Defiantone.com

I added some new photos to the gallery of the Mariners game last night. Jessica’s grandma was nice enough to provide tickets and let me fill one of the seats. I spent a chunk of money eating rather unhealthy but very tasty ballpark food. If you don’t have a strong gut you probably shouldn’t eat there. I think we are going to another game in a couple of weeks. It should be fun. You can check them out if you go to the gallery. They start on page six and continue for a couple of pages. I haven’t added any captions but you really don’t need them. Besides, writing all of the captions takes a whole lot of time and I’m just slightly lazy.

If only I could keep it up -

So, on Thursday night I spent the evening wearing a polo shirt that was provided to me as I stood directly next to the stage at a Faith Hill and Tim McGraw concert. For the evening I was a member of the security team. My only job was to be a visible presence, answer questions, and remove any fan that attempted to jump up on the stage. I only answered one question and nobody attempted to jump on the stage so it was a relatively boring evening. I’m not a fan of country music - save for Johnny Cash - so I almost fell asleep a few times. Jessica was with me and was watching from a different part of the floor. She was rather jealous of me and wished that I could have been sweat on by either one of them - I don’t quite get it. She had fun but it was an extremely long evening. If only it was music that I actually liked - Stevie Wonder would have been awesome.

Friday was another night of fun as we went to watch the Tacoma Rainiers play in a triple AAA game. I’m not a huge fan of watching baseball but when you go to the park there is a lot of other stuff to watch if you have little interest in the game. They also have two of my favorite food groups: brats and beer. I haven’t had a good brat in a while - you know, brat, bun, sour kraut, catsup ( or ketchup) - all the things that make it good. We were staying for the fireworks that were at the end of the game and I guess it was a good choice. The game was all tied up through the 9th inning and we gave up 5 runs in the top of the 10th. Three of them were from an unforced error… doh! Since the Rainiers hang out at the bottom of the standings I didn’t think they had a chance in hell of coming back from that one but a miracle happened and scored 6 runs. I was extremely tired by that point so I really didn’t care but it was one heck of an ending. There were fireworks after the game but I almost fell asleep. If I’m tired I’m willing to sleep almost anywhere.

Saturday - last night - I went to Katie’s house - she is one of Jessica’s friends. We imbibed large quantities of behavior influencing liquid. Needless to say…. I was inebriated. Good times were had by all.

The girl is making me pancakes right now - she could be a keeper. If only all of my time off of work was this enjoyable.

I finally uploaded the few pictures that I have taken and you can see them all here. If you don’t want to look at them all I’ll just post the view out of my window.

I recieved notification that my car is available for pickup and I’ll be able to get that tommorow and the bleeding from the wallet should stop at that point. I can finally turn in the rental car (which hasn’t been all that bad save for the cracked window) and drive my car. I can hardly wait until I am able to drive it.

My personal property is probably in the middle of an ocean so I won’t see it for a while but I’ve got enough things to survive on (hooray for the camp chair and air mattress).

Thats about all for now

I’m not a big fan of posing for photos as I’m extremely unphotogenic. Most of the photos that I share are the ones left over after I’ve removed all of the bad pictures from the rotation. Recently, much to my dismay, we had family photos taken. I’ve only posted the ones that I thought were decent after somebody else had discarded all of the really bad photos. So, here they are… my family. More photos can be found in the gallery.

Free thought and liberty

All Americans are afforded the same protections under the constitution and the bill of rights regardless of what background they might come from. Our nation is great because we are a melting pot of people from many different nations with different backgrounds, opinions, and religions. Many Americans believe that no matter what, we should all be treated the same. Some people think that if I converted to Islam that I should have my security clearance revoked and that I should be put under a terror watch list. Americans are watching other Americans solely based upon the color of their skin and their religion.

In the mid-1800’s the United States was a divided nation as we fought in a brutal struggle for the rights of everyone despite their background or skin color. Hundreds of thousands died in this struggle in an effort to treat everyone equally. Despite the great loss of life America still did not treat everyone equally. America went through a large civil rights struggle for the equality of African Americans during the early to mid 20th century in an effort to even everything out. They wanted the right to be treated as an equal irregardless of how they might look. Today I think that we are still fighting the same battle but the participants are different. In the past month the president signed a law that allowed him and the secretary of defense to indefinitely hold anyone if they are suspected of terrorism. In a nutshell, they suspended the right of habeas corpus. The American civil liberties union immediately began to fight this new legislation as it was in violation of the rights spelled out in one of our nations greatest documents, the bill of rights.

