pretty pissed off, right? Is that just me who sees that?

American officials say that they will notify Pakistan when they conduct limited ground attacks like the Special Operations raid last Wednesday in a Pakistani village near the Afghanistan border, but that they will not ask for its permission.

Hey, remember a couple years ago when some people hijacked a couple planes and killed whole lot of people? And there was all sorts of wailing and hand-wringing and crying about "why do they hate us?"

Hmm.

Essay essay essay essay essay

I have about a hundred and fifty pages left in the Anti-Federalist papers I'm reading. Then there's six hundred pages of Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention. I also have decided I want to go back and re-read Locke's Second Treatise and at least some of the Supreme Court opinions from my precept last year. If I get the time*, I have two further non-primary books on the evolution of the Constitution, with plenty more where that came from. Plus, of course, repeatedly digging further into the Social Contract and the Constitution itself.

Plus Hegel, plus Einstein, plus various folks for lab (Milliken, right now, with this ridiculously involved practicum we're going to have to do). Oy.

*hahahahahahaha. hahaha. heh. funny.

Worst thing ever

I generally keep my little shower basket - with soap and body pouf and face wash and all that - in the bathroom on the floor. There's a little alcove with a bathtub that no one ever uses, so it's a good place to just stick something like that.

I hop in the shower today after biking back from the grocery store. Grabbed my pouf - and a goddamn cricket jumps out.

I hate crickets. They creep me the hell out and they're evil and nasty and vile and foul. And this one had that awful jabby appendage sticking off it's butt, which I know isn't a stinger but it looks like one and it's horrible.

Luckily, it did not jump on me. Also luckily I did not totally freak out and scream and slip and fall and crack my skull open on the tile wall. I did, however, stomp on it, repeatedly, far more than necessary, and with great glee. Stupid crickets, trying to ruin my shower.

Since yesterday

Faust is undeniably awesome, if only because Faust himself is such a Johnny and Goethe agrees that poodles are inherently satanic. It's such a delightfully bizarre story, and apparently part II, which we don't read, is even weirder. That gets added to my list of "books I want to read but I'm not going to have time to touch until after I graduate". Speaking of time:

Yesterday I got my lab homework done between class, work, and seminar. Went to seminar. Came home from seminar. Spent about an hour and a half translating French. Started my math reading, gave up around 1 and went to bed. Got up, went to lab at 9, went to work at 10:30. Am now finishing math reading and eating lunch. French at 1:30, then math at 3. Then pickup my paycheck and take a sweet, sweet nap.

Note to self: that mostly-empty Thursday with 3 classes on Friday is going to take some time-management skills.

Seriously?

Georgia Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland used the racially-tinged term "uppity" to describe Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama Thursday.

Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.

"Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they're a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah."

Well then. (from here)

Someone is listening

In Brazil, an accusation of illegal wiretapping leads to the President suspending the higher-ups allegedly responsible until a full investigation is completed.

Gosh, I wonder what America would do in such a situation?

Oh, right.

Also, Thailand is having another overthrow-the-government party. Or maybe it's the same one and they just took a break for a while. I can't quite keep it straight at this point. (Dear Thailand: If you've still got a monarchy that upholds lese majeste laws, and you're rioting over attempts to bring down the prime minister...you might want to reconsider your priorities. Just my two cents.)

Senior year ahoy

I have lab this morning (Faraday! Electricity! The answers are within sight!) and math this afternoon (Einstein! Holy crap, Einstein!). Meeting with a tutor on Thursday to bounce senior essay ideas off of him.

I'm not wholly convinced it seems like it's been five years since I was sitting in a dorm room in uppers, trying to figure out how to read Homer and what puzzling over what exactly it meant to "prepare" Euclid's first definitions. It's got to be either a lot less or a lot more.

Here we go.