Insomniac

I found this humorous considering the whole ACORN fiasco. I am adamantly against any time of "hate-crime" legistlature. Assualt is assault and murder is murder and reguardless of the movtives any assault or murder is a crime of "hate". All hate-crime legislature does is to make someone who is not a minority feel that if they were assaulted or murdered that their life is not as important as someone elses. We in the LGBT community constantly advocate for equality, yet we want special treatment when it comes to punishment for crimes against us? How about we fix the current system that is flawed instead of trying to push new laws. Nice thought, but I'll believe it when I see the proposed legislature. In the end this is just an agenda. While I would like to see some of this passed into law, it is still to early to tell if our new commander in chief will follow through or just be like the majority of his predecessors. He already state in his Inauguration speach that the economy is "worse than he thought" and won't be able to fix it as fast as he promised. That and his chief financial advisor stating that the jobs created under BO's stimulus package are not for "white male construction workers". Forgive me if I'm anything but skeptical and yes, I am still bitter about the turnout of the election. If only America could stray away from a 2-party system, Barr could have had a snowball's chance.

Except for the Second Amendment, but I guess that one isn't important anymore. Next goes the 4th, 1st, 5th, and 6th. I don't think the guy is a miracle worker and people are going to be sadly disappointed when he can't magically fix the economy with more government spending and solve all of our problems instantaneously. I seem to be in the minority though on this subject, aparently

I love how that when America first entered into Iraq that President Bush has more than 80% support of the American polulation. More than 80% of Americans supported entering in the War with Iraq. Now that it has been a few years since 9/11 and since the war has started all of a sudden the majority of America is against the "pointless war" (that they once supported) and Bush. Gotta love America, I've almost but lost all faith in it's population...

I will proudly admit that I am a conservative gay man. An extremely conservative gay man. This doesn't mean that I am not open to liberal issues such as gay marriage/rights, but that I hold more capitalistic views on the economy and have strong beliefs in the constitution and my rights as a citizen. I would gladly give up my gay rights entirely to enjoy the freedom of my other rights granted to me in the constitution and bill of rights. People place too much significance on a politics religion. Mitt Romney (although an idiot) was condemned for being a Morman. Sarah Palin is currently being condemned repeatedly for being a very devote Christian. A true politician understands that they represent the will of the people and that they're not in office to vote on their opinions of matters. Issues like gay rights and abortion are social movements that cannot be greatly affected by any one politician. These social movements can only be changed by time and gradual acceptance by the general population. The Democratic party and liberal media has also deployed it's usual smoke and mirrors in this latest presidential election. They have been continually been digging up material on McCain and Palin, but what is to be said of Obama. Acorn? Rezko? Won't provide birth certificate? Voted present 130 times in Illinois legislature? I will not vote for Obama becuase he does not support my Constitutional Rights as an American and feels he knows "whats best for me". I do not like how socialist McCain is either, but I feel him as less of a threat. YMMV, just my view on things.

I seemed to be the only one with a Yahoo account that wasn't getting spam, but recently I have been getting about 2-3 a day and it's increasing. It all goes to the spam folder, although I am still annoyed.

I first found this story around last June and ended up reading from the first chapter to the last posted chapter in about 2 weeks flat. Any wait for new chapters is well worth it.

Awesome article, thank you for posting it. I only had one problem with this statement: Most guns laws are ineffective in stopping crime and only work to oppress those that will follow them. This means that in cases like the D.C. gun ban law abiding citizens are left defenseless while the criminals run rampant as they simply will not follow the laws. There is a reason why D.C. has the highest murder rate per population in the country.

I watched an interesting documentary on the Witch Trials and it was something about the stuff they put in the Rye bread that has a mold that made them hallucinate. I've also been to Salem a few times. I went once on Halloween, but I won't do that ever again.

Another example of a Zero Tollerance policy. Discretion is almost necessary to seperate people from the good ones (or kids in this example). Good people(kids) make mistakes, but sending them to the gallows for it is not needed in all circumstances. This also reminds me of the 2nd grader who was expelled for drawing a stick figure holding a horribly drawn gun and a 5th grader that was suspended for 10 days for having a pen with a Glock logo (given to her by her father) in school. Both punishments were later overturned with the threat of legal action, but it never should have come to that. Like I've said before, we're only sheltering our kids with these rediculous policies. I can understand 'banning' foods becuase a kid has a certain allergy for liability reasons, but what is that kid gonna do when he goes to the food court in the mall and expects me to move becuase I sit next to him eating a peanut butter cup DQ blizzard? The kids allergies are not going to magically go away after highschool, so he needs to learn how to deal with them now. The whole allergy thing is another story, but I cannot stand people who expect me to change what I do to accommodate them. I'm all for the rights of the minority, but when you infringe on the rights of the majority in doing so you are in the wrong. Don't even get me started on all the PC bull-chit as of late, especially the whole religious holiday crap.

