New Blog

Well, I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a domain for my blog. So I have moved all the content of this blog over to the new one. I will still be checking this site for comments from time to time, but I won't be posting any new content here. You can find the new blog here. Hope to see you all there.

The big anouncement

Well, it isn't that big at all..... But I am supporting Ron Paul for president. There are many reasons for this, but here are a few.

1)Ron Paul supports the constitution
2)Ron Paul wants to cut unnecessary government organizations
3)Ron Paul is awesome
4)Ron Paul wants us out of Iraq
5)Ron Paul is an isolationist in all the right ways

Basically Ron Paul's views line up perfectly with mine.

If only all politicians were like this

I saw this video during my regular research and it struck me. Once our political leaders were like this, they would speak out openly about their faith in the public square. But today people are so scared of public sentiment. They are so scared of being sued. If only more people were like this perhaps our country could be saved.

American Purpose

Several hundred years ago a small ship sailed into a small bay in an unexplored part of what would one day become known as America. This ship of course was the Mayflower. Contained on this ship were just over one hundred refugees from England who were fleeing religious persecution. Their goal was simple: create a place for us to live. But they went on to do much more than that. They ended up being one of the most influential members of the early American movement, and influenced many who were yet to come.

The leader of this expedition, William Bradford had a grander purpose than to just live. He wanted his small colony to “be a shining city upon a hill for all to see.” These words categorized America for much of her long existence. And it is these few words that sum up Americas purpose.

Over the course of American history these words have guided the leaders of the country. Even the founding of the country was done, in part, to show the world that America can guide the world to overthrowing tyrannical overlords and become independent. And it accomplished its mission. The French Revolution quickly followed the American, and was influenced by it. Over the rest of the 19th century America stood as a shining city as it stretched to the Pacific Ocean. Into the 20th century America was pulled into both World Wars to continue this tradition.

However, this is where America lost track of its goal. It no longer was a city on a hill, but a watchman with a lamp trying to guide the rest of the world. America had gone from being a place welcoming all and serving to inspire to the policeman of the world shining his flashlight into sovereign countries. Perhaps I will discuss this change in foreign policy later, but for now it serves to say that America became entangled with the affairs of the world, and less concerned with being a city set upon a hill.

It also serves to note that it was the 1920’s that brought about the first immigration controls. I will not go into immigration at this time, but as Ronald Reagan said in his farewell speech to congress the shining city on a hill was “a tall, proud city, built on rocks stronger than ocean, windswept, God-blest, with free ports teeming with commerce and creativity; and if there had to be city walls, those walls had doors, and those doors were open to all…” America had drifted from being a city on a hill, to being a place where only a certain number of people could come.

America has taken up far to many “nation building” excursions. The current war in the Middle East is one example. Instead of simply being a shining lighthouse in a troubled sea to lead others we have become a nation that uses force to coerce our special breed of government. This is by no means what America was founded on.

As you can see, America has drifted from the noble dreams it was founded upon and has changed into something very different entirely. In the upcoming posts I will be exploring each of the following issues and offering my perspective on them: Immigration, Foreign Policy, and Democracy.

Make Money Online

OK, so during my daily surfings of the web I have come across a pretty neat little article. OK, so I didn't just run across it, my friend actually wrote it. But it is still pretty cool. Anyway, it is a fairly in depth guide to making money online. Now I know what you're saying. Jason, your friend is paying you to say all this. No, at least not yet (Shaun you have my email address and paypal info ;))

What this article does is take you through the steps you need to do to get a popular blog that can bring in a decent amount of cash. My friend (Shaun Connell of www.shaunconnell.com and www.rebirthoffreedom.com fame, and the writer of the article) has applied the principles and last time I talked to him he was typing away on a new laptop that he purchased with nothing but the revenues of his blogs.

There isn't a lot more I can say about it, so I would just suggest you go check it out. Here is the link: Make Money Online

Yuwie

OK, I know it has been a long time since I last posted, and that I totally missed the 5th of November (I had a rather lengthy post on revolution planned). But I hope you will all let me make it up to you.

Today, I'd like to talk to you about a very cool new web site that I had introduced to me by a friend. It's called Yuwie, and it is a social networking site just like Facebook or Myspace. But Yuwie is different. Beyond simply providing you with a service that you can use and enjoy, Yuwie pays you. That's right, Yuwie pays you real money. All you have to do is join, and get your friends to join, and you will get money.

