lonecity.com

President Obama is about to wrap up his first week in the white house and I’m surprised there hasn’t been more exciting news.  I’ve never been a racist or thought that way at all.  Still I would have predicted at least one major tragedy to be headlining the news as the back woods white supremecist groups get their panties in a bunch over the nations first black president.  All in all I’m glad to see it turned out this way.  I had almost lost faith in people completely and seeing that my fellow citizens are capable of behaving in a manner befiting of a human bieng puts off my theory of everything.  Even us pessimists can’t be perfectly negative all the time.

Alot of speculation has come to surface about what his first days in office would see accomplished.  Shutting down the prison at guantanimo bay wasn’t at the top of my mind and I’ll admit it probably didn’t win him much popular oppinion.  I have to give him credit though.  He doesn’t back down.  Regardless of whether the american people are afraid of terrorists or not he’s willing to do the right thing, stand up and be a man.  Bush retaliated at the first punch thrown and acted like a little kid and a bully.  Thats not the america I believe in.  I was devastated the day our troops invaded iraq.  I’ll admit there was a problem there and something needed to be done.  However I always felt in my heart that we as americans were above that.  We don’t attack other countries, we only defend ourselves.  I was proven wrong.  Its nice to see obama taking steps to reverse the damage that the bush administration has done.  Where bush hurt this country more than anywhere else is where its most important.  He hurt our pride.  The guantanimo bay prison may harbor the most outrageous criminals known to man but as americans we still have to treat prisoners as though they have the basest of human rights.

I’ve read arguments from military advisors that this is a bad move.  They say we are at war and that we have to treat these prisoners as war criminals.  To that I say yes.  If they are truly guilty and they we at war they don’t deserve a trial in the american court system.  They’re not americans they’re the enemy.  We should execute them!  Holding on to a notion of treating them with respect and then torturing them only injures our pride and our reputation.  If they’re the enemy kill them.  If they’re not let them go. 

The true enemy of the american people is not these people.  Its the radical islamic belief that blowing up complete strangers is going to win them a place in heaven.  Killing a martyr is the last thing we want to do and thats all the iraq war accomplished.  What we should have done is instead of spending billions on blowing up towel heads with guns, we should have spent those billions on printing anti-islamic anti terrorist propaganda.  We should put an end to putting international criminals on trial before sentancing them.  If the FBI or CIA catches a known international criminal entering the country they should be executed without a trial.  (right there in the airport by a firing squad)

Plain and simple Americans shouldn’t be profiteering from war.  We’re better than that.  When an enemy attacks we take them out.  The rest of our military energies should be spent advancing our military advantage over rivals so they know better than to mess with us.

Enough about my american beliefs, Getting back to obamas first week.  The other half of obama’s week seems to have been spent working on the economic crisis.  I’ve made my thoughts known before.  The best way for our government to foster the growth of our country as a whole is to let the economy crumble.  You have to demolish old buildings to build skyscrapers.  Bad business models need to fail in order for newer better ones to compete.  Its real world natural selection.  I see billions in spending and a rush to spend it.  Well I don’t feel the need to rush.  In fact I don’t see the need to spend.  Instead of spending to avoid cuts we need to spend our energy making sure what gets cut is what really needs to.

On the news a few days back was a protest from parents of autistic children who were upset because funding for special education for autistic children was cut.  Now I understand that they feel like their children are bieng left behind, but they shouldn’t.  Realistically their children are entitled to exactly the same education as everyone elses children.  If their children aren’t able to go to school because of autism its the parents responsibility to pay for special schooling to prepare them to attend a normal school.  I’ve heard it argued that if we take away this funding these children will grow up to be wards of the state and cost us even more.  Again I disagree.  Perhaps they will grow up poorly but that doesn’t entitle them to be supported by my tax dollars as an adult.  America is the land of equal opportunity.  I don’t remeber ever reading that america is the land of extra opportunity for those less capable. 

Its cruel I know but we can’t stand in the way of natural selection.  We cut a weakness into the heart of our society by giving more to the weak so they can survive.  If an arm has gang green, we cut it off.  We don’t let that infection continue to grow until it kills us.  Drawing upon our strongest people to pay for unemployment benefits to people who really don’t try all that hard to get a job hurts us.  Paying for viagra, diabetes and asthma pills through medicare programs hurts us.  It would be a sad day when our government really starts to make these kinds of cuts.  Alot of people will be affected.  You don’t need to worry though, because that day will never come.  Try as we might with economic stimulus packages and other bandaids on the economy the united states will die long before our leaders grow enough balls to stand up and tell their constituents that the best thing for our country is not to “help” them anymore.  We’ll continue to foster weakness and eventually we will falter and fail to a country who is more brutish in their policy.

