Did you see how Hugo Chavez, the leader of Venezuela, and someone Jimmy Carter says he admires, shut down a TV station in his country because they were critical of him? Carter sure has good taste in friends.

Anyway the reason I bring this up is because this could potentially happen in the United States because of something called the "Fairness Doctrine," which is coming up more and more in interviews with Democrats. What is the "Fairness Doctrine?" Well it basically says that if a media outlet, usually a radio station, is presenting only one point of view, then it is unfair and will face fines and/or worse. Of course one-sided is in the eye of the people in power. The New York Times is pretty one-sided, but I doubt anyone would ever try to hit them with the Fairness Doctrine. FoxNews, on the other hand, would be an immediate target. Think about it.... The only people who would ever put into place a measure like this in this time are Democrats. They did it before, and some are talking about it again. And the Democrats are probably not going to shut down an outlet that is friendly to them, but why not go after one that is not? After all, it's fair, right? FoxNews is only presenting their side of the story.

Anyway, the implications of the Fairness Doctrine sound a lot like what happened in Venezuela. Maybe people that hate Bush and plan to vote Democrat no matter what should reexamine what people really stand for.

"Fascist ethics begin ... with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position."

[Mario Palmieri, "The Philosophy of Fascism" 1936]

Doesn't that sound an awful lot like the Democratic Party nowadays? Individualism is bad, government is the solution to all our problems.

Remember the Valarie Plame scandal? It was all the rage because the administration ALLEGEDLY leaked her identity for some sort of lame and needless revenge. Much of that has been debunked, but people still like to talk about this particular leak because it might make Bush look bad.

Why don't these same people care about much more important leaks, like the several that have come from the CIA about various middle east related plans? When I read in the paper that a government source "leaked a secret military plan too attack Al Queda" or something like that.... These are real secrets and these leaks could get people killed. Plame was never in any danger, she had a desk job in D.C. So why do people only get upset about pointless leaks, but ignore the major ones that reveal real secrets to our enemies? Because only the former makes Bush look bad.

Bush hatred makes people forget logic and blow minor incidents out of all proportion. If someone says they hate Bush, then you might as well ignore them unless Bush personally killed their grandmother with a handgun. But if someone says they don't like Bush, and they have logical reasons with real facts to back it up... That's reasonable. But don't tell me you hate Bush and your best reason is that he pissed off Europe. If he pissed off Europe so much, then why did France and Germany both elect leaders that share many of Bush's views and are far more friendly to him and the U.S. than their previous leaders? Because they don't dislike America, that's an anti-Bush canard.

This weekend was the ISDC, the International Space Development Conference. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, has been attending for years, and says it has definitely lost the science-fiction convention feel that it used to have, and that there are a lot of pretty women, probably there for the men in suits who have lots of money and want to spend it on space development.

Anyway, it's all pretty damn exciting to me. If I had a few billion dollars, I would totally be setting up space ventures. People with tons of money like Paul Allen (Microsoft), Richard Branson(Virgin), Jeff Bezos(Amazon), and John Carmack(id Software) are lining up to start or invest in space development, and they are going to have a real hand in shaping the future. Andrew Carnegie thought rich people should have legacies besides money, and that's why he paid for libraries and such all over the country, he wanted his money to do good. Well what more of a legacy to humanity is there than to help open up the stars?

This is real, people. Once private money starts getting thrown at something, things happen. We will have space tourism for $200,000 a flight within 5 years if the government doesn't try to over-regulate. And we will have people living in space in permanent habitats within 20, maybe even less. If someone can get a space elevator going within 20 years, which is definitely possible, then the whole solar system opens up. Mining colonies in the asteroid belt.... It may be a cliche in every Sol-based sci-fi book, but it will happen within 50 years.

It's a great time to be alive.

Something I have noticed lately in the media when defending themselves.... Columnists, when attacked, often counter-attack the "conservative bloggers" that have been besmirching their name. Here's the thing, though, and this goes for conservatives and liberals.... If one person is blogging about it, there are plenty of others that think it and don't have blogs of their own. So if you share an opinion and see it attacked in blogs, you are a moron if you think it's only those damn bloggers who disagree and everyone else is totally cool with whatever you said. Bloggers are merely the most willing and energetic about sharing their thoughts, but that does not in any way imply that those thoughts are unique to the person writing about it. You can't just assume the opinions of the vast majority of people who are not regular bloggers.

