Josh the Aspie’s Blog

Some of you may remember the post I made a while back regarding the Virginia Tech Shootings. A few of my friends have actually commented on this post on other forums, and one of them, Harsan Ronyo, replied on his own blog. Harson’s focus in the wake of this tragedy is on people that he says pollute the memory of the victims by using the Virginia Tech shootings to justify additional gun control.

Given that there is all this discussion going on about gun control, a subject I feel is an important one, I feel I should weigh in on the subject. While the discussion of gun control these days has been tied inextricably to the latest of the School Shootings. I shall try to be respectful to the diseased and their families, but with school shootings being a rallying point for both sides, I will make mention of them occasionally.

What I will not pull punches on are stupid, deranged murderers, or people that condone them. People who commit suicide are cowards, and those that shoot others, then themselves are worse than cowards, they are deranged murderers who either kill because they don’t want to go alone, or because they want publicity in death that they could not achieve in light. Giving any sympathy or attention to a given coward like that will only encourage them. Anyone seeking attention that way deserves to be buried in an un-marked grave, if at all, and have all record of their name expunged.

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About a month ago I went to a group interview at Lockheed Martin. About two weeks ago, I accepted a job offer to work for them as an Associate Systems Engineer, in a position that requires a Security Clearance.

As a part of this process I will be taking lie detector tests, and my fingerprints will actually be taken and placed on file in a federal registry. Some people who know me locally, and know my strong support of the right of Americans to protection against search and seizure were surprised that I was fine with giving up my fingerprints. I’m fine with it because it was my choice. There isn’t a bill requiring me to give up my fingerprints against my will.

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Not only have the students that were killed and injured and their families suffered, but now they are being exploited as well. There is, of course, the exploitation of the media. All you have to do to see this, is turn to CNN or Fox news. But in addition to this, you now have people registering the domain names of the shooter and their family members.

I found out about this through Thor Schrock’s Technology Blog, and Thor found out about it from Garry Conn, a blogger who talks about ways to make money online.

But not only are the domain names of those involved in the shooting being exploited, the disaster as a whole is.

The following domains have also been registered.

VIRGINIATECHLAWSUITS.com
VATECHLAWSUITS.com
VATECHLAWSUIT.com
VATECHLAWSUIT.info
VATECHLAWSUITS.info
VIRGINIATECHLAWSUITS.info

In a story from the associated press, Mitt Romney says that it takes a family to raise a child, not a village.

Well the family is what a child depends on the most if the child has one. But take a look at the other people that have an influence on a child as they grow up, helping to mold and shape their perspective… in effect ‘raising’ the child.

There are the child’s friends, who have an enormous influence on him or her. Those children were in turn influenced by their parents. Kids often play or eat over at each-others houses, where the parents of the house are in charge and set the rules, and the tone of the evening.

Then there’s the school. Most children go to a school, whether public, or private. There they are taught by teachers, who help to teach social skills to the lower grades, and also inform and train their minds with what we consider basking knowledge and skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic.

And if you feel you are a part of your community, and you see a kid about to get himself into a very dangerous situation, you don’t just let the kid potentially kill himself, you either alert the parent, if near-bye, or try to save the kid from his, or her self.

Now I suppose that a family could decide to keep their child home, keep them inside the house, home school them, and try to teach them social skills till they hit 18… but even if they manage to teach that child the proper academics, how out of touch will that child be with society?

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.

One of the things that bugs me is that when people start talking about that “stuff that bugs them” they tend to talk about things that are totally inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. They’re bugged by oh… people that use the word “ain’t” or people who drive slow in the fast lane. And this is a topic that pops up in discussion or on message boards over and over again.

There are a lot of things in this world that bug me, but most of them are things on a large scale…

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Recently, in a political sub forum I’ve posted in on and off for work, someone proposed the idea that the government should perform lobotomies on violent criminals in order to “protect society.” She preached the view that the rights of the many always outweigh the rights of the few, and that criminals take away people’s rights every day, so it’s acceptable to take away any and all of their rights we choose too.

I disagree strongly with this statement.

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