Sad day for America

Today, Americans appear to be choosing fear and hate over reason.  It's easier to blame others who are different from ourselves than to take responsibility for one's own situation.

2016 Presidential Election

This year's presidential election really shows many problems with America.  Trump stands for all that is bad about America.  Hillary stands for sanity and reason.

Trump's strategy, thus far, is to keep the campaign from being about real meaningful discussion of issues.  Instead, he keeps distracting everyone with his antics.  If there's one thing he's good at, it's making the news.

If the election were to come down to actual political issues, Hillary would destroy him with her real knowledge and experience.  So in response, Trump's supporters attempt to slander her as being a liar and whatever else they can come up with.

Would you really want to live in Trump's America?  One in which the rich can defraud the poor like he's done with Trump University?  One in which racism and fear rule our daily lives?  Sure, corporations and the rich have way too much say in government, so is the solution to put a rich businessman into the top elected position?

In every single way that Trump and his supporters criticize Hillary, Trump is far worse.  I mean Hillary isn't perfect, but she's done a very reasonable job in her long political career.

Health Care Reform

The debate on whether the government should provide a public option is very easily summed up:

Why are private citizens against a public option that would give them another option for health care (you can still choose your old health coverage)? Are you really so worried that the highly lucrative health care industry's profits will suffer?

People Are Way Too Outraged About Obama's Speech To Students

Conservative parents fearing some mysterious socialist propaganda in Obama's upcoming speech to students are pretty much hypocritical and paranoid. Where have they been protecting our schools from propaganda all these years? They should be protesting the religious bits in our pledge of allegiance. Talk about brainwashing! That "under God" line is intended to be recited by all students daily?

Let's get that daily, religious brainwashing stuff out of our classrooms first before we worry about keeping the president from encouraging kids to stay in school in a speech that has not even happened again and will not be repeated daily in classrooms. Everyone should fight for freedom of religion and separation of church and state.

These rabid anti-Obama people are completely irrational hypocrites.

Birthers

This BBC opinion piece captures a lot of why I'm so annoyed at the idiocy the "Birther" movement shows about Americans. Barack Obama's citizenship is as proven of a fact as any other president's birth has been proven. People who are clinging to the notion that he might not be a citizen need to stop being morons.

FUD: Health Care Reform

The amount of stupid misinformation going out about the upcoming health care reform legislation is astounding. It's on par with the claims that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. Ironically, John McCain really wasn't born in the United States (he was born in Panama), just nobody chose to attack his eligibility (he was born on a military base, so born a citizen).

Anyways, it's gotten to the point where folks have had to put up a website to clear up these ridiculous accusations. Honestly, why the hell would the proposed changes suddenly change the health care system into something drastically different from what it is now?

The government would gain some say into the services that you have access to. Is this so different from HMOs currently deciding what services you have access to? The difference is that HMOs are profit based organizations, so they are motivated to do what saves them money. I see government run health care as an improvement.

On top of that, they aren't planning on taking away your current health care options. They are adding an additional option. How is that taking away your freedom of choice? An additional choice is more freedom of choice if anything.

Turn on your brains, people.

Asian-American President Of The United States?

A friend and I were talking some random politics when he joked that I should run for president. Age issue aside, I told him that I didn't think America was ready for an Asian-American president yet.

Currently, the highest ranking Asian-American in the U.S. government, in terms of presidential succession order, currently is Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke at tenth.

Prior to Obama's election, we had already seen the highly respected Colin Powell at Secretary of State, or fourth. Additionally, Obama had tons of circumstances helping make him electable: his amazing charisma, the general dissatisfaction for the current state of the economy created by his predecessor, as well as a very weak opposing ticket (i.e. a fairly respectable, old man who somehow managed to choose a bimbo to be next in line to succeed him).

An Asian-American presidential candidate will need something along the lines of those factors to stand a chance.

Sarah Palin Is Baffling

By announcing that she's stepping down as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has once again proven that she can confuse the country with her ridiculous actions and words. Her completely ridiculous remarks include commenting that it's a waste of taxpayer money for her to remain governor and that she's quitting because she's not a quitter. Wow. She's definitely not the brightest bulb.

Government Spending

It's very hard to visualize quantities of money on the order of magnitude that our government spends it. Our brains have a hard time visualizing the difference between $50 billion and $500 billion.

Someone decided to make a nice image that puts the budget in relative scale so you can see how much we spend on different things.

As much as folks (especially Republicans) insist on cutting government spending to shrink government, I hope they notice that over 2/3 of our government spending is on military / national security. Yet, our military spending is increasing while we're running a ridiculously big deficit?

Eisenhower (a Republican, if you'll note) warned us of the military-industrial complex. I wish the Republican Party would look to guys like him for some advice.