I don't know if any of my readers ever watch The View. I certainly don't, but I am sort of a fan of Elizabeth Hasslebeck, and have been since her Survivor days. The fact that she shares some of my more controversial political views helps, though I don't agree with her on a lot of social issues. The big fight between Rosie and her on The View the other day was pretty funny, you should definitely check it out, I'm sure it's on Youtube or ABC.com or something.


I don't consider Rosie to be a very intelligent person. She was the one who said regarding 9-11, that it was the first time in history that fire melted steel. As most anyone can tell you, i-beams don't come out of the ground like that. The ore has to be refined and melted down by extreme heat (that would be fire), and then shaped. So Rosie is a moron. And last week she made some ambiguous controversial statement about Iraq, and was attacked as having said our troops are terrorists. I won't go in to details of the statement, because I haven't seen the video of that. So the other day she calls Hasslebeck a coward for not defending her, and Elizabeth responds that Rosie should defend her own statements. Rosie then yelled at Elizabeth a lot, but she didn't even attempt to clarify or explain her own statement that started the whole affair.

I'm not even sure why I wasted the time to write all this up. I guess Rosie justs irks me. She's fat and stupid, but obviously must have some sort of charm to enough to people to be very successful.

I don't watch Law and Order and had no idea who Fred Thompson was until fairly recently. I think it's only prudent to be skeptical of a celebrities involving themselves in politics, but Thompson has served as a Senator, and seems to be a pretty amazing guy. He never finished high school, but went on to earn a scholarship to Vanderbilt Law School. What's more, he has really impressed me in words so far. First he made a sarcastic video response to Michael Moore challenging him to a debate, saying that maybe Moore should spend more time worrying about his supposed friends like Castro, who recently jailed a documentary director for being critical. And today I read a column by Thompson on the U.N., where he talks about how it only makes sense that an organization where a single dictator has as much say as the entire population of a democratic country is obviously not going to be a force for good. It does make sense. If half the UN votes are from oppressive governments and dictators, and the other half from democracies, well a least half the decisions made are not going to be what a democratic citizen would call good, and, objectively, the U.N.'s track record proves this. Remember, this is the group that allowed Saddam to seal tens of billions of dollars from Oil-for-Food and didn't really fire any over it. This is the group that has "Peacekeepers" accused of slavery and forced prostitution of refugees they are supposed to be helping. This is not a good organization, and we should stop imagining that the U.N. has any kind of moral authority. Morality is not relative, and giving respect to mass murderers and totalitarian dictators makes people collaborators, not good people.

Eleanor Ringel, the AJC movie critic, had a blog entry where she talked about disliking the first Star Wars movie for killing the auteur cinema era (but she still loves Empire Strikes Back). She went on to discuss the importance of the trilogy as sort of looming over an entire generation that was growing up when they were released and will always be strongly influenced by Luke and the gang. I emailed her on a related point, but also asked if anything recent would have that sort of influence, mentioning the Lord of the Rings trilogy, despite my own doubts about it's lasting power. She wrote back, unabashedly praising Peter Jackson's take on Frodo. There was a typo and a missed space between words at one point in her response, and it seems possible that she accidentally erased part of a sentence. The way I got the email, she says LOTR will stand the test of time as a lasting film masterpiece. I have a hard time being objective about the films, because I know the story so well from the books.... But maybe it's a testament to the quality of the films that I never thought, "Hey, this is so different from the books." Obviously there are differences, but to my mind, there was nothing that was illogical for the medium. You just have to do some things different on film, but Jackson totally captured the flavor of the written form. Anyway, just felt like sharing that.

Here are a bunch of pictures from my Olympic lifting thing. Page two has a nice one of me doing a front squat.

I went to a one day Olympic lifting seminar (paid for by my sister Courtney, and Lane, and my good friend Richard Smiley as a birthday/graduation present) today at the local Crossfit affiliate. I have mentioned Crossfit before, they have a really great program, though I would recommend a decent level of fitness before you try them out. In other words, if you don't already exercise, start jogging and doing so pushup and pullups for a few months first. Or learn the ins and outs of weightlifting form, while getting in shape. They are all very nice people at Crossfit, and I am sure they would welcome even he most unfit and have less advanced versions of programs available, but I think you would get more out of it once you have activated and explored your body a bit.

