<sarcasm>Sure, the Soviet Union is dead</sarcasm>

Idiots (If it’s true. Drudge is kind of tabloid, so can be sensationalist at times)

And people think the Patriot Act is bad–it’s a drop in the bucket in comparison. I don’t exactly feel oppressed in publishing whatever the hell I want on the web. I don’t feel threatened by some secret police that will take me away to prison for 20 years for voicing my opinion against policy. But, it looks like that’s what Russia is reverting to.

Whether their government is communist or not, absolutism is a sure-fire way of causing trouble 😛 They seem to have completely forgotten the likes of Stalin. Putin has been terribly bad about centralization, especially in his second term. Why not pull a Hugo Chavez and declare himself dictator and sing the <moresarcasm>glories of Socialism</moresarcasm>? 😛

Perhaps this is what the Cold War was really all about–absolutist dictatorship vs self-determination and expression. It wasn’t really all about Communism vs Capitalism but it was certainly an element of the “argument”, I suppose a simplified summation of it. Their Communist society just gave them “license” to oppress, and they’ve now found that they can get away with this crap even without a Communist face to it *sigh*

Galactica schtuff

Now this is a bit morbid.

High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator

I wonder if it accounts for altitude at all. You can’t set it as a parameter, so I’d presume we’re talking about ground bursts. 20 MT takes out a huge chunk of the Chicago area :\

This certainly doesn’t help with all of those apocalyptic-type nightmares I sometimes have 😛

Galactica Craziness

So, I’ve had the 360 for nearly a week. The awesomeness is truly astounding. I got three more games for it: Star Trek: Legacy, Halo & Halo 2.

Star Trek: Legacy is just frickin’ awesome. It’s a very good space sim. Like most of the modern ones, it combines sweeping strategy with individual control–you can command either a single ship or the entire fleet. I’m still in the Archer storyline. I got my booty kicked last night by Romulans. Making progress, though. The graphics are really nice, and the interface is surprisingly good–I had my doubts about such a game being intuitive with the controls, but it’s easy to manage and navigate ships.

Halo & Halo 2 aren’t all that bad, either. Even though they aren’t HD games, they still look fairly slick. It looks like Halo has more plot to it than the PC version.

I’m watching Angel. I hadn’t seen many of the earlier episodes, and I am watching the one where Faith goes to LA. Lindsey had been in the last episodes, and I didn’t know where he came from; he obviously had a past with Angel & Company. It looks like he was a lawyer with Wolfram & Hart. Cool.

It’s frickin’ cold here. It should not be 15 degrees 😛

I’m so glad that today is Friday.

The one thing that the Democrats don’t get is balance and equilibrium. When people like John Edwards brazenly declare new taxes on the “rich” as part of what he thinks is right, they have nearly no comprehension of the consequences of all of this.

The “rich” as the Democrats describe them–which is also ironic because Democrat politicians are quite rich–are the ones that give the lower and middle class jobs. When you increase taxes on them, you inhibit their ability to hire more people. In fact, you tax enough and you cut into their profit margin enough, they’ll start firing people. The unemployment rate does not go down because of this, believe it or not. It does not mean that the “rich” will hire more people out of the kindness of their hearts. They would be taxed more and more out of capital they could use to hire more. We have the lowest unemployment rate in a decade for a reason.

Why is it that Democrats nearly always act or spout rhetoric on emotion, just so they can feel good at the cost of something more reasonable and sensible? Ugh. Another thing that people don’t comprehend is that these entitlements are going to lead to more taxes for all of us. Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security can’t be sustained merely by the “generous contributions” of the rich.

When we pay 80% of our wages towards entitlements to support the Baby Boomers, and we’re all in the poor house because of it, at least we’ll feel good, eh?

Stupid Colts *puts a boot up the booty of the head coach of the Colts*

You learn something new every day. I was looking at my mortgage stuff, to check out all of the tax information (UAH FINALLY sent my W2. w00t!), and it said on the top of my escrow account summary that “Our records indicate that your account is impounded.”

I didn’t realize what impounded meant, and my knee jerk reaction was to pack up my things and head to Mexico. lol. Well, maybe not that bad, but I didn’t realize that’s what they called a mortgage that has an escrow.