Apple recently donated $100,000 to fight Proposition 8 in California. I guess that means that if you own an iPod, iPhone, or any of the other iProducts made by Apple, you have indirectly supported gay marriage.
While you’re at it, stop using Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft, and Ebay, to name a few.
Since everyone seemed to miss the point on the last one, I won’t go into as much detail this time.
Selfishness is a virtue.
Now tell me I’m wrong.
I posted about a month ago about the classes I’d like to take next semester.
This past week, the official schedules for next semester were released, so here’s the proposed schedule:
BUS495 BUSINESS CAPSTONE M/W 2:30-3:45
ECON495 ECONOMICS CAPSTONE M/W 4:00-5:15
ECON442 HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT T/Th 4:00-5:15
MBA735 INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS T/Th 5:30-6:45
ECON457 LAW AND ECONOMICS Sat 9:00-11:45
Note the absence of ECON462/463, which I previously mentioned was a required course for graduation. Notice also the addition of a graduate-level MBA course. I was recently speaking with one of my professors about the predicament I’m facing regarding ECON462 (it’s only being offered during one section next semester — at 8:30am — not good for my schedule) and he told me he will be teaching a more advanced version of the same class at the graduate level. I submitted all the paperwork last week to be able to take MBA735 in place of ECON462, and now I’m just waiting to see what happens.
Next semester could be the nicest schedule I’ve had my entire time at UNLV… if everything works out.
Previously, the highest number of unique visitors I received in a day was 75. Most of the time I average around 40 uniques a day.
Two days ago, with the posting of my first gay-marriage-related blog post, I reached a record 88 uniques in one day.
Yesterday, after the second post, I reached 116.
Thank you all for reading my blog. I hope you’ll continue reading it.
I can’t even say that McCain is less bad than Obama. It’s hard to say, and it depends entirely on the weights you give each of their terrible positions.
I would like to point out, however, that John McCain is also a socialist. My proof? For one, he voted in favor of the $700 billion bailout package. And if that weren’t enough, watch this video.
The girl here is amazing. To get up in front of so many people socialists and equate our form of taxation to slavery speaks a lot for her character.
But McCain’s response is just dumb. And terrible. After dancing around the issue for a while, his final answer is telling: “So, look, here’s what I really believe, that when you are — reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.”
I’ve said it before, but I don’t know how any principled individual can vote for either of the two candidates and keep a clear conscience.
So far, my friend Chad has been the only one with the guts (or maybe time? 
) to respond to last night’s blog.
He brings up several good points that, while good, can still be simply resolved by an application of ideas I already put forth; namely, that the government is too involved in our lives.
The first thing Chad said that I’d like to emphasize is
There have to be rules and regulations when it comes to marriage because it’s a union that affects every aspect of your and your spouse’s life and has a lot to do with how we stand in the eyes of our government. Society has to come to a consensus with regard to the regulations because we don’t live in a separation of marriage and state country.
I’m not a scholar on the history of marriage, but I’ve read tidbits here and there. Are you aware that in our country, marriage used to be regulated solely by the churches (duh, right?)? In fact, the government didn’t start getting involved until blacks started intermingling with whites, and then the crazy Mormons came along and wanted to have multiple wives. “Society” couldn’t allow these types of aberrant, destructive behaviors, so laws were put in place to restrict who could marry whom. Then as people loosened up a little bit, rather than outlawing relationships, they flipped it around and began providing benefits to socially-acceptable ones.
Any being with a sense of justice would deem this type of behavior as completely immoral.
So, fast-forward a few hundred years: who is the current socially-unacceptable group desiring recognition? The gays. But since the laws are built in such a way as to condone and even support individuals desiring to be married, an allowance of gay-marriage would essentially mean a government sanction of something that many in the country deem as sinful.
I’m in agreement with everyone out there who doesn’t want the government to condone immoral actions. But the problem isn’t that gay marriage is or could happen, it’s that government is involved in it in the first place! In other words, if the government weren’t involved in the institution of marriage, this entire debate would be a non-issue.
My argument is essentially that the Church, rather than jumping on the anti-gay-marriage bandwagon, should be creating its own bandwagon of “the government is too involved in our lives.” What we are doing to gay people is exactly what other Christian sects did to the Mormons 150 years ago with polygamy. The only difference being that gay marriage is a sin, and polygamy is not.
But then, if you read and fully understand Doctrine and Covenants 134, specifically the verses I pointed out in yesterday’s post, you’ll realize that religious rights and wrongs should not be imposed on others not belonging to your religion.
The second issue with Chad’s response that I’d like to address is
I do think, though, that it is reasonable to be put to popular vote since it has so much to do with how our country functions
There’s this false notion in our country that we’re a democracy. This is actually something I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. (I have a draft I started in August called “Newsflash: We don’t live in a democracy”…)
Majority doesn’t rule. The Founders of the country wrote in depth in the Federalist papers and probably elsewhere concerning the idea that majority/mob rule is evil, and must not exist in this country. Somehow over the past couple hundred years, we’ve levitated toward it. Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution states that we are to have a Republican form of government, and the 10th Amendment guarantees states rights. A long list of atrocities have occurred that have shreded our Constitution… anyway, I’m off on a bit of a tangent here. This is really a topic I’d rather leave for its own blog post later.
The point is that in our form of government, if we’re going by what the Founders wanted (and I think most Mormons hold the Founders in high esteem), they believed that majority rule would be acceptable so long as the rights of the minority were not infringed.
Because marriage is an unalienable right, it applies to all people. The rights of minorities should not be infringed upon simply because the majority doesn’t like what they want. The simple existence of laws regulating who can marry whom doesn’t imply a system that is just; on the contrary, regulating the relations of supposed “free” people is completely immoral and unjust.