Anyway, the program was run by C.J. Stockel, who is a US olympic coach (or was, or coaches the junior team or something like that), and has a regular job running the gym at a high school in Flowery Branch, GA (not too far north of Atlanta, but outside what I would consider suburbs) and running or being involved with a sports performance gym. I wasn't taking notes during the introduction :) He brought along a kid who he coaches and is now student at GT, and I guess must be working towards the Olympics. I'm bad with names, and I can't remember his, but I will definitely recognize him if I see him lifting on TV someday. We learned the snatch, which I'm still not confident in at all. I need a lot of time with a bar and a platform, the second of which isn't available in most gyms.

The snatch, btw, is where you grip the bar fairly wide while squatted down, and move i jp overhead without stopping. With a clean and jerk, you get the bar up so it is rest on your shoulders, gather yourself, and then jerk it overhead. After lunch we did the clean. My front squat, an essential movement for the clean, was singled out as being particularly good. I'm not nearly as happy about the accolade as I am that I had thought my front squat was near perfect, and I got reinforcement that the feel I have for my body is pretty good. Of course feel is one thing, doing it right is another. Put another way, I seem to know where I am going wrong, even if I don't yet always know how to correct it.

Finally we did the jerk, which is something I never really got before. Now I do. It's actually a pretty nifty little motion, and if you consider power as a function of force and time, then the jerk is the most powerful weightlifting motion of all. It's the fastest, and you can move a crapload of weight with it. You dip down just slightly, then push your heels into the ground and jump and shrug your shoulders up. The bar starts moving up and your feet, which have barely left the ground, split into a lunge position. So while the bar is moving up, you are pushing yourself down under it, with one leg forward, one back, shortening your height. Once your elbows are locked overhead, you drag your front foot back and then you back foot forward. That's it.

After that, we all just practiced what we wanted with some actual weights while they critiqued us. Then the Crossfit guys started getting the Tech weightlifter kid to try muscleups, which are a pullup into a dip, on gymnastics rings. He got it, I came SO very close, I just couldn't get the transition all the way. I was maybe an inch away from having my shoulders in the right position for the dip.

I had fun, it was a good day. And for all you Crossfit-doubters out there, almost everyone there was involved with Crossfit, and they all had nice bodies. The women weren't all the most attractive of girls, but every single one of them had a an awesome body, no skinny fats in this bunch. Of course I would advise everyone to get involved with Olympic lifting, too, but its a bit tougher to get in to. With Crossfit you can learn most of what you need to learn on your own over time. I wouldn't advise trying the snatch or clean without proper instruction.

Check this out, if you are interested in HDTV, and the various connection formats, i.e. HDMI, DVI, coax, etc. I can honestly say I have never read a more interesting and informative article on the subject, and I'm excited about exploring the other resources the same website has.

So Jimmy Carter, contrary to centuries of tradition for former Presidents, criticized the current administration, and called its foreign policy the worst in history.

Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Sure, Carter got the Nobel Peace Prize. For what? For brokering a really bad deal between Israel and the Palestinians that quickly fell apart and turned into a much worse war than what had gone on before. Carter, while President, was responsible for the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which did nothing good or lasting in the long run. DO you see a pattern here? Carter likes to do things that look great in the short term, but always end up leaving things worse than they were before. I'm not defending Bush here, btw, just saying that Carter's track record has results already recorded by history, and they aren't good.

And lest we forget, there's the Iran hostage crisis, which was handled very badly by Carter.... And our economy tanked. And he previously criticized Reagan's Cold War policy. So Jimmy Carter has prety much always been on the wrong side, as far as results are concerned. And after all the lies documented in his recent book (plus the very use of the word apartheid int he context of Israel, which is wrong and irresponsible), I don't really see why anyone would put much credence in his words.

The Fairness Doctrine- Suggested by Democrats, it censors political speech on the radio
McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform- Although McCain is a Repub, this act is favored by
Democrats, and it's all about censoring political speech by anyone who is not officially part of a
campaign
Affirmative action- a racist policy pushed by Democrats in which members of one race are favored
over members of another race for education and employment
The military draft- basically enslaves citizens to the armed forces, taking away freedom of choice. The only elected official to push for a draft in recent years- Charlie Rangel, a Democrat.

