Posted By matt on September 21, 2012
So, I watched NORML life, which talks about legalizing Marijuana.
The biggest problem I see is that weed is associated with all these annoying hippies. If the same types of folks who smoked cigars and drank scotch openly smoked weed, it wouldn’t have the same stigma associated with it.
All that said, is there anyone who really thinks Marijuana is dangerous and that banning it accomplishes anything other than social control?
Posted By matt on August 4, 2012
Speaking of race, I encountered this article, which basically says that being white and dressing up as a nonwhite character is fine, unless you color your skin. Digging through the comments, the rules seem to be:
Really? Really? We haven’t gotten past this? I mean, that was one of the core themes of original Trek which Roddenberry wanted to address, and that was FIFTY YEARS AGO.
Why, when there are so many other things to fight about, we’re still getting all butthurt over arbitrary conditions of genetics?
Posted By matt on August 3, 2012
“I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage’. I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.”
Not surprisingly, this is not the first time someone has professed to know the will of God when it comes to marriage:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.
–Leon M. Bazile, judge in Loving v. Virginia
Further, the Defense of Marriage Act is not exactly a new idea either. Codifying what constitutes a legitimate marriage, lest it lead to the downfall of civilization, has been done before.
It’s the same playbook, run again, just with a different group being denied their civil rights this time. Here is what the Supreme Court had to say about this playbook last time:
Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival…. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
Now, for everyone who is supporting Chick-fil-A, I ask – if they were donating to groups promoting racial segregation and defending traditional marriage as between people of the same race, and that will be punished for being so arrogant as to presume to change that definition, would you still back them?
Of course, many of those folks will claim that this is somehow special and different.
It’s not, and everyone who believes in equal rights of free people should realize that.
Posted By matt on August 3, 2012
I’ll see if maybe I can keep it up. There’s enough stuff going on to talk about (that’s actually worth talking about), that I have things to write, but I’ve just been busy.
We put in the garden, and that’s going well.
Picked up some kayaks for our anniversary, and have been paddling about in those.
We’ve got chickens now (I’ll need to post pics) – 10 of them.
We’ve been working on the house, working at work (times are busy for both of us of late), not much else.
Just living life, I guess.
Posted By matt on January 28, 2012
The new floor is going to be dark wood cork, heavily sealed against moisture (slobbery dogs, klutzy humans).
We need to get a little bit more tile and then remove the layer of plywood with the glue on it. There’s another layer of plywood under that. Then we need to get a thinner layer of plywood for under the new floor so it’s all the same height, put that in, and the flooring arrives this week, so there is a possibility that it will all be done next weekend.
Posted By matt on October 28, 2011
The problem with a blog is that you don’t have time to keep up with it when you are actually doing things. I’ve had some thoughts on various topics of philosophical natures (Occupy Wall Street, password complexity, top posting of email, etc.).
This is the latest addition to the estate, and accounts for a lot of my time over the past couple of months. We subcontracted out the building, but there was still a lot of set-up with the painting, caulking holes to make it weather tight, adding hardware, etc.
Posted By matt on September 20, 2011
So, when Netflix basically doubled their prices, I was cool with it. It was a heck of a deal, and I looked at it as “we’ve been getting the streaming stuff as an extended beta for free, and now we have to pay for it”. Even if I wasn’t being so generous, there’s also the idea that with more money, they can get me more content. So, I’m fine with it.
And then they pull this crap. Splitting up the services so they don’t integrate anymore, loses their “try it on streaming and if you can’t find it fall back to physical media” value proposition. Further, it opens up the new streaming-only Netflix to increased competition from streaming-only services. The value the unified Netflix brought was the one-stop shopping. With this split, I could see myself quite easily keeping Qwikster and dropping Netflix in favor of Amazon video or similar – or possibly dropping both.
Of course, I would have commented on their blog, except you can’t, because it’s not a real blog – it’s Facebook, and you can’t comment without a Facebook account, which I don’t have, because Facebook sucks.
