Why, hello everyone. Long time no see. As you might have noticed, I have been basically nonexistent on the interwebs lately. It’s a long story, and I would probably end up making some excuses, so I really won’t get into it. However, I do want to discuss what I plan on doing in the upcoming weeks.
First of all, I am finished with using Tumblr as my main blogging platform. I enjoy its minimalist nature, but it just isn’t the right thing for me. I found myself missing many of WordPress’s features throughout my little “experiment.” So yes, I will be moving back to WordPress (maybe for good this time). I hope you can put up with this problem I have with switching things and changing everything around constantly. Given the time I would spend probably an hour a day trying to figure out what desktop wallpaper to use, only to change it back moments later.
Although I have been absent from the web, I have not been absent from life (thank goodness). I still keep up with the news so don’t worry, I still have opinions. I know you are all relieved. However, I need a little catching up time for a week or two. I’ll explain why in a paragraph or two. And before you ask, I have not just been too lazy to blog. I have been extremely busy with tests, science fair, and everything else in school so blogging fell by the wayside for a bit.
Now to why I need a while to catch up a bit. Essentially, my family hit some troubled times a few months back. My aunt and uncle each had cancer, breast cancer and colon cancer, respectively. Through the years they have been doing relatively well. Unfortunately, both of their cancers had been caught late. Soon after their chemotherapy treatments were over, both cancers came back stronger than ever. In late June of this year, my aunt was taken to the hospital. She passed away on July 2. My uncle was in relatively good condition, and he was on chemotherapy again. The doctor seemed relatively confident that he could beat the cancer if he kept in good shape. About three weeks ago, my uncle was rushed to the hospital. After being sent home, he began to have problems he’d never had before. Eventually he too passed away, on October 3. I never knew either my aunt or my uncle very well, but it is a tough time for all of my family regardless. I’ve missed a few days of school because of this as well, putting me a good deal behind.
As soon as things can get back to normal, I think everyone can expect me to be back on a regular blogging schedule. Thanks for reading, and please look forward to reading a bit more in the future.
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.
