Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow...

It snowed last Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and we got an inch of a snow/hail/slush mix this afternoon. This is probably going to be one of the coldest last weeks of March on record. State law forbids the use of studded tires starting April 1, but they've announced that they will not be enforcing this law until it stops snowing. The passes have tons of fresh snow and I hear skiing is good.

School starts tomorrow but I'll probably skip the first day since all we typically do is receive our syllabuses and go over them. Since Trebonte is still out west in Hawaii I have little desire to drive the 60 mile trip to school without using the carpool lanes.

I did my taxes early this year and finished them about 45 minutes ago. I realized that if I don't count sales tax (8.8% at the moment) I paid 19.3% of my income to the government in some form of fees or taxes. As over half of my income pays for college, tax is my second largest expense, slightly beating out gasoline in third place. I'm not holding my breath that whatever loser wins the presidential election will do anything to reduce my taxes since they seem to think that they can spend my money better than me. Lies!

Closed

The Seattle Library was closed on Easter.  Here's the official posting from their web site:

Library Closed due to historic low usage (Easter)
12 - 6pm
Summary:
All locations of The Seattle Public Library will be closed Sunday, March 23 (Easter), due to historic low usage.

I think being a national holiday might also have something to do with being closed, but you can't mention Easter since it's a Christian holiday and therefore must be ignored by all government funded institutions.  Also I don't think the library would be much less busy than usual as dozens of bums pretty much live there. 

Congratulations!

If you can read this I should probably congratulate you on surviving 2007. Since my last post of substance we’ve had quite a lot of news:

A report by the United States Senate Committee on Environment & Public (a mouthful isn’t it?) about “global warming” gave a list of over 400 well respected climatologists and other scientists who decry the so-called consensus on the issue of “man-made global warming”. Many of these scientists were or are on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and disagreed with the findings. If you have a ton of free time and interest here’s a link to the report itself. It is over 160 pages long. Anyone who claims consensus on ANYTHING in science is obviously ignorant or lying. There’s never consensus on anything. Everything is constantly questioned and retested in new ways to create new theories. Scientists who disagree with the current models of gravity can present their hypotheses and receive funding to test their models with the latest tools to try to prove or disprove their original claims; this is how real science works. Scientists who disagree with the popular claims on “global warming” are shouted down and called puppets of the oil companies;
this is dogma.

The government has once again decided to get into my bedroom saying what I can and can’t use to illuminate it.  Incandescent light-bulbs with light outputs between 310 and 2600 lumens (so generally 40-150W) will be illegal to buy or sell starting 2014.  It doesn’t matter that there are incandescent bulbs that are 4x more efficient than standard bulbs; research funding is going to completely dry up for these new bulbs since they now have a very limited time before they’re made illegal too.  They want us to use the TOXIC compact fluorescent bulbs instead.  I refuse to use those because the color temperature is ugly, they rarely last more than a few months in my house before burning out, and they contain mercury vapor.  They claim you don’t have to worry though, since small quantities of mercury are only dangerous if inhaled.  Since this mercury is in vapor form is just scatters into the air…where it can be inhaled…
I think I should try calling the ACLU to ask them to fight to keep the government out of my bedroom when it comes to my illumination choices. They didn't do anything to protect my right to privacy in the bathroom when the government decided it could regulate how much water got flushed down the toilet so I really don't expect the ACLU to do anything to protect my liberties.

:-(

As far as I can tell, Bryan Suits is no longer on the radio. I heard a promo commercial on KVI on the way to church yesterday morning that mentioned the wrong shows in the wrong time slots. Going to the web site we saw that virtually all refrences to Bryan were gone and Dr Laura was now in the lineup. I can find no word whatsoever relating to where Bryan went, when he’ll be back, or why this is so. Bryan’s was the only radio show I’d go out of my way to listen to, and now there’s very little on KVI that I really like. I even liked Bryan’s show better than Rusty’s. But at least I can hear Rusty on the radio when the weather is right.

Wednesday Rant

So there were a bunch of hippy groups gathered at school today to celebrate the deaths of American soldiers. They had several thousand fake headstones that they placed all over campus with each one containing the name of a fallen soldier in Iraq. The people claim that they are a non-partisan group whose sole purpose is to show everyone the “human cost of Bush’s war.” I’m pretty sure that they’re celebrating every American death because it gives them another name to add to another headstone.


Also the Senate is trying to force amnesty for 12 million criminals into law. The scary thing is that it looks like they may do it; which would pretty much give millions of ILLEGAL aliens even more rights than citizens as they probably won’t be required to pay taxes on all of their past income. Many groups have estimated that this will produce a net financial burden on the government of $2-4 TRILLION over the next ten years. With 300 million people in the US, that comes out to an average of over $1300 that each and every American will be paying in taxes each year solely to support the drain on the budget caused by these criminals. I’ll pay the extra few cents my fruits and veggies will cost by having to pay Americans to pick them instead of depending on illegal workers illegally handling my food for a few bucks a day.


We used to have places like Ellis Island where we funneled all potential immigrants through and screened them before allowing to officially enter the US. We have extensive laws and regulations and hoops to jump through for anyone who wants to legally come to the US and the process can be expensive and take years. Most of the illegal aliens here today skipped the process and walked across the Mexican border, and now they’re being rewarded for it. Now I want to move to Mexico, renounce my US citizenship and hop back across the US border to enjoy all of the privileges of being an illegal alien in this country.


Also, Congress is considering a bill making it a criminal action punishable with jail time to download copyrighted works from the internet or use them without buying them first. So not only are they going to pardon millions of criminals who shouldn’t be here in the first place, they want to send kids to jail for sharing a song or two with their friends. I’m starting to consider moving to a freer country like China, where foreigners can get away with much more than citizens (sound familiar?) but in things like being a Christian criticizing government without disappearing.


I guess that’s about it for my quasi-coherent rant. Someday I hope to be represented in either half of Congress, but until that day I’ll just complain a lot and wish I was old enough to run against these morons.