Standards and Grudges

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Here’s an idea to help take the influence of campaign donations out of politics.

Why should people and companies be allowed to donate to election campaigns in regions they do not reside or are incorporated? Here’s a nice example that I used in my previous post about the South Park Scientology episode. Tom Cruise donated to Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign. He lives in California, she is of course a Senator for New York.

The point of the idea is to of course prevent companies from buying our elected officials. While I don’t generally like the idea of preventing an individual from donating to a cause they believe in, individual donations would become a loophole for companies to still influence our government if it were not prevented as well.

I wouldn’t expect politicians to embrace this idea however. They currently enjoy large donations from people outside their constituency.

South Park takes on Scientology. I didn’t see this episode when it first aired, but I was lucky to catch the rerun today. It was a great episode. They made fun of R Kelly, Scientology and especially singled out Tom Cruise. Here’s a nice fact. Tom Cruise donates exclusively to Democrats. Really nice ally you got there moonbats.

I wonder how many people learned about Scientology’s weird beliefs from this episode. I bet there’s some serious strategy meetings going on at the headquarters in Clearwater. Think they’ll sue Matt Stone and Trey Parker? The ending was perfect. I think Matt and Trey are daring the Scientologists to sue them.

Here’s another interesting fact. Issac Hayes, the voice of Chef, is a Scientologist. Chef wasn’t in this episode and this was the first episode that didn’t credit him, even though there were other episodes without his character.

I’ve been doing some laundry before I go to work tonight and I had an interesting thought. The abortion rights activists believe the government should not interfere with a womans option to get an abortion and that she should not be required to notify or get the consent of her parents, husband or the child’s father. Should similar rights be conferred to men? Should a man have a right to disown an unborn child, meaning they give up all legal rights and absolve themselves of any financial support for the child?

I think that’s an interesting debate. Should men have the option to not support a child they do not want? If the woman doesn’t want it, she can get an abortion. What are the options for men?

Sometimes technology is used to create amazing things. But then sometimes toy companies use technology to dazzle kids into annoying their parents into wasting money.

Ah yes. Hasbro’s latest concoction is nothing more than a cheap electronic device made from a surplus of old hand held game and cell phone technology. They call it VideoNow XP. I wonder how they got away with using “XP” in the title when Microsoft has “XP Media Center”. It seems awfully close to a trademark violation.

Hasbro’s trick is not making a revolutionary hand held entertainment system. They’re banking on marketing it properly. Their target demographic is ages 6 and up. So far they’ve unleashed a blitz of advertisements with the teen pop poser, Jesse McCartney and I’m sure other teen idols are being enlisted to push this garbage as well. The system costs about $50-60, depending on where you buy it and it currently has 100 discs available. The game and music video discs sell for anywhere between $10-25.

I feel bad for parents that buy this thing. They’re going to waste a lot of money first on this system, then on discs for it, and then the kids will forget about it by this time next year.

When I was a kid my brothers and me would find endless entertainment with a bunch of sticks and rocks. I had a great time. When I eventually have kids I’m going to have to move to the country. That way the kids can play in the woods and I won’t have to hear the begging for expensive electronic toys. Get them a sled for winter and a bike for summer and unleash them into the wilds of Wisconsin.

I’ve become absorbed with the all consuming task of creating a multimedia site for work. The National Guard is kind of unusual in the regards that Guardsmen are expected to know things, but that’s pretty hard when you’re only there two days a month. So I’ve built a site to let Guardsmen in my shop know about things. I have a calendar, forum, private messaging and news publishing installed so far. But there’s so much yet to do. The private messaging module is not connected to the online users table in the database, so you can send a private message, but you have no way of knowing who is online. Not unless you have administrator rights and you have access to the backend. So getting that fixed is priority right now.

Once that is working I want to install a gallery and file manager for sharing documents and files. Then I would like to install a live chat function. Live chat is not exactly a high priority right now, but when we get deployed, it would be nice if family members would be able to chat with us. Traditional methods of chat, like a messenger program or IRC are not authorized on government computers, so browser chat is the only way.

But if ANYONE out there has experience with Mambo or PHP CMS, send me an email. This is a big project and I’m in well over my head right now. So far I’ve managed to keep to not break the site, but my luck will probably run out as I add the more complex functions. I’ll probably need to ask someone some questions eventually, but I don’t know anyone to ask.