After a long layoff, I'm back in the gym, and boy did it feel great! I went Saturday and did overhead squats, front squats (oh, how I missed front squats), back squats, deadlifts, and bench press. It was awesome to get in there and do the big lifts. My numbers were low, but that's cool, it's been a while. I'm so sore I can barely move, but I went in again today, and did front squats, deadlifts, overhead press, and bench press. Ok, very similar to day one, but I'll add in some variety tomorrow. Kind of want to get the soreness out of the way.

This gym is pretty decent, they have most everything I need, but are missing several things I wish I had access to. Lucky for me I just found out a CrossFit gym opened near here, so I'm going to check it out soon, maybe do their twice a week membership. I want access to climbing ropes, gymnastics equipment, bumper weights, and the expertise to teach proper use.

This is some amazing stuff.

Courtesy of Instapundit, a fantastic article on the benefits of having the sort of rich businessmen that liberals often complain about. The basics are that semiconductor mogul T.J. Rodgers figured out several years ago that solar energy technology was going to blur the lines with microchip manufacturing, and presumably be subject to Moore's Law. Now he's beginning to reap the benefits, with a free and basically inexhaustible alternative energy source and solar panels that get cheaper and more efficient on a very consistent basis. With energy prices rising, Rodgers stands to make a whole lot of money, and at the same time, change the world.

Now that rates are going down again thanks to the Fed's panicked lowering of their target rate by 125 basis points in less than a week, refinancing mortgages is again becoming a popular and smart choice. There's a problem, however. After getting reamed recently for giving out too many mortgages to people with bad credit partially at the behest of politicians and the press who thought every American should be able to own a home, mortgage companies are upping their standards, so now we get headlines on CNN like, "Refinancing: Only for the Privileged Few."

So if you're a mortgage company, you just can't win. Either you give mortgages to ever bad credit case that walks in the door, and then are blamed as greedy, evil bastards when those people can't fulfill the loans they signed for, or you only give mortgages to people with good enough credit to remove doubt about their ability to pay, and then you're an asshole for not helping the poor and less "privileged."

But you know what? That's such BULLSHIT. First off, you don't have to make very much money to have good credit, you just have to not have too much debt, and pay off the debt you do incur on time. So the difference between "privileged" and "non-privileged" has nothing to do with how much money you make, but whether you are responsible about your money or not. And CNN thinks mortgage companies and the responsible should take it up the ass for those who spend more than they earn. This is a bad attitude, and the kind of thinking that leads to a lot of bad social policy.

So here's an interesting question which I read on another blog.... As the elections heat up, the Democrat candidates hint at raising taxes to fix our budget deficit and keep social security from going under. Basically either the government goes back on its word and lowers/changes benefits for people who have paid in thinking they were getting one thing and instead will get a lot less. Or the government raises taxes a LOT to pay for it. The question is, at what level of taxation/confiscation do we no longer have freedom? Heck, people already talk about 60% tax rates on rich people. Those people are no longer free, they are slaves of the system, working hard and smart so they can keep less than half of what they earned? Is that freedom? It doesn't seem like freedom to me.

There's a new documentary out called "The King of Kong." It's really, really good, covering the saga of the people who compete for world records in old video games like the original Donkey Kong. It doesn't focus on the games so much as the personalities, and their little, insular world. It doesn't matter if you've never played a video game in your life, it's just a really interesting documentary, so check for at Blockbuster or on Netflix or wherever you get your movies. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

In a new low in the annals of inhumanity, terrorist assholes in Iraq put remote detonation bombs on two mentally deficient women, and sent them into a marketplace, detonated the bombs, and killed about a hundred people. Even the sort of lay down and die apologists who call terrorists "freedom fighters" can't possibly be ok with this. At least suicide bombers, as sick as they are, know what they are doing. These two women probably didn't realize the implications. Sick, just sick.

Some stupid town in Vermont with an overblown sense of it's own importance and a profound ignorance as to the true state of affairs in this world called for the arrest of President Bush, something they plan to act on if he ever visits their town. They got tons of publicity for it, which is probably what they wanted, but they also got people around the country calling the town hall to tell them they are idiots, and now they are offended that people had the nerve to call them on their ridiculous bluster. What did they expect the reaction to such utter stupidity to be?