Wow, this blog has really risen up the ranks. It is now the sixth result for “Kevin Porter” on Google.
Ahh, yes, the TSA. Now able to catch terrorists and the excessively fidgety with equal accuracy.
http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugged-in/fit-to-fly-balance-board-tapped-to-detect-shifty-characters-at-airports/1361483
I am not condoning copyright infringement. It is illegal, and if you want music you should purchase it legally. However, I most certainly don’t think that a fee of USD $80,000 a song is an appropriate fee for illegal file sharing. This poor woman, a mother of four, illegally shared $24 worth of music, and is now going to have to pay a fee that could buy her 8 decent sized houses.
I’ve been blogging on WordPress for, oh, I want to say three years now. I’ve been on WordPress.com for a little over a year and a half. WordPress is a wonderful platform and I’ve loved watching it improve over the years. However, there’s a new kid on the block, and his name is Tumblr. Tumblr is basically a mashup of different ideas about blogging. It can be a micro-blog if you like, it can be a feed of all your different stuff, or it can be a full-on blog. After playing with it a bit a year or so ago, I really liked it. I let it fall by the wayside but picked it up again after I saw Ryan McCue’s decision to switch over from WordPress. I should let you know that I regard Ryan here to be a WordPress fanatic. I was intrigued to say the least. I took a look again, specifically at the simplicity and the new themes. I have to say I really loved it. The themes are simple, the design is elegant, and I think it has a user-friendly interface.
So that brings me to this point: after mulling about it for a few weeks, I’ve decided that I am going to move over to Tumblr semi-permanently. I can’t import posts over to Tumblr, so my WordPress.com blog will serve as an archive of old posts. Of course you will still be able to comment and I will give responses, but the new stuff will all be on my new Tumblr blog.
So, that is all. You can check out my new blog over at kevinporter.tumblr.com. This whole blogging thing is one big experiment, and I think Tumblr is an important player.
Yep. We're pretty much worthless.
Cow and Boy, 5/31/2009
To be completely honest, I think we all know I’m not an absolute libertarian. But from a libertarian perspective, I would like to take a moment to give a libertarian, constitutional perspective on Proposition 8 in California and the recent court decision there. I know I’ve discussed gay rights a lot in the past few weeks, but it’s an issue that’s been on my heart for a while and I think we really need to clear this thing up.
First of all, constitutionally the states are given any and all rights not reserved by the federal government as per Amendments 9 and 10. This means that all laws that do not violate the US constitution or federal law are free game in the states. That said, so long that a ban on gay marriage is not unconstitutional or it doesn’t violate federal law, it’s completely legal and okay by standard of law.
That leaves us to question whether or not such a ban is legal or not. There are very few instances in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence that define whether or not banning a marriage is “fair” or not. One instance is the ever-cited clause in the Declaration regarding equality of all men.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
So is marriage a liberty? Something that belongs in the category of pursuit of happiness? Honestly, as a libertarian I believe this is a liberty and something the government should never meddle with. Marriage is an agreement between two people and God in my eyes, not two people, the government, and then God. However, this is yet another passage in the annals of our history that needs some discretion. This is why our Founders allowed for the amending of the Constitution: to clarify and reform. Are “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” ideals which include marriage, or more importantly, gay marriage? Honestly, I don’t really know. I think it would be quite arrogant of anyone to come out and make a claim on this and say that it means one thing or another, because it simply does not say. You can interpret it any way you want to, but the best way to figure out what the Constitution says is to reform and clarify it.
So how do we go about clarifying it? California has shown a good procedure of doing so. Iowa can also be an example. You get laws passed. You clarify. As we have said, this does not infringe upon the Constitution in any way. It in fact amends and clarifies the Constitution in each respective state and makes the law more workable. Whether or not you agree with the decision is one of the beauties of the United States: you can move to another state where it is different. If you don’t like gay marriage, move to California. If you don’t like gay marriage bans, move yourself over to Iowa. It’s the rights of the states to do as they please without any interference from other states or Big Brother.
In essence, the California court made the right decision. They upheld a vote by the people that is Constitutional and lawful. Whether or not you agree morally about that decision is up to you, but today I am speaking purely from a law perspective. And the decision was lawfully correct and okay.
I just wanted to post a brief update on the state of this blog and my recent lack of posts. First of all, I wanted to apologize for my recent post lull. I’ve been rather busy, so naturally a self-motivated blog (and lately my self-motivated Twitter account) have fallen by the wayside. With the school year closing out, I’ve been having to focus more on studying and getting last bits and pieces of homework and papers put together, as I’m shooting for valedictorian of my eighth grade class. And I’ll be sure to let you know how all that goes.
Lately I’ve been wanting to start posting to Tumblr, so I’ve come up with a possibly crazy idea: post my ideological junk here, and my life-related junk on Tumblr. It seems to make a lot of sense to me, but I’d love your comments on it. It just seems that I always write my long, thought out posts here and I never update on my life just because I feel that would be out of place. Or maybe that is the whole point of a blog. I don’t really know, but in any case, I’d like your opinion.
However this whole debacle goes down, I’d like to get another post in sometime this weekend, though it might be unlikely as I have a lot of poetry homework to do. Anyhow, I’ll get this whole thing solved soon.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_pelosi_torture
It just seems like she’s trying to cover her own #$% to me.
Its out of the frying pan and into the fire now…
http://bouncewith.me.uk/europe/8027043.htm
P.S. This is a joke.