Today I received an email from… someone that advocated the idea of spamming the ACLU with mail to adversely affect their mission: to protect the freedom of all Americans. First off, this is an illegal act. Second, this is one of the most foolish ideas I have heard of in a long time. Why in the world would we want to fight an organization that is fighting for all of our rights. Sure, the status quo in America is that we don’t care who we jail or whose rights we violate to stop terrorism but I know that I wouldn’t want to be one of those individuals who was illegally detained.

I mentioned this to someone yesterday and they mentioned that the ACLU is notorious for fighting only certain things and not all rights violations. In particular, they often fight not for the right to have religion but to remove it from a particular venue. In some cases, I can agree with this rational because we need to separate church from state. Why? Islam is nearly inseparable from most of the nations where the majority of people are of the Islamic faith. When this happens, only the faith of the majority is promoted and the others.. well, a Christian in Indonesia could get murdered and nobody would care. If the shoe was on the other foot and it was an individual of the Islamic faith the matter would be rigorously investigated.

Now that I’ve beat this to death… lets move on to the next topic today

Voting along party lines is foolish

Most politicians in America campaign on the party policy alone rather than their individual beliefs and ideas. We, as Americans, who live in greatest nation on earth, should elect people who think for themselves. When was the last time we voted on abortion in America? Do you think that the legislative body would subject themselves to a vote that would splinter the voting population in half. Lets face it, if there was a political climate change, as there is now, these people wouldn’t be elected the next time around. To make a campaign on polarizing material would be dangerous… the republican party joined together and supported GW’s decision to send Americans into Iraq. It will take years to figure out if the loss of life was worth setting them free. The crazy part is that they don’t care about what we’ve done over there… they just want us dead and gone.

Ok… whats the deal with this? well, I got an email yesterday telling people to vote on party lines citing the following reasons… time to tear them all apart

1. The economy. More than 6.6 million jobs have been created since 8/03. 4.1 annual growth is superior to all major industrialized nations. Dow hits new records. Productivity is up. Real after tax income has grown by 15% since 2001. Like VP Chaney would say…”What more do you want?” The tax cuts proposed by Bush and the R-Congress can take a bow.

More than anything else, the federal interest rates affect how our economy grows or shrinks. One man, who was put into that office by GW (and reagan before that), is responsible for that. Were you aware that 720,000 of the jobs created were government jobs? Creating a bigger government is not an effective way to reduce taxes and lower costs. Smaller governments are more efficient and cost less money.

Oh yeah, my data from Sept 06 says only 3 million jobs were created…. hmmm… fudging numbers somewhere?

Clinton took the jobless rate from 7.5% to 4% during his two terms in office. The GW took the jobless rate from 4% to 6.6% to 4.4%…. we’re almost back to where we started. He didn’t do anything legendary… he just got us back to where we started out in the first place.

You’ve also got to take into account that our nation now has over 300 million people… more people means more jobs.

want to know more check it out at senate.gov

2. The Patriot act. The much discussed civil liberty abuses have just not materialized. It has permitted the CIA and FBI to cooperate.

There has been no mention of civil rights abuses because all of the cases are handled in a seperate court that is out of the publics view. I am not aware of any… nor could I find any but the potential is just too great. Rewrite the legislation and give us something better. There IS a way to do it without infringing on citizens rights. The CIA and FBI have continually proven that although they can communicate they often do not communicate.

3. The ABM Treaty has been cancelled permitting us to work on missile defense. Is anyone but Nancy Pelosi sorry?

The fear mongers want us to spend billions on a missile defense system that does not work. They’ve already spent billions on the system and it doesn’t work… hey, I’ve got an idea. Give me your money and I’ll flush it down the toilet for you.

4. Immigration. The Republican Congress has gotten the first serious immigration restriction law passed in years.

If I was to look at the voting record I found that democrats and republicans worked on the reform together… you can’t take the credit for everything. Whats next? taking the credit for the sun rising every morning?