The Bush Administration's Legacy

America's moral high ground is completely gone since we apparently have tortured prisoners for information.

Is it any wonder when a guy like Cheney was vice president? Cheney apparently believes that the government can spy on us, imprison us, even suppress free speech but the government is overstepping its bounds when it tries to provide universal health care. Wow.

I am very grateful that our democracy finally kicked that horrible administration out of office. Now we need to repair all the damage they did.

Video Games Delivering Political Messages

Harpooned is a game about killing whales for scientific research.... It's great to see that video games are being used to deliver more meaningful messages than mindless entertainment.

The Real Differences Between Liberals And Conservatives

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

This is a very interesting lecture discussing the fundamental differences in the liberal and conservative ways of thought in terms of moral psychology.

Sadly, this last segment is all stuff that I've recommended to my friends on many occasions as common sense. I just wish more people understood.

Google Bombing John McCain

Google bombing is quite a powerful technique to subtly influence people and it's simple to do. There's currently an effort to google bomb John McCain with negative articles about him. All you have to do is spread around links such as these:

John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain
John McCain

And you've contributed to the effort. When people search Google for John McCain, those articles will have a higher ranking due to the way google's link analysis works. =)

"I'm Voting Republican"

I stumbled across a pretty funny video about why people should vote Republican. It's so true in so many ways.

Voting Machines That Can't Count

Apparently, the Sequoia voting machines used in the New Jersey primary can't count quite right. I don't understand how we entrust our elections to companies that don't have to disclose their software source code to be audited. Who knows what kind of mistakes the machine is making when it makes such a basic error? Plus, nobody will ever know but them?

Sequoia's explanation of the problem reveals a kind of idiocy to their software design. Why, when creating software that's sole job is to count, would you make the machine "best fit" any choice, whether by the poll worker or the voter. I mean what if a voted pressed a non-sensical button and the machine just arbitrarily picked a candidate on the person's behalf that it judged to be the "best fit?"

Additionally, apparently, they are blaming further discrepancies on people misreading 9s and 8s for each other. When your machine's sole job is to count votes and print out a verifiable record of those votes, shouldn't you make sure the printed out record is legible? You should choose higher quality output printing mechanisms than the extremely low resolution dot matrix printer that they seem to have chosen. On top of that, you should choose a font with unambiguous characters so that partially printed characters are still distinguishable in almost every case. When an 8 and a 9 are only visually distinct by one dot that the printer has a 10% chance of not drawing, then we have a problem.

While I'm not sure hand counting ballots is any better, having such blatant mistakes certainly doesn't make these election results any more trustworthy.

State Secrets

While there are certain circumstances under which I can accept that the government can refuse to submit certain evidence to court because it constitutes some sort of "state secret," it's fairly clear that this doctrine has been abused under the Bush administration.

This is a great write up about what's been happening in Oregon to the American branch of an Islamic charity called Al Haramain. The government accidentally disclosed proof that it was wire tapping the organization and then rendered this proof inadmissible by citing "state secrets." It's pretty much known that the government was indeed wire tapping the organization, however, this cannot be a factor in the court case.

Isn't this a great country where the government can do whatever they want and not be held accountable in court anymore?

Bush's Crusade

The war in Iraq has always seemed to be a bit of a "crusade" as Bush inappropriately called it early on. Apparently even among our soldiers, there is some religious discrimination against non Christians. Whatever happened to the separation of church and state? Under Bush's reign, the line has gotten more and more blurred.

Religious freedom should be one of our nation's basic tenets. The virulent and intolerant nature of most religions must be held in check by our government or we risk becoming a theocracy.

Net Neutrality

One of the things we take for granted these days is "Net Neutrality." This is the principle that internet users are provided equal access to anything on the internet. However, some ISPs are working toward the ability to regulate content. Imagine the potential future where you can't access your favorite sites because those sites refused to pay your ISP. Imagine if websites critical of a certain politician were somehow blacklisted by ISPs by a simple bidding process.

There's a growing movement to try to protect Net Neutrality. Increasing awareness is always a good step to preventing this sort of potential problem.

Barack Obama's Amazing Speech

Today, Barack Obama delivered one of the most amazing speeches of recent years. I highly recommend listening to it or watching it. He does an awesome job of boiling down why there are still racial tensions in our country and asks us to try to find common ground to move forward. If everyone in the country would listen to this speech and think about what it meant, there would be a lot more progress in general. The people of our country really do need to unite to move forward.

Go Vote!

If you're a fellow Californian (or in one of the states having primaries today), go vote!

Voter apathy is killing America. If you don't vote when you have the opportunity to directly influence the government, then you have no right to complain about anything the government does. When the government does something bad, you are also at fault for not preventing it.

So get off your lazy butt and go vote!