Obama for me represents hope.  I know he isn’t any more likely to make the kind of cuts I see as needed, but at least I see a man with the cojones to stand up and make the cuts he believes in whether someone is going to whine about it or not.  I only hope he sees a different path for our future than I do.  There is some hope for change in his plans for the spending on alternative energy.  Perhaps he sees a fix on the horizon that eludes me.

Picture a scene where a mother in a park buys two ice cream cones for her children.  One child is rowdy and more excited about running off to play on the monkey bars.  The other child is calm and composed.  This child is carefully licking the ice cream so it doesn’t drip.  Care is taken so that every last bit of this ice cream can be savored.  By now we all know how this story ends.  The careless child drops the cone and in an effort to curb the whining little brat mom steps in and does the unthinkable.  She forces the well behaved child to give up half their cone to appease the other child.  This scenario, however simple and unmeaning really represents how life has been for me all along.  It doesn’t matter how hard I work, how good I behave, or even what I say when someone comes for it.  I always earn my ice cream cone and someone else always gets it.

In the real world, the government plays the part of good old mom.  I work very hard to put a little money aside, start a business, and be a successful person.  (not working out nearly as well as I’d hoped, but I still try.)  Out of that income the government takes a portion as tax.  I think thats great.  After all, I can’t afford to pay police officers, build librarys, and pave roads.  A small stipend from everyone makes these larger projects possible.  Heres where I get a little upset though.  Child tax credits, Earned Income Credit, ect.  I don’t have any dependants to claim so my tax money is taken and litterally given to families who have so many kids they can’t afford to pay for them.  They’re rewarded for being irresponsible and its my ice cream cone they’re getting.

Lets move this to a bigger scale.  I put every cent I can into trying to start a successfull business.  Its barely afloat and likely won’t succeed.  The numbers are just against it.  Still I know that its only chance is for me to continue to infuse my money into it and work hard.  In the end if it fails I’m out what I invested, and if it succeeds I might retire with a little bit of a nest egg.  All in all its a fair system.  So when a company thats making hundreds of billions of dollars a year (auto makers!!!) all of a sudden sees an economic downturn I feel they have the same gamble as I do.  Ten years ago I started hearing people talk about wanting more fuel efficient cars.  Solar energy.  Hydrogen Cells.  Ect.  The big three auto makers ignored these requests completely and focused on building monster sized SUV’s for a quick profit.  The fact that the big auto makers are now failing is a direct result of thier lack of forsight.  Had they turned some of those billions of dollars into research on fuel efficency and driving down the cost of new technology people would be lining up to buy their cars.  So what happens?  They go crying to uncle sam (mom) and they get half my ice cream cone.  I’m sorry but they don’t deserve it.

I’m a harsh realist, and I believe that letting the big three go out of business is the right thing to do.  You have to prune a tree for it to grow stronger in the places you want it to.  Its going to hurt a lot of people but the folks who had 300,000 houses and were making $80 an hour on an assembly line were getting more than they deserved.  This in turn swings to inflation with all this money thrown around.  In the end the big three auto makers are hurting the us economy more than they are helping it.  Its time to let them sink or swim.

Now lets scale back to a more personal level.  Last week I heard through the grapevine that a distant cousin of mine had her children taken away by the state.  I don’t know the details, but I don’t think it was anything sexual.  Rather I’m sure it was related to drugs or something like that.  None the less I’ve always known she wasn’t fit to be a parent.  Both of her ex husbands are doing prison time now.  Her oldest child was taken away a year ago, and now the younger two are as well.  With the way those children were growing up I honestly cant say I feel bad for her.  Starting fires, doing drugs, burglary, car theft…  Horrible parenting all around.