5. There has not been another terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. Who would have predicted that on 9/12?

You got me here… there also haven’t been any more flying spaghetti monsters attacking our cities…. this is the most asinine statement out of all of them… yes, voting republican stopped the terrorists… oh wait 2819 americans died on 9/11 and 2828 american soldiers have died so far in Iraq… yep, we really showed them (I just want out troops back… soon)

6. Libya has surrendered its nuclear program.

Hmm… years of economic pressure or they saw republicans and gave up…. duh!

7. A. Q. Khan’s nuclear smuggling network has been rolled up.

Can you really attribute this to one party alone? No

8. John Roberts and Sam Alito sit on the Supreme Court.

I’ll give you this one…

9. The Demos that do not want to close Gitmo altogether want to give all its inmates the full panoply of rights Americans enjoy in criminal procedures.

Thats right, we don’t want to lock people up and throw away the key without trial because other nations watch what we do. If we abuse human rights why shouldn’t everyone else do it. We should at least give these guys and chance and if they are innocent… let em go, they didn’t do anything. It also doesn’t help that negativity is associated with the prison in the international community. One of the only reasons we have it is because its not located in America and we can pretty much do whatever we want to the prisoners.

10. Demos believe in immediate withdrawal from Iraq. If this happens the US will face a stinging defeat on the war against terror. According to Osama bin Laden, and those who share his views, we are militarily strong but psychologically and spiritually weak. Like it or not - and no one likes it - we cannot leave Iraq now without utterly and decisively validating this analysis.

Or maybe he says things like this to keep is embroiled in a war that we might not be able to win. He’s taunting us, this is what he does. I don’t want to loose either but if they outlook predicts no chance of winning… why stay? Lets get some guys together and find out what we need to win it… and win it. If we don’t change anything we don’t have a chance.

11. Demos would like to eliminate the terrorist surveillance program.

I can’t verify this one

12. If Demos achieve the majority in the House, Barney Frank will chair the Financial Services Committee, Henry Waxman the Government Reform Committee and Alcee Hastings the Intelligence Committee.

The three individuals are tools… but, we should get rid of them instead of voting for a republican… there have quite a few people in the past year that are involved in scandals, this time around most of them are republican…. lets keep the good people and get rid of the bad ones regardless of political party affiliation…

13. Demos believe the proper response to Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test isface-to-face talks. That’s what the Clinton Administration did for years.

For six years the bush administration has done no better… neither made any progress

What I’m trying to say is this, give me a list of facts and I can counter almost all of them as I’ve done here. Vote for the right person, don’t vote for someone based on party affiliation alone… its a bad idea.

Comments? please let me know your opinion

I’ve got a bunch of new photos that I’ve posted in the gallery. Its a whole bunch of picture from my work here at Sunny Point. I didn’t put in details because well, I’m not letting you know what each item is and where it was going. All you need to know is that we handled a whole bunch of stuff and thats about it… these are pictures of all of that stuff. Oh yeah, I’m incredibly un-photogenic so don’t hate. There is a catch to the whole thing though, you’ll need to register because I don’t want to share these pictures with everyone on the internet. So, follow the link above and click on register in the top right corner of the page. I’ll activate your account and you can check out the photos. If you don’t register… well, you won’t be able to see them.

Often I feel that I need to post some worthwhile content here and more often than not I’m unable to provide anything new that I didn’t scour from the internet. Lets face it, I read and see many things but find that bringing something new and unique is near impossible. We’re all doing our best to stand out in our own way; I put it out all on the table.

This weekend could be absolutely disastrous as we’re planning to imbibe massive quantities of booze. I’m not only talking about drinking beer… something that I have found myself doing with frequency here, I’m talking about binge style hammered drinking. This is an occasion to bring a camera but delete most of what happens the next morning. I’ve found that here, at least, I don’t need to drink to join the crowd. People just want me to come out and we drink, its all good. Its been a while since I’ve felt social acceptance like I have here. The environment feels must like it did in Korea, its all family.

I’m looking forward to seeing my family in the near future… its been awhile. I’m not sure what I will do while I am home but it will be nice to be back.