My other blogs

I actually maintain two other blogs out there that I use much more often than this one. If you are interested I blog about my family/life/personal issues more here

http://blog.myspace.com/151362085

And I also have one that I call my political/current news blog here

http://360.yahoo.com/realdarthnielsen

Maybe I will see you there!

Funny Story

So I got a sad but funny story to tell here today.

My son in law is currently living with us. He is a 19 year old who is half Mexican, but he has never even been to Mexico and does not even speak any Spanish. But he has been trying to find a job for some time now here in Idaho and a funny thing happened to him the other day.

He was talking to a prospective employer who asked him if he knew how to lay linoleum. He promptly informed the man that he did not.

The man then asked him “do you have any friends who would like some work, under the table with no questions asked?”

This left my son in law dumb-founded and just made me laugh. This is a glaring example of just what is wrong with our country today.

Busting those Damn Aliens

In an unusual move today, the government actually showed some balls when it carried out an immigration raid in several meat processing plants around the country. The purpose of the raids was to break up a huge identity theft ring. I had to laugh as I saw pictures of women holding up signs protesting their mothers being arrested for breaking the law. How can you protest this? It may be my identity they are stealing, as my personal info has been stolen at least 4 times in the past 5 years that I know of.

Now I do feel bad for the kids. I mean, if they were born here then that puts them in a sad situation. But their parents broke the law, and if we are truly a land of justice than they need to be busted. They won’t get any sympathy from me. Their children will, as they didn’t do anything wrong. But if their parents are here illegally than they should have to pay the price. The law is the law.

Human Nature

I am not a religious man. For years I had religion crammed down my throat and then finally, when I was 29 years old, I opened my eyes to the absurdity of it all and have never looked back. But I don’t have a problem with religious people. I don’t have a problem with the 10 commandments being at the court house or having “in god we trust” on our money or any of that jazz. I just don’t personally believe in any of it.

That being said, I do like to sit and ponder human nature and the instinctual tendencies we all have a human animals. Religion is interesting to me in that it seeks to deny the natural self. The majority of the major religions out there encourage us to believe that we are inherently evil. That our carnal lusts and desires are to be fought and suppressed, and indulgence in them is a sin punishable by eternal damnation.

I have witnessed several interesting things in my lifetime concerning crooked people in positions of religious authority. I have known ministers who were alcoholics, adulterers, liars, dishonest bigots, and just pure dishonest. It was hard for me to understand how I was supposed to trust these people to help me when they were not any better than I was. Who were they to judge me?

But then I realized that they are just human like me. When it comes down to it we are all animals by nature. Men will always have a tendency to have sex with as many different women as they can in their lifetimes. They will always find it in their nature to lie, cheat and steal if that is what they perceive is needed to survive. It is survival of the fittest, after all.

Women will always be the protectors of their young ones. They will always have an instinctual desire to protect their children. They will always be attracted to the male that they feel can best suit their needs, and then they will always want to hang on to that male for as long as they can. But if that male ever stops being what they need they will go out in search of another.

I am not advocating that we all need to go out and become animals, screwing whoever we want whenever we want. We do have intelligence, and we need to be able to control our desires somewhat for the betterment of society. But I have found that by just embracing them and understanding that they are not evil, but normal and natural, I am much more at peace with myself than I ever was with religion. I know now that if there is some higher power and I have to face him/her when I die than I will at least be at peace with myself.

But religion seeks to deny these truths and replace them with their own. But history shows us the truth of the animal kingdom, while there is no real evidence of religious truth. One has only to read the news to see the tragedies facing religion these days to see the failure of religion. Whether it be priests who molest children, ministers who are drug addicts, or so-called prophets who use religion as an excuse to control and rape little girls, the world is rife with travesties. And it is tragic to me that people will use religion as an excuse to commit some of the worst tragedies in human history, whether we are talking about the inquisition period of Catholic history or the latest story about the polygamous prophet of southern Utah forcing 14 year old girls to marry their cousins and be totally submissive to them, the idea is the same.

So at what point do we as a people move on and get modern with our views of human nature? Why do so many people work so hard to be something that goes totally against their natural selves? All for some expected reward that nobody has ever truly seen and of which there is exactly zero evidence for its existence? I find this stuff fascinating to think about sometimes.

I can’t help but feel that sometimes religion is holding back the human race’s progress by clinging to ancient beliefs and ideals that were designed for another age.

Sean Hannity made me a Liberal!

I have been teetering for a long time over whether or not I identified better with the Liberal or Conservative persuasion. I have always kind of leaned towards liberalism in most of my personal beliefs, but since the only talk radio that seems to exist anywhere I have lived is conservative, I have never really commited myself either way. Guys like Hannity and Rush can be pretty persuasive in their arguments and do an excellent job of painting liberals as the awful, evil manipulative people who are out to destroy everything. I am never one to just buy into propaganda though, so I make an effort to read the news for myself.

So today I am driving home from work early and so I got to listen to Hannity instead of my normal Michael Savage. I don't normally listen to Hannity because he just gets on my nerves, but today I did. And boy did he open my eyes to the conservative movement and the Republicans. Here are a few of the things he said and my responses to them. I shouldn't be too hard to see why he made me a certified Liberal. Keep in mind that Hannity did not expound on anything the liberals are saying. He just through out inflamatory headlines without painting the whole picture for his listeners. This is how they make the liberals look bad. They take one line of a story and paint it to look awful. When I read the whole story about why they are saying the things they are saying I happen to agree with them more than the conservatives.

