Josh the Aspie’s Blog

For those of you who might not know, there has been yet another school shooting, this time at Virginia Tech, a University in Blacksburg, Virginia.

At the time of this writing, according to the school’s website, 33 are dead in the wake of this shooting, the highest death toll in a school shooting in the US thus far. 31 of them, including the gunman, died at Noris Hall. The other two died at the dormitory known as West Ambler Johnson Hall.

According to CNN, the shooter used two hand guns, one a .22, the other a 9mm.

The first two murders were committed at about 7:15 a.m. in the West Ambler Johnson Hall dormitory.

About two hours later, a second shooting happened in the Engineering building, Norris Hall.

At 9:26 an e-mail was sent out, warning students to stay where they were on campus, and warning students not on campus not to come to campus.

At about 9:50 a second e-mail was sent out warning students about a gunman on campus.

At 10:17, a Campus Lockdown was initiated.

Soon after, the police stormed Noris hall, and found the doors chained shut.

At about 12:22, the campus has been declared secure.

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Recently someone clued me into a place called “Technorati”, which is the leading authority on the section of the web consisting of dynamically updated webpages such as Blogs and Forums. If you’re a blogger like I am, you can actually claim your Blog there and create a Technorati Profile, like the one I’m linking you to now.

Hopefully claiming my blog will help me get a -bit- more traffic and commenting here. In the mean time, I have a few more posts I’ve been working on. Hopefully I’ll have them up later today.

According to some recent forum discussions and websites on the net, food stamps have been re-instituted for illegal aliens. That’s right, our tax dollars go to feed Illegal aliens from grocery stores. To be clear, no where that I have seen does it say that illegal immigrants can use the program, but I have yet to see a place where they cannot use the program. You don’t even have to provide a fake social security number in order to claim benefits.

This has come up in a few discussions, and I did some follow up research to confirm. One of the topics that I have seen or heard people talking about for years is illegal immigration and the politics related to it. Most people I know are incredibly sick and tired of it… but for some reason some people I run into online support illegal immigration, saying that we need it in order to survive as a nation. I don’t buy that load of horse manure for a moment.

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There’s a lot of back and forth about giving the president the power of the line item veto through a constitutional amendment.

Candidates like Mitt Romney say that it’s essential in order to cut pork out of bills.

Others say that that it gives the president far to much power, and that it would allow the president to twist legislation, and that the line item veto has been abused in the past.

First of all I’m generally -against- giving the president more power. To much power in the hands of a single man is rarely a good thing.

An example of this is the recent debacle in Virginia where the line item veto was used, not to remove pork, but to change the basic meaning of a bill. The bill said that no smoking could occur inside a bar or restaurant unless a sign was posted in the window that said it would allow smoking. In other words they made a small change to make it so that bar owners had to consciously make a choice, and so that people that didn’t want to be in a smoking establishment could just walk on by it the way smokers can walk on by a bar that doesn’t allow smoking because it displays a no smoking sign in the window.

The governor removed the part that said they could allow smoking in their bar by posting a sign. He also removed language that defined what a restaurant was, restricting it to indoor venues, and leaving it as any place that serves food, such as wedding receptions, ball parks, and even the area around a street vendor’s cart. Now I’m not saying that smoking is good, and discouraging it is bad, I’m just saying that the governor made the change enacted by the bill a more potent change using his line item veto power.

I’m also against pork… but I don’t think that we need to give the president the line item veto in order to get rid of it. I think that what it would take is simply for the American public to become more politically active and informed.

When discussing this issue with others they’ve asked why the president doesn’t just veto the spending bills, well the problem is not in bills dedicated to spending, but the current trend to take a good bill, then make several amendments to add spending items to it.

Then if the president vetoes the bill because of pork, or a congressperson votes against the bill because of pork, they are on the record as having done so. This gives their opponents ammo to say that they voted against a bill most people would have been behind before all of the pork was added, even if the bill became quite a poor one with all of the spending initiatives attached.