Yuwie operates off of the principle that the people that use the site also serve the same purpose as advertisers. Think of it this way: we advertise facebook and xanga all the time when we tell friends who don't have facebook and xanga about them. However, currently, we don't get paid for advertising these sites. The point is: social networking sites reel in millions mainly because of word-of-mouth advertising between friends that want to stay in touch online. However, with facebook (or xanga or myspace), you don't get paid for your advertising.

Yuwie, however, wants to give its advertisers (users) a little back. They think this way: the users upload all the content...they keep the site running and fresh. They view the ads that pay the owners of the site. They create the traffic. In other words, the users do all of the work, so they deserve some money. And this is a real deal.

The returns don't seem to be that high (the $10K figure on the site is completely overblown, IMO.) In reality, the earnings look a lot more like a little extra side money, but seriously...you get money for networking with friends online. Even if it's only a few bucks a month, it's more than what you'll get for facebook, xanga, or myspace combined. If you put a little time in it, from what I've read so far, you could eventually reel in possibly $20-30 a month.

Also, not only is it not a scam, but spam is highly regulated. It also operates kinda' like facebook...people can't contact you without your permission, so your privacy is secured (just like with facebook or like you can do with xanga). According to my research (and this comes from blogs) adult content is heavily restricted. :)

Last thing, ads are not too bad. I've seen two so far that are borderline, but they're animated. Also, if anyone has a facebook, the ads there are probably getting worse than most of the ads I've seen on yuwie. The main problem with yuwie's ads is that they are big and flashy.

If you are interested and would like to join just click on this handy little link and get started.

Spam

Warning: Rant Post Ahead

Good evening my friends, I want to tell you about something that has been driving me crazy lately. It’s called spam, and no, it’s not the nasty stuff that is talked about in the Monty Python sketch of the same name, it’s the nasty stuff that you get in your e-mail inbox. I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t buy random stuff just because I get it randomly in my inbox. And why, why do these companies incessantly think I am a 75 year old man with problems…. Why else would they constantly be trying to sell Viagra to me?

But getting back to the topic on hand. Seriously, why do these people do it? It’s about on the level as tele-marketers. Everyone gets annoyed, and not many people respond….

Facebook, Myspace, Cell Phones, and You

Fifty, even ten years ago youth of the world had to actually leave their house in order to communicate with their friends. Today there is a very different world where conceivably someone could never leave their house and still be almost as in touch as they would be otherwise. Why is this? Well, it all stems from the amazing advances over the past years in the field of computing. Now, I’m not going to tell you that computers are evil, or that they are destroying the youth, because they aren’t. I am however, going to explore the issue and hopefully leave you with a bit more in your brain than when you came.

There are many devices and services that all offer one thing: the ability to communicate faster and more efficiently than ever. There’s the cell phone with its texting abilities, facebook and myspace with their promises of community, and Gtalk and MSN messenger that offer a way of quickly “chatting” with people. These have evolved over the years from simple devices and chat rooms reserved for the rich or the universities into devices and services that fill every part of our lives. Facebook for example, a service which I find incredibly useful and entertaining, has become a place where people could conceivably spend their entire lives if they wished, chatting with their friends, playing games, throwing food at people, poking people, flirting, and whatever else they felt like.

This all seems well and good, but does it come at a price? Many youth have grown to where they use these goods and services more than actually speaking face to face or on the telephone with their friends. This is not inherently bad, but it poses several possible problems. The youth could not be used to dealing face to face with people, and instead become slightly reclusive. Also these activities could easily become obsessions that could take away from the rest of their lives. Granted, these are not likely, but there are many stories of youth spending more time online than they do in offline.

On the other hand these services are very useful and have greatly helped us. For instance, the cell phone has allowed us to become more mobile and able to be more productive without being tied down to one location, myspace and facebook have allowed us to keep up with friends and classmates more easily, and chat services have allowed us to talk to our friends faster and more efficiently than ever.

Now, what I am trying to say with all of this? It is very simple. I am not recommending that people stomp their cell phones, cancel their facebook accounts, or go back to the Stone Age. No, I would recommend people to always exercise moderation and never allow themselves to become obsessed with something to the point where it takes away from engaging with people in a conventional, face to face way.

Scum of the Earth: Bait and Hook Sites

We’ve all seen them, or at least heard of them. Those web sites that sell cameras at insanely low prices only to discover that they are “out of stock” or “don’t include the battery” (which they conveniently sell at insane prices). These sites are, in my mind, some of the nastiest, low scum places on the earth that need to be thrown into the lowest rung of that bad place that is also a swear word.