As believers of God, the ultimate source of justice in the universe, we should be able to look through the facade of anti-gayness and recognize the true unjustice.
Being LDS, the majority of my family and many of my friends support Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage amendment in California.
The primary reason given is taken from the Church’s “The Family: A Proclamation to the World“, which is not technically scripture, but basically considered culturally as such: that “…marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children. Children are entitled to be born within this bond of marriage.” In essence, the Church and its members are taking their religious beliefs and legislating them.
I find this to be inherently contrary to other teachings of the church, which state that “We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government, whereby one religious society is fostered and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members, as citizens, denied.” (verse 4 of the same section is also somewhat relevant to this subject)
If this is like most legislation (“for the children”), and we are pushing to legislate morality because “children are entitled to be born within this bond of marriage,” why are we not also pushing for anti-divorce laws?
And then I realized that’s only part of the issue.
A few weeks back I was sent a video from my family. Basically, a dad was arrested because he went to his son’s school to protest the fact that his child had been taught about gay marriage without his (the father’s) consent.
I responded to my family with the following:
“I am morally opposed to gay marriage. When I have kids, I will teach them that gay marriage is bad. I am not in favor of the state forcing me to teach my children what marriage is. In fact, you should all know me well enough to know that I am adamantly opposed to all forms of government coercion.
That said, what is the government forcing any of us to do if gay marriage is ‘legalized’? ‘How will gay marriage affect your family?’ — the question is asked in this video. It will only affect me as much as I allow it to affect me. I realize the government is ever-encroaching on our freedoms, but the First Amendment’s guarantee that ‘Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]‘ is pretty explicit. The government can’t tell us what we teach our kids. The government can’t force us to send our children to public schools. It can’t force us to practice gayness. We choose what we do. And we choose what we teach our children. If the thing about public education that puts you over the edge is them teaching your children about gay marriage, then I have to wonder: have you not been paying attention to the quality of public education?
This video doesn’t make me want to outlaw gay marriage; it just adds to my list of reasons to not send my children to public school.”
I have to infer that Mormons are in favor of Proposition 8′s passage simply because it is easier to fight against than so many other things that are wrong in and with society. I don’t think it’s right that government schools indoctrinate children with things contrary to what their parents want them to learn. But the answer to that is not to deprive others’ rights, the answer is to fight against the real root of the problem — government coercion!
With the “for the children” argument thoroughly dissected, and the “God tells us it’s bad” argument dismissed, what else is there? The entire support for Proposition 8 hinges, and therefore falls apart, on these two premises.
To my computerly-nerdy friends, especially the ones more computerly-nerdy than me. Please help me figure this out!
I got hit with some malware tonight. Malware, for those of you not in the know, is short for malicious software, eg. viruses, spyware, etc. I won’t go into how I got infected with said malware, but rest assured it was not porn-related. Anyway.
My computer almost grinded to a halt. I tried force-quitting several applications that didn’t look familiar, but to no avail. I figured I would restart and try it again once Windows rebooted. Well, that didn’t work: Windows wouldn’t reboot. It would get about halfway there and just pause indefinitely. And thus the inevitable began: a reinstallation of the Windows Vista Operation System.
Luckily, I had enough foresight to set up my file system in such a way that I would only lose about 1% of my data in the event of such a crash. All of my personal data (documents, pictures, music, etc.) are stored on a separate drive. Specifically, all of my stuff is located in D:\Users\Brandon. The default for Vista is C:\Users\Brandon. I know… not very original.
So I got Vista all reinstalled and I went into the Users folder, right-clicked on the different folders, and told it to “move” the location. I then went into the registry editor to find any other spots that this “automatic” method hadn’t affected. Once I was finished, I restarted.
When Vista rebooted and asked me to enter my password, I did so. It said “Loading” … and then a few seconds later, “Logging Off”. It wouldn’t boot into Windows. Unless I did it in Safe Mode.
I thought maybe something weird had happened by my doing the move location method mentioned two paragraphs previously. So in Safe Mode, I looked at the registry. I found dozens of new keys pointing to D:\Users… which had not been there before. Well, I mean, they had been there before I had reinstalled Windows. But now they were back again. Where had they come from? This only made me suspect the move location method even more. So I decided to format and reinstall — again.
This time I did everything manually in the registry editor. Before I started changing the Users folder location, I checked to see if there was anything pointing to D:\Users. There were no keys. I changed the couple dozen C:\Users… keys, restarted, and BOOM. Same freaking problem. Again, checking regedit in Safe Mode revealed a bunch of “old” keys.
HOW ARE THESE THINGS RESURRECTING???
The third installation is now about to finish, but it’s also almost 1:30am and I have to wake up early for work tomorrow. I’m going to play with this a little bit more and then go to sleep. But if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.
UPDATE: Victory! I got it to work… and I will explain how later, in the comments. Now, I’m going to bed.
That’s what over 100 economists are saying. Is this a surprise to anyone? Not me. Among those listed are five Nobel Prize winners, two of which are professors at GMU: Vernon Smith and James Buchanan.
By the way, I got this story from Greg Mankiw’s blog. Mankiw is a macroeconomist at Harvard, and though his name doesn’t appear on the list of supporters for the above-mentioned statement, he did state that he doesn’t like Obama’s proposed plan either; he merely didn’t sign because it was a “tad too hyperbolic for my tastes.” Makes me wonder how many more economists would have signed if the statement were merely “Obama’s plan is bad,” rather than “Obama’s plan is absolutely terrible.”
I just got a check for $480 from UNLV. And there’s no reason why… other than God decided to show some love by way of the UNLV controller.