So now she’s coming to take away my ice cream cone.  The state needs to place her children into foster care and she knows that I’m the only one who has a job, owns a house, and doesn’t have kids that is reasonably close to where she lives.  I really was surprised when the state came asking if we wanted to adopt the kids.  It wasn’t expected.  Still from looking at the pattern I shouldn’t have been.  She’s gone and screwed up her life.  Now she wants me to pay to raise her children.  She wants the pleasure of bieng able to see them but not the responsibility of caring for them.  Well at least I can say no. 

Before all of you start to think I’m a horrible person for saying no, I have to say that I don’t feel any guilt in refusing her pleas.  I quite honestly believe that for those children to have a chance in life they need to be taken as far away from their mother as is humanly possible.  They should never be allowed to see her again.  I would be doing them an injustice by taking them in.  Couple that with the fact that I seldom work less than fourteen hours a day and would be wholly incapable of bieng around enough to act as a parent, and I don’t have anything to feel guilty for.

Well there is one thing I can feel guilty for.  I did take some pleasure in saying no.  It felt good not letting her have my ice cream.  Perhaps I really am a monster.

I don’t really know if winter gets harsher during some years as compared to others, but it seems this year winter is just plain miserable.  All I want to do is hide in my house, and even then its cold.  Bitter cold…

I’ve re-lit the pilot light in my water heater twice this year as it has spontaneously gone out.  The heater seems to run constantly, but the house never seems to be warm.  There were even a couple of days I left work early to head home because the roads were so bad that I didn’t want to travel after dark.  Just between us, there was a sick day that the only sickness was being sick of going out and shoveling a path out the driveway and onto icy snow covered roads.  I’m the type who goes to work regardless of how bad things get, but one storm this winter just went beyond where I felt it was safe to even attempt to leave the house.

So I’ve been sitting back and thinking about doing some remodeling to my old’ish house.  Probably shouldn’t be since I don’t have any money to do any remodeling, but still Its on my mind.  Today I did internet research on radiant in floor heating, and on tankless water heaters.  I plan to tile my kitchen in granite, relocate the cabinets to the opposite side of the room.  Switch to a cooktop and wall oven versus a conventional unit, and put in an island.

The majority of what I want to change about my kitchen I can do myself, but there are a few things I wonder about.  I could build my own cabinets, but I want to make this happen inside of my lifetime.  I just can’t see myself completing the task before I get bored and move on.  I can tile the floor and countertops, and I can handle the electric work and moving the water and gas lines.  I’m just not sure about what I should do before I get to putting down the tile.

I would love to install radiant in floor heating and from all that I read today I could do the task easily.  However after seeing all the “spin” and sales pitches, and thinking about how much it will actually be used, I don’t know if its worth the cost.  It seems electric radiant heating will likely cost four times as much as the vent system I have now to operate.  I was thinking radiant heating was a must because I’d read that granite tile floors are awefully cold without it.  I’m wondering how much I really would use that system though given its usage expense.  I’m a realist and putting on a pair of shoes beats a few thousand dollar improvement cost and a few hundred bucks a year in usage.  The problem is that I have to decide before I tile the floor.  I’m not spending a boatload of cash laying down expensive granite tile and then tearing it up next year when I decide the floors are freezing and I want to add heat.

My home is old enough that it has virtually no insulation.  I have full access to the underside of the structure through a crawlspace and I am thinking that a better investment would be to buy a few rolls of pink panther and staple it up between the floor joists beneath the kitchen.  One of the goals of my kitchen remodel I mentioned was to move the cabinets.  Right now they are located on the inside wall of the kitchen adjacent to a bedroom.  I want to move them to the outside wall surrounding a window.  The thought is that an extra two feet of cabinet covering the wall will provide more insulation where the cold litterally seeps through the wall and window area.  As a part of the process of putting in new cabinets I plan to tear the sheetrock off that wall and put the pink panther stuff in it.   I’ll then paint and finally hang the cabinets.  The cooktop and the kitchen sink will both sit side by side under the window.  The wall oven will sit to one side and the refridgerator to the other.  An island in the center of the room will serve as cooking preparation area as well as on the reverse side a dining table.  My whole design is based on making the kitchen attractive, and in refocusing the solid mass in the kitchen along the coldest wall.  Thus the dilema on the in floor heating.  I want the kitchen to be warmer.  I want the whole house to be warmer.  But the reality is I don’t want it to cost more to operate.  That beats the point of adding efficiency with improvements.  Also when it comes down to it I’d rather the kitchen be a bit cold than the living room or bedrooms.  I guess I’m just missing the real life experience of how cold a granite kitchen floor really is.  If I knew firsthand I could make the decision in a heartbeat, but all I know is wives tales I’ve read. 

