Shawn's Website

In perusing the internet for political content, I came across this rant by a guy calling himself Raybin. It's pretty impressive, and sums up my feelings very well. In particular, I liked this part a lot:

I say this now, in full realization of all its implications: I would be willing to endure a yearly 9/11 scale attack in exchange for not surrendering one whit, one inch, one iota of any right guaranteed by the Constitution, even should one of the aforesaid attacks take my own life.

They can destroy the Sears Tower, the Empire State Building, they can level every city in America but if the people live free, come what may, terror can never and will never triumph.

I second this, and I would prefer my own death over the end of my freedom. As the Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata said, “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” I am not a coward, and I will not live my life in fear of terrorism or anything else. Fear is a sign of weakness, it should not be something treated as a legitimate concern. All of the whining and passive aggressive attitudes of the Republicans and other idiots about terrorism should come to a stop. Now. If you are afraid of terrorists, you are a coward, and you have already lost to them.

It is a sad day when so many Americans are so cowardly that we don't even let people carry around bottles of water anymore. Enough is enough. It's time for courage to become an American value once again. Fear is Unamerican.

Congress is debating giving the telecommunications companies the ability to shut down sites like mine or force me to pay a fee to let other people read my website (note that the server and bandwidth are already paid for, so this is just an attempt by AT&T, Verizon, etc. to steal from me and other sites.) Unfortunately, the mouth-breathing morons running this country are leaning towards the side of the greedy, as always, and have no clue what they are doing. This was made especially clear by Republican Senator Ted Stevens, who made a very weird rant about why he voted against legislation that would keep the internet uncensored, that is listed on Wired News:

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service is now going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people.

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says “No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet”. No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutrality that hits you and me.

So according to Ted Stevens, the internet is in tubes. Like plumbing. Or toothpaste. Also I've never had someone send me an entire internet before, but I imagine that if I did receive an internet, I probably wouldn't have enough room on my hard drive to store it all. The man is an idiot and should just abstain from voting on things he is too lazy and stupid to even bother researching.

With recent events, we started looking into the idea of buying a house. However, instead of buying one, we ended up going with the idea of having David Weekley build one for us in the Grand Mission community just outside of Houston. Click all of those links for more information, because they explain better what features out house will have as well as what the community is like (e.g. they have water slides and a huge pool.) We're getting a decent lot since the area we got to pick from just opened up, and we will have a big brick wall to the back of the house. I've taken a floorplan from the David Weekley site for the Aiden and edited it to look like what I think ours is going to end up being:

The house should be built in a September/October timeframe, so watch here for more updates. We're already figuring out what all we have to buy, what we have to do, etc. It should be exciting.

Ok let's be clear on something. As everyone who knows me well knows, I like guns. I grew up around them, I realize that guns themselves are inanimate and thus guns do not kill, and I understand the 2nd amendment of the U.S. Constitution that guarantees the freedom for people living in the United States to own arms. With all that being said, you would think that I would be interested in the most powerful lobbyist group in the country on the subject of firearms might be a perfect fit for me, right? Well, you'd be wrong.

I first realized how stupid the NRA is when they decided to hold a rally in Columbine right after the school shootings. I understand that perhaps they were scared that Columbine would become a rallying point for an anti-gun movement, but that is only because as an organization they are paranoid. I think that Michael Moore put it pretty well in his movie “Bowling for Columbine” when he discussed how the boys that did it were also into bowling, yet you don't hear calls for bans on bowling. Anyway, their rally ended up making them look like a bunch of jerks because there was no real anti-gun movement there, and the NRA badgered and intimidated the families of the kids who were murdered that day.

The fact is, the NRA has become a paranoid conspiracy right-wing nutcase organization. They always go on about how the Democratic Party wants to take their guns. This is a lie, and as I've found out, most of the Democrats have a very mainstream view on guns, and the few who are against them do so by representing the people of their communities. The fact is that the NRA doesn't actually care that the Democrats don't want to take guns away from us, but they need a scapegoat, and I'm sure they appreciate all the money they get from the Republican Party.

This brings us to the latest lunacy from the NRA tin-foil hat brigade. The NRA is claiming that the U.N. wants to seize the guns of all Americans on July 4th. According to the article I just linked to:

The campaign is largely the work of the U.S. National Rifle Association, whose executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, warns on an NRA Web site (http://www.stopungunban.org/) of a July 4 plot “to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection.”

Of course, anyone who bothers to spend at least five minutes using their brains discovers that the U.N. (which is located in New York) is closed for the 4th of July as a holiday. Secondly, the article states:

For another, the U.N. conference will look only at illegal arms and “does not in any way address legal possession,” a matter left to national governments to regulate rather than the United Nations, he added.

If you are a member of the NRA, please read that again, then I want you to go to a chalkboard and write it 100 times as a punishment for being stupid. The U.N. is not going to take your guns. Do you want to know what the conference is really about? Take a look at the U.N.'s website that describes the conference:

The [UN] Register [of Conventional Arms] comprises seven categories of major conventional arms, namely, battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-calibre artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships (including submarines) as well as missiles and missile-launchers.

So is the NRA in favor of selling tanks to the Sudanese government to commit genocide? Or, perhaps, is this just another conspiracy theory by that sleazy rat Wayne LaPierre to keep gun owners living in fear and paranoia so they can be more easily led to vote for who pays NRA the most?

This past Wednesday, Hazel and I had the honor of attending the release of Al Gore's book, “An Inconvenient Truth” which is a companion to the movie by the same name. It is all part of a media blitz meant to bring awareness of the impending climate disaster to the awareness of all Americans.

Overall, Al Gore brought together an amazing presentation of what is happening to our planet, what have the conditions been like historically, and what the expected results should be. Gore is working on spreading the word about what may be the greatest danger our civilization has ever faced.

We were able to not only see a first-hand, updated version of the presentation the movie and book were based on, but also to meet the man himself, plus walk away with two autographed copies of his book. Below, you will be introduced not only to the multimedia presentation of “An Inconvenient Truth” but also my thoughts on things such as Al Gore's future roll in politics and in society.