Do you put a line through your zeros like I do as well?

I would write today as 12MAR08, but then again I also use 24-hour time and know what Zulu time is. The problem I see with DD/MM/YY is that when storing computer files numerically the files won't be in correct cronological order. The again MM/DD/YY would only work if the files were from the same year. YYYY/MM/DD would be the only true way to store something numerically and cronologically, I've only seen it used a few times though.

What better reason to join than to help change things. If all gay/bi people quit the military and no new ones joined there wouldn't be any reason to change the policy. It is also about more than your sexual orientation. Passing the initial and difficult training and then being able to serve your country can mean much more to some people than being open about their orientation. It might be hard for an outside observor to justify hiding their sexuality and relationships just to serve in the military, but in some aspects it's more than worth it or even the risk of being "found out".

Colin, I don't know about the motives of this myspace group, but when I went to tech school in Wyoming white kids from the Mid-West used to call black people "Coons" as a slang for a much more derogatory word. If you read the group introduction you can pick up that they are being bigotted against some racial, ethnic, or social group. Just a heads up.

That's the brass for ya. It's issues like this that keep me motivated to get my own gold bar.

I loved Juno, it was like a sappy love story that had a happy ending but pulled it off really really well. It didn't win anything

I think innapropriate and unrealistic standards are worse than inadequate ones. When you have generic standard for all schools in a state or country you are tend to ignore cultural influences on that particular school or even that schools method of teaching. I also cannot stand political correctness what-so-ever. The whole 'can't publicly celebrate Christmas' issue of this past year drove me insane. I heard someone say it best when they said, "Your being offended offends me."

I read the original blog when Des first posted it and thought it was one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. Now he has three shorts posted up with more on the way. The whole designer muscle thing still has me cracking up and I can only expect more great laughs

Then that right there is the problem. How can we expect adolescences to mature into adults and be productive members of society if they are not taught how to be productive members of that society. It seems the only way to learn anything about reality and how the outside (of school) world works is to be kicked out of the house at a young age (or have some other tragic happening), join the military at 17/18, or skip college and go right into the work force. The sheltering has even extended to the college aged student and you can pick out of a crowd those that went straight from HS and momma and dadda's house to a dorm room at a college. When they speak in class they tend to be 180* from the "seasoned" students who tend to be commuters and have lived outside of a sheltering for a good while. When the teacher asks a question and is looking for a specific response that takes critical and logical thinking the 'sheltered' student tends to be off-the-mark while the seasoned students more-than-not get it. I'm not sayin every student is like this either way and some are able to develope critical life skills on their own, but we're talking in majority sense. (Or even not in a majority sense, but a good amount none-the-less.) This is from a college student of 2 1/2 years and not from an outside observer .

You're just mad because he steals your trash cans

This just shows how children in schools are being made to think. With standardized testing and zero tollerance policies we are slowly forcing our children to only be able to think one way and essentially sheltering them from reality. Administrators at the becking of the majority of parents try and shelter our youth from issues and events that they feel could be harmful (such as bullying), but in the end all the child does know is that he doesn't know how to handle such an event. It is good to see that there are still people and students who are fighting the system and trying to retain their retational thought and independant minds.

I soooo called Tim being straight didn't I . Excellent story Cole, I wasn't really sure how it all was going to end up until the very end

That was great! Finteresting got me rolling.

True, but the media is a business that will only report on what sells. It's funny that we rely on this business medium for our source of information and consider it to be mostly factual and representive when ,for the most part, it can be extremely biased. Good stories are hard to find, but death and destruction are a dime-a-dozen.

You cannot classify everyone over the actions of a few. We can all think of time when we've seen an idiot driver on the road, but do we condem every driver as being incompetent because of that? As for America not being a warzone; google VT massacre, NIU shooting, Trolley Square, Omaha Mall, etc. The perpetrators may be Americans but that doesn't make them any less of a threat or any less deadly than an Islamic militant. I agree completely with Rad, it is a total "nurture" problem. All these "no child left behind", "zero tolerance", and other policies that are suppose to better our children have done the opposite and sheltered them from truth and reality. When some are confronted with a real world big issue they have no idea how to repond and, more times than not, act inappropriately. They say the worst roads are paved with good intentions. It sounds bad, but maybe our children might fare better later in life if we make it harder on them now than they currently have it. (I'm saying "our" in a collective sense). There needs to be a balance and a conservative tone. Kind of like anti-biotics. We need them to help cure infections, but overuse can make them ineffective and the bacterial strains stronger and harder to fight. Implementing massive amounts of policies and banning everything under the sun is not helping any.