Posted By matt on August 28, 2011
As a result of the hurricane, at least one of the cats has decided to seek refuge in the hung ceiling of the basement.
The wind is blowing, but as of right now there is nothing tremendously interesting going on – just rain and wind and we still have power. It’s flickered a bit, but is otherwise stable.
The garden has been going well so far. The pea crop was bad – largely my fault, as I underplanted. Plus, that batch of seed seemed to have a pretty poor germination.
The rest of it has been fine – squash and corn were fine, the pumpkins are looking good, as are the onions and potatoes.
Beer is good, carboys are full, and phase 2 of the beer system is complete (phase 1 was 4 kegs with ability to tap 1. Phase 2 was 4 more kegs, with the ability to tap 4. Phase 3 is bringing the taps out of the refrigerator so that they’re proper bar taps).
We’ve decided to keep chickens, starting next year. MyPetChicken.com has a pile of interesting breeds. Liz found a fairly over the top chicken coop, which we’ll be hiring our neighbor to build. He builds houses, and this coop is more “small house” than “shed” or “coop”. That and the economy is pretty down, so he’s available, and building it ourselves will end up taking a couple of months of weekends.
I also picked up a new video card to add to the computer my brother gave me for my birthday. Right now, we’re playing a lot of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I’m planning on gearing up for Battlefield 3. This requires an upgrade to Windows 7, which I’, not particularly looking forward to, as I fear it will break a good portion of my existing games. My brother, for example, claims that he’s not been able to get Mechwarrior 4 to work.
I think that I’m going to preemptively partition the drive to multi-boot, likely using xosl as the boot loader. That way I can still play games on XP (even after it goes unsupported) if need be. The working theory is that XP will be a fallback if I can’t get it to work in Windows 7.
Anyway, pictures behind the cut. ASUS card with ATI Radeon 6870 w/ 1GB of RAM. It’s a little absurd.
Posted By matt on August 12, 2011
So, because I’m over 20, they’re testing my blood every few years for cholesterol. As such, I’ve been researching it, and have dug up some more information on things I read some years ago.
http://thehealthyskeptic.org/cholesterol-doesnt-cause-heart-disease
This article cites a lot of sources, but is not tremendously lengthy.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mercola/the-cholesterol-myth-that_b_676817.html
This article cites few sources, but quotes a lot of people. This one is especially poignant:
Sally Fallon, the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, and Mary Enig, Ph.D, an expert in lipid biochemistry, have gone so far as to call high cholesterol “an invented disease, a ‘problem’ that emerged when health professionals learned how to measure cholesterol levels in the blood.”
Further down in the article, he suggests that any level under 150 is LOW cholesterol, and that 200-250 would be optimal. One should note that modern medical convention says that 200-240 is “Borderline High”.
Even further, he goes on to criticize the medicines. At best, they do very little. At worst, they do active harm.
Finally, he criticizes the methodology of Ancel Keys, who first linked dietary fat to heart disease – namely discarding data which didn’t fit his conclusion.
I think what has happened is that there was some (flawed) studies linking fatty diets with heart disease, then 30 years of analysis isolated it to a link between heart disease and cholesterol. So, logically, if we lower the cholesterol, the heart disease will go down, right? Except, it isn’t happening. So, there’s a bit of a WTF, and cue 25 years more research, which brings us to today, and the above.
To be honest, I’m a bit skeptical about medicine in general. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of what they do is fabulous and amazing, but no one bats a thousand, and medicine has quite a history of getting things wrong, and having “conventional medical wisdom” be wrong for a really long time. Remember leeches and bleedings? How about the ebb and flow model of blood circulation, or using mercury to treat VD.
Posted By matt on August 12, 2011
I was listening to the Cato daily podcast, and they referenced this freedom study. I found it interesting. Unsurprisingly, NY is quite un-free, though the gay marriage bill being passed will likely move us up a couple of steps.
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