Politics

I’ve been trying to find information on the presidential candidates that is accurate and unbiased. No easy feat. So far the best source of information I’ve found is through the site ontheissues.org which allows you to see what candidates have said and done in the past.

I haven’t looked at it that in depth yet to determine if there is any kind of political slant (liberal, conservative, etc.) but in theory the site is supposed to be non-partisan and non-profit (if you believe wikipedia).

Completely unrelated side note here: A study has been done comparing Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica for accuracy. Yes, Britannica was more accurate, but not by as much as one might think.

Anyway, if one uses ontheissues.org, I recommend looking at the “full quotes” as they seemed to help give a more complete picture of what the individual candidate has said and done. Also, this site isn’t just for presidential candidates so if you need information on another candidate you could try them as well.

This site may not be entirely up to date on some issues however. I don’t know this for certain, but when taking one of the political quizzes it seemed like the information on one of the issues didn’t include anything from the Bush Administration. Of course maybe nothing notable changed on the issue during those years.

BTW, the political quiz didn’t really help for the simple reason that McCain and Obama tied for me. This is typical for me on political quizzes – right down the middle.

Addicted

I walked into the bathroom this morning and looked down at the counter. There’s a clear plastic bag full of white powder beside the sink. I know immediately what it is – I’ve seen it before. She normally stashes it under the sinks, in cabinets, or any place else she can think over but today it’s just out in the open for everyone to see. She’s addicted to the stuff and uses it everywhere: on countertops, in sinks, even on the toilet. It’s insane. But why not? I mean the baking soda sure seems to do a good job cleaning.

iTunes = eVil

I was one of those weird people who use to use other music players such as Musicmatch instead of iTunes. After Musicmatch became part of Yahoo I eventually ended up switching to iTunes just because I figured that was the way everything was going and it was going to become more and more difficult to use any other player. The truth is though that I’ve had far more problem with iTunes than any other music player I’ve used.

Just a few minutes ago I got around to upgrading to version 8.0. Now most of my music is missing. It appears that anything that wasn’t originally bought on iTunes isn’t there anymore. Now I have backups of all this music (much of it on the original cd it came on) but unless I can find a quick fix somewhere (so far all I’ve found is other people complaining about the same issue) I’ll have to take several hours out of my life to go through and add the music again.

This is just one example of a multitude of issues I’ve had with iTunes but unfortunately it was becoming increasingly difficult to find the music I wanted on other players so I feel forced to stick with iTunes. I really don’t understand how it ever became popular.

Edit: I got most of it back with one fix and it appears that I got the rest back with another fix, but I haven’t taken the time to check for every song.

If the theory that there is a parallel universe for every possibility is true, then somewhere there is a parallel universe in which there are no parallel universes.

Patio Reflections (or reflections I’ve had while building a patio)

The problem with trying to understand God is that we so often put ourselves higher than we really are and expect that we should understand everything. We are like dogs trying to fully comprehend the intelligence of humans. It quite simply cannot be done. We can see and understand some aspects but not the whole picture. Why know the human is the key to opening the locked door, but not why but unlike dogs we often don’t stop there. Instead we decide in our pride and arrogance that because we cannot open the door that it simply cannot be done and that the human is but a myth developed to comfort us. Instead we should recognize that the human can open the door if we but wait.

            And just because we can’t understand how the door is opened doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try because our recognition that the door does indeed open can allow us to access a whole new world that was previously beyond our reach. We just need the human’s help. In our struggles to understand the door, we may never see the key or understand its purpose, but because we took the time to learn the human could do something (even if that something is beyond our comprehension) with the door we know to wait at the door leash in mouth for the grand outside.