The Dems are going to raise your taxes and repeal the Bush tax cuts.
Okay by me. I read today that an independent financial firm determined that if the Dems do nothing else but let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, by 2012 our deficit will be 10 trillion dollars less. If I have to pay a little extra taxes in order to protect the financial future of our country for my grandchildren than I am all for it. I look at it as an investment in the future.

Hillary Clinton is wanting to put the Health Care issue back on the table.
Having been someone who has not had health insurance for years until very recently, I understand the frustration and fear that comes from not being able to see a doctor. I am open to exploring different ideas and thoughts concerning health care reform in this country.

The Dems want to raise the minimum wage and hurt small businesses.
Waaa. Have you ever had to try to live on minimum wage? How many of the rich republican congressmen who oppose the raise have? They are quick to give themselves raises all the time, and they don't even need it. Businesses will be fine.

And last but not least, the Dems want to "cut and run" in Iraq and surrender to the terrorists.
Funny. If you read the whole story about what the Dems want to do it makes much more sense than what we are doing now. Lets take a look at what we are doing now. We are dumping billions of dollars into a lawless nation. The people have been killing each other for thousands of years. We send them guns and supplies and a huge percentage of them disappear, only to be found in the hands of terrorists killing our kids. And what progress is being made? From what have seen and read things are just getting worse. A recent poll showed that our being there is just increasing the terrorists' hatred of us and is spawning more terrorists wanting to kill us. The Iraqi "government", and I use that term loosely, has no incentive to get their act together and start taking care of themselves and their own problems because they have us there on an open-ended deployment.

In summary, we are spending billions to give terrorists more reasons to kill our kids with our own guns.

The evil Dems want to begin a phased pull out of our troops. This is to be done in such a way to put pressure on the "government" over there to get there acts together and start taking care of themselves. They are not advocating a full and immediate withdrawal. They are saying we withdraw in stages in order to show them that we are not going to be there forever. They will either get it together, or they will erupt in an all out civil war. It is up to them.

So I just want to thank Sean for opening my eyes. The Dems have plans. The GOP just wants you to think that they don't. And listening to a champion of the GOP today spewing half-truths and propaganda just opened my eyes to the reality of the GOP: They are just a bunch of closed-minded rich white boys who have never had to work for a living. They are afraid of losing their power because then they might have to find a real job instead of working 100 days a year and making millions of taz payers dollars for it.

Politics

What an interesting couple of days it has been! The Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives and the Senate is still in the midst of a heated neck and neck race. I also just read that Donald Rumsfeld, whom I have been a staunch hater of for years, is FINALLY stepping down. Where to start here…

I don’t generally side with any particular party. I do tend to lean towards the liberal side of things do to my personal beliefs and lifestyle, but I don’t like a lot of the current batch of Dems due to their inability to stand up for anything concrete. They all seem to be wishy-washy on things, leaning first one way and then the other.

But I do feel that we need a changing of the guard. It seems to me that the current Republican congress has done next to nothing the past several years except argue and take recesses. I am not sure if the Dems are going to be any better but at least they will be different. I guess we will just have to watch what happens over the next 2 years.

As for Rumsfeld, I am so glad he is gone. I don’t like him for a lot of the same reasons I don’t like Bush. They seem to like consolidating power unto themselves, finding ways to bypass the system of checks and balances that our constitution lays out. Rumsfeld in particular does not listen to criticism. I find it interesting the number of people who are willing to express a difference of opinion with him publicly has dropped drastically since he came to power. Early on, those who didn’t see things his way were “retired” or they just disappeared. Take for example General Shinseki. You remember him, don’t ya? He was the decorated army general who was a veteran of urban warfare in the Balkans. He told congress that we were going to need at least 300,000 troops to secure the peace in Iraq after we toppled Saddam. This was in stark contrast to what Rumsfeld wanted to hear, and within weeks Shinseki was “retiring”. Now Rumsfeld has surrounded himself with yes-men and nobody stands up to him.

Who better to ask about how to run a war like the one in Iraq than a decorated military commander with that specific experience?

So today has been a monumental day in our nation, and I will be curious to see what happens next.

US Bank

I hate banks in general. I have for years. I hate the fact that I can no longer just get a paycheck for my work, go cash it, and when my money is gone it is gone.

But out of all the banks I have used over the years I don’t think there is one that has pissed me off as much as US Bank has. This past weekend we went on a trip with my parents. My dad was paying for the room so he reserved conjoined rooms at a really fancy resort. It was not the kind of place I could afford, but that didn’t matter because he was paying for it.

But we got there a couple of hours before they did and wanted to check into our room. In order to do that they required my bank card. I gave it to them but made it very, very clear that I was not paying for the room, my dad was. And even upon check out my dad told them again that he was paying for both rooms.

So imagine my surprise when I was billed $245 yesterday in my account from the hotel. This immediately caused 4 other things to put me in the negative, which of course allowed the bank to take almost $150 in overdraft fees. My dad called the hotel and they were more than happy to fix the mistake and send back my money. They assured him it would be there today. But the bank did not want to refund the overdraft fees, regardless of the reasons for the over draft. I spent my lunch hour fighting them and in the end the relented, but not before there were some interesting revelations made to me. The worst one is the admission that they will still authorize my card to process new transactions even if my account is in the negative. This is what happened when I put gas in the car yesterday. Apparently I was already $30 in the hole when I put my card in the pump, totally unbeknownst to me, but the pump took it anyway. So right there the bank made an extra $35 off of me because I hadn’t taken a look at my account yet that day. This happened again at wal-mart the other night when we went to get groceries. It allowed me to spend $80 when I was apparently $30 in the hole.

Does anybody else see the problem with this??

Well I went down and got a little nasty with them and was assured it would be fixed tomorrow. I told them for their own stake they better hope so…

Banks are evil.