So one party is behind numerous blatant examples of racism and censorship, yet it's the other party that gets called racist and totalitarian. Please, give me examples of the Republican Party of current times being racist or espousing censorship? I love how the Dixie Chicks, for example, can talk and talk about how they are being censored. Girls, if this were a country where censorship was alive and well, you wouldn't be able to complain, you'd be in jail.

It's Monday. I have one more thing to do for a class. Just edit and make pretty a little paper, then I'm done. I still have school related stuff to do, but it's all with various paperworks and such I need to finish for graduation.

Now I gotta find a job.

France just had an election and got over 85% voter turnout, which is hard to believe. And the winner by a 6 point margin, which is also huge, is Sarkozy, the right-ish dude who openly states that he believes the US is a force for good in the world. And in Germany they recently elected Andrea Merkel, also friendly to the US and American-style capitalism. Nice trends.

So Mitt Romney is all over the net as having said L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" is his favorite book. Hubbard, for those who aren't aware, is the now deceased founder of Scientology, but he was a science-fiction pulp writer first. "Battlefield Earth" was made into a movie I never saw because it got some of the worst reviews I have ever read. He's getting a lot of flack from people, but most of them have never read the book and say they never will. I suppose one could say that parallels me never seeing the movie. But there's a difference. I have read the book twice, and really enjoyed it. It's a huge, epic story that was very clever and fun and had me staying up all night reading. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with Scientology, and I would never consider it great literature or life-changing, but in the words of so many other critics referring to other things, "It was a rollicking good time."

Skeptics like Roger L. Simon should read it for themselves, not so that I can prove a point, but because they might actually like it. I do agree with Simon's opinion on having a favorite book. It's tough. I have four that I answer to people when they ask, but that's just so I have something to say. Atlas Shrugged, Lord of the Rings, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Foundation. I suppose that's actually pretty accurate, at least those are the ones I go back to the most.

So... It's long been known that exposure to the sun creates vitamin D in your body. What was only recently discovered is that vitamin D deficiency can lead to bad things like breast cancer, colon cancer, and prostate cancer. So by following advice to stay out of the sun and avoid the easily treatable skin cancer, we have created vitamin D deficiencies which can lead to much worse results. This is why I usually ignore things like stay out of the sun or avoid trans fatty acids. Five years later they find out there are tradeoffs. And in this case, I'd take an increased risk of melanoma over prostate cancer any day of the week and twice on Thursday. How many people died of cancer because they did what they were told and stayed out of the sun, didn't have enough vitamin D, and thus got a big ass tumor up their butt?

Moral to the story.... If you've been doing something your whole life and it hasn't killed/hurt you, use some common sense and ignore the people who have suddenly decided it will hurt you, despite years of actual real life evidence to the contrary. Reality is a far better measure of cause and effect than statistical correlation studies. Few of those studies bother to look at side effects and collateral damage.

So I took my final final today, and it was the hardest test I think I have ever had. Typically when people complain about a test being hard, I just laugh and think they weren't prepared and should get over it. But this test today.... I admit I could have been better prepared, but even so, I think it was so hard as to be unfair.

He gave a us a practice test last week that had 30 questions. It took me most of the week to answer those questions, so I figured the actual exam would be like maybe 8 questions of that difficulty level, since we only have 2.5 hours to take the test. But no.... It was 30 questions, many of which were tougher than what was on the practice test. After 2.5 hours, no one was anywhere near done, and we were all pretty upset about the whole thing.

Of course I can say unfair all day long, but it doesn't matter. Fair is what the teacher decides. What really ticked me off was when he says, "But if you know what you are doing, these shouldn't be too hard." BS. Even if I knew how to answer every question, it would have taken me about 6 hours to finish that test, and most everyone else agreed with me. This is a class of grad students who are majoring in actuarial science, risk management, finance... So these aren't soft MBAs who like marketing classes, these are people who know math very well, and if all of us had such problems, then I think that counts as not fair. On the other hand, if the prof decides to define 50% as an A, I should do ok. And it's very possible he might do something like that.

Almost done with school. One in class final tomorrow, a take home final due Monday, big-ass project due next Tuesday, and a small project due this Thursday. Then it's all over. Finally.