I guess the solution might be to spend the extra $2000 for an electric system and then not use it when I realize it is costing me so much to operate.  That really sucks though concidering I can’t afford the $2000.  That 2k would be better spent on a tankless water heater that “will” pay for itself and provide benefits I can actually use.  (like a warm shower that lasts longer than five minutes.)

This week I thought I’d tell you all what I got for christmas.  Yes I am a bit old for santa to come a knocking but I do occasionally have someone I have not alienated completely stop by with a gift.  Trust my I tried, but you can’t chase away everyone…  Someone always gets in!

Anyhow, my gift this year was the Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess game for the wii.  Yes there was a bit of hint dropping there as thats a pretty specific request.  I bought my wii just a few months after the console release.  I’m not one who would wait in line through the coldest nights or the dork who calls every store in town every day trying to get one.  Instead one of those “dorks” managed to get his hands on a couple of them, and was hoping to turn around and resell them for tons of green.  I’m also not one to pay tons of green if it can be had for less.  So I waited patiently until this fellow discovered that supply was closer to demand than he thought and when he was strapped for cash having spent all his dough on wii’s I bought one from him at the price I would have payed at the store.  (patience is a virtue)

After I got my wii, the whole family played wii sports for a couple of days then it set unused for months.  Finally I broke down and bought Mario Galaxy.  Every mario game I’ve ever bought has always been worth the money.  They’ve all had enough replay value that I don’t feel bad having spent the cash, so when mario galaxy was released I didn’t feel bad about buying sight unseen.  I’d say its exactly what I expected.  I didn’t get way more than my money’s worth, but I also didn’t get ripped off. An all around OK game with plenty of replay value.  I burned through a couple packs of AA batteries with that one and then bought a rechargeable batteries.  After that the wii set unused for a few more months. 

Next came Boom Blox.  This game had incredible reviews and looked really fun on tv.  I should have known better than to trust that the reviews of a steven spielberg game were unbiased.  Quite frankly had I rented it I never would have purchased it.  In fact the entire game can be played through in one night, it has NO REPLAY VALUE, and though it was touted as a party game, nobody wants to play it.  Everyone who I convinced to play it got sick of it within a half hour. (not much of a party)  I had the same experience with lego starwars.  It was just plain stupid…  (here comes the hate mail)  I don’t think I’ll ever buy a steven spielberg game again regardless of what kind of reviews it gets.  They’re all terrible!

So the wii has been mostly unused up until christmas and then I dropped a few hints and finally got the zelda game.  I’ve been eye’ing it since I got the wii but I never put down the $50 because If I’m going to spend that kind of cash I like to get games the whole family will play.  Zelda is a game that only I will ever play, at least in my family.  I watched and watched to see if it would eventually go to a bargain bin price 19.99 or so, but a full two years later the game is still at the premium game price.  Honestly its worth the fifty bucks, but I just didn’t want to spend that much.  I tried to get it when my store started liquidation, but apparently I ain’t the only one who didn’t want to pay fifty bucks for zelda.  The only copy we had sold the very first day we started liquidation.  In fact ALL of the wii games sold before the price ever dropped below 10% off.  Its funny to see HOT titles like rock band and guitar hero sitting on the shelves after xmas for the ps3 and xbox, but even the most low budget crap titles for the wii sold out almost immediately.

Well anyways, for anyone else out there who’s been eye’ing zelda for a couple of years now I say give it up and pay the fifty bucks already.  I’ve been playing the game every day for more than a week including all day long on my days off, and there’s still no end in sight.  You will definately get your moneys worth.  Very few games can churn out a solid 50+ hours of original gameplay without becoming outright boring.  The legend of Zelda Twilight princess is one of them.  I’m still deciding if I like it better than the old Zelda ocarina of time though.  So far the bosses haven’t been as hard as they were on the old N64 game, and the puzzles not quite as difficult.  I’d say they’re close. 

If you haven’t played ocarina of time, and you’re debating on spending the $50 for twilight princess, spend the five bucks to download it from the wii online services.  Its worth the $50 so get it for five and when you’re done you’ll know just how good twilight princess is.  Then maybe you can justify forking over a full days pay for this great game.