Let me tell you a story about these things. The other day I was shopping for a new camera (because I need one pretty badly) and I found out that the Canon HV20 was an amazing camera. After some shopping I discovered a site that sold the thing for well under half price. Excited, but also wary, I asked around and discovered that this site was one of the many sites I have been talking about, otherwise known as “bait and hook” schemes. I did a bit more research into this single site and I discovered that almost 100% of people who bought from them were extremely dissatisfied with them. Some of the complaints that I saw spoke about how this site had items always on backorder or had rude customer service people who called and tried to sell you more stuff.

How do these schemes work? Well, it’s very simple, they get you into the store (or website in this case) by claiming a very low price, and then, once they have “baited” you they proceed to “hook” you by not having the item in stock, not selling the battery, etc. Now, it is technically illegal for these sorts of sites to engage in false advertising (i.e. not actually selling the product for the price listed) but there are ways around it.

What is the lesson here? Well, plain and simple it is to look before you leap. By looking I mean to research any web site you buy from. There are many ways to do this, but the best web site I have found for technological stuff is http://www.resellerratings.com/.

Good luck, and don’t fall for any of those “to good to be true” deals, because they probably are….

Youth Violence

It seems that every time you turn on the radio today you hear another story about a school shooting, or another teenager who gets mixed up in a gang war. Well, maybe it’s not every time you turn the radio on, but it certainly happens more than it should. But why does it happen? Why do seemingly good youth turn to violence?

One view, and one that is often touted, is that students who resort to violence are desensitized to it though video games and therefore do not see what they are doing as wrong. In the example of Columbine High School it was discovered that the gunmen often played the video game “Doom” and this is what gave them their nature of violence. But if it was this single game that brought rise to the violence than it would follow that there would be many, many more cases of youth violence. But this is simply not the case. Although there is a frightening amount, the numbers just simply do not add up if video games are to be blamed as the single reason.

There are thousands of people (many under the age of eighteen) who regularly play games equally violent, or more violent than the example of Doom. The overwhelming majorities of these people do not “take the game into the real world” and are instead perfectly happy to blow the heads of pixels inside of the computer. If video games were the culprit than there would be many more incidents of violence from those who play those games.

If video games are not to blame than what is? Another suggestion that has been brought to the table is drugs. No, we aren’t talking about the illegal kind that people take to get high, but the kind that doctors give to kids who they label as “hyperactive” or “unable to focus”. It has been suggested that these drugs have the side effect of making children irrational and prone to violence. Again, as with video games, there simply are not enough cases of violence by those who are taking these drugs for them to be the answer. They may well have contributed to the problem, but they are not the catch all solution.

If it is not an outside influence like video games or drugs than perhaps we should look inside violent youth for an answer. The first thought that comes to mind is peer pressure, other youth who compel a youth to violence. This seems like a fairly logical explanation on the outside, the youth is dared to go into school and kill a bunch of people…. But wait, doesn’t it seem slightly odd that the youth is actually doing it. Most people (if not all people) have an ingrained sense of right and wrong, enough so they won’t kill people just because their friends compelled them to it.

Perhaps then it is the students feeling that they are “left out” or rejected by there peers that drives them. This seems much more logical than the last example. A student who feels that he is completely left out by his peers and teased about it goes and decides to take revenge on those who exclude him. This is again rather plausible except for the ingrained knowledge of right and wrong that is inside of every person.

There is another possibility which I believe is the most likely to explain the acts that these students commit, and that is the lack of morality that fills our culture today. If you look at statistics the number of violent acts by youth has been on the rise as the cultural morality has been on the decline. Three hundred years ago youth had access to weapons, they had motivation, but by and large they did not. The real variable between these youth and the youth of today is not the access to dangerous weapons or the changes in the social lives of the youth it is quite simply the changing in the culture of the world. Three hundred years ago youth were instructed in morality, they were taught that there was a God who would punish them if they killed people, and they learned the proper way to relate to others. The culture had just as many violent influences, just as much peer pressure, and many of the same problems. But it had morality. That is what is missing today, and it is why there have been so many cases of teen violence. If anyone want to change this they won’t accomplish it by banning weapons on school property, they won’t accomplish it by banning video games, they will accomplish it by changing the world towards morality.