And if you give the president the ability to strike out lines from a law, how are you going to specifically limit that to ’spending’ items in a way that prevents him from striking anything else, and also prevents loopholes?

Several people have said that that’s the only thing the president would be given the ability to line-item, but in all the discussions I’ve heard about it I’ve never heard that the president would only be able to line item veto spending sections, but rather that pork is the main reason to give him the general line item veto power.

I’d post links to the news items where I got the information about Mitt Rumney’s position, and the Virginia Govenor, but while Fox news provides free video feeds on their websites, they make it nigh impossible to embed in a page, or even link to it.

The articles are in their news section politics sub-section, labeled “Mitt’s Momentum”, and Butt out.

With all of the hullaballu in the media about global warming and Al Gore’s stance on it, I’ve been getting rather sick of the lies on this topic. The bare facts of the mater are that it is NOT a unanimous agreement among scientists that global warming both exists AND is caused by human beings. In the extended section of the article, I’ve included a video, over an hour long, that shows several scientists who disagree with the idea that global warming is caused by humans.

Which runs in direct contradiction to some of Al Gore’s long winded speeches in his official appearance before congress. He was to speak on global warming, but mixed in a fair amount of spiel on war, tax schemes, health care, and a number of other topics all in a 17+ minute ‘introduction’ during which he also claimed, once again, that global warming is a scientifically accepted fact, and that all scientists support it, and that it is caused by humans.

Now, I’m not saying that there is no global warming at present. I’m just saying that humans aren’t the main influence upon it, if we’re any real influence at all.

Well, I’ve been trying to figure out some way to get the Nucleus “Fancy URLs” to work over the past few weeks. The Fancy URL core mod doesn’t work on our server, and so far all of the url re-write mods that I’m at all interested in have it as a pre-requisite. I may be looking at different blogging software in the near future.

For those of you who don’t know, Fancy URL is an optional modification to the Nucleus software family of blogs, which allows you to convert the post data urls such as http://blog.joshtheaspie.com/index.php?itemid=24 to one that looks like http://blog.joshtheaspie.com/item/24 which are far more Search Engine friendly.

I just finished watching the Princess Bride for the first time last night.

Well, not really, but this is the first time I’ve watched it since I read the book “The Princess Bride: The Good Parts Version” by William Goldman, the version of the book that the movie was based on. As often happens, the book was even better than the movie it was based on, but since I had watched the movie first, the characters in the book were, to me, as the actors had played them on TV. For me, Fezzek will always be Andre the Giant.

One of the most interesting parts of reading the book, was remembering that in the movie, The Princess Bride was the story within the story of a young boy who had been read a book by his Grandfather, and realizing that this too was actually in the book as well, but as an editorial by the man who abridged the original Morgenstien, he had been quite ill, and over the course of several weeks, his father, who wasn’t the best at reading or speaking English, read him that book, and that is what began his love of reading.

Two of my other favorite parts were the back-stories of Fezzek and Inigo, which were only just hinted at in the movie. These two had their own chapters devoted to their back story, Fezzik’s was just as oddly humerus as any part of the story, and Inigo’s was as wonderfully heartfelt, dramatic, and nuanced as the character himself. It brought them even more to light in my eyes, and there is no way that I will ever regret reading that book, just because of those two characters alone.

For any who have not actually read it yet, I highly recommend William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride: The Good Parts Version”.

There are a couple of things that I was upset about being cut out. One was the Royalty school that teaches buttercup how to be royalty. The other was a full chapter of Inigo and Fezzek collecting the ingredients for the miracle pill, where you got to see way more of Inigio, Fezzek, Max, and his wife.

Still, it was a great read, and it makes me want to go back and read the original Morganstein.

The publishing company wanted it out because “the two seem to Jewish, we don’t want to offend” my response. Then you find out that Morganstein’s parents were Jewish. A man is allowed to parody his own parents for goodness sakes!