WSU Trumpet

I made a mistake two years ago when I agreed to buy a house. Houses are nice to have but completely unnecessary. If you buy a house, you put yourself at the mercy of the economy really badly. One second you could be happily enjoying your dwelling thinking of the return on investment and the next second you'll be losing thousands on it. It just sucks and I can't believe I actually bought one.

The problem with my house really stems from my distrust and general dislike of my neighbor. He has abused us ever since we've lived in our house, generally for things we have no control over. I can see the point for his anger towards us, but there is nothing I can do about it. I do not have the funds to completely fix up the yard and the driveway so that they look beautiful; and even if I did, I don't think I would because I don't have the patience to keep up on them. Then there are other ongoing costs such as re-roofing the house and replacing windows and so on. Owning a freaking house is bloody expensive!

You see, I am not cut out to own property. For one, yard work absolutely turns my stomach. I don't necessarily mind mowing the grass, but planting and weeding and trimming and pruning... Those are for the birds for all I care. I have no interest in doing any of that. I'd just as soon pave the entire property with asphalt and forget the whole thing. That's my spring/summer dilemma.

This is my winter dilemma: I hate snow. I do not like to shovel it. I can't stand slipping and falling down in it. I don't like the fact that it increases minor traffic accidents by like 3000%. Snow just simply sucks. It sucks that during the winter there are snowstorms that last for like a week straight. It is no wonder that I fall into a bad depression during the winter months.

I really wish I did not have this house tying me down. It was a bad decision to buy it and it will be impossible to sell it for anything close to what we want to get out of it. I wish to simply live in an apartment or something where all I have to do is keep my living quarters clean, which I do happily. I don't want to do yard work; I don't want to shovel snow. I don't mind so much doing those things if it's a community effort. But here, I feel like it's me against the world.

It will be a VERY long time (if it ever happens) before I am comfortable buying another house. All I want to do at this point is offload this house and leave. So there you have it.

I have a problem. It's kind of a big problem and it seems to only get bigger with each passing day. The problem that I have is with this illegal immigration issue. It keeps getting attention, but coming up short on an actual solution. I would love it if someone would explain to me what the problem is with enforcing the laws of the land.

Illegal immigration, as you may or may not be aware, is not a new problem. People have been coming to this country illegally since the constitution was ratified in 1787. People will continue to come to this country illegally. What blows my mind is how it seems that every time we try to enforce laws regarding illegal immigration, there is someone at the other end countering that law. It makes it seem like there is no way to protect ourselves.

I was watching a news report this evening about a town in Utah where the citizens are fed up with the illegal immigration and want the city to do something. They feel that the city is encouraging illegal immigration by not cracking down on the businesses that hire illegal workers. The report goes on to say that the city's hands are tied because this is in the domain of the federal government and that cities have been sued because they have tried what the citizens are requesting. I'm sorry, but how does someone who is living in the U.S. illegally have the ability to sue a U.S. city because they were caught residing and working here illegally? That makes absolutely no sense. An illegal immigrant is just that: ILLEGAL! They have no rights. They have no legal protection in this country. I can claim fairly certainly that if I were to be living in Mexico or in pretty much any other country in the world illegally, they would not have any qualms about throwing the book at me. And guess what! They would be totally justified in doing so. So why is it that we can't seem to do the same in the United States? Why is it that so-and-so illegal alien has more legal protection than a law-abiding citizen? It makes no sense. And to put the maraschino cherry on top of this little dessert, a representative of the Hispanic community stated that he had concerns about discrimination if new laws were to be enacted. Excuse me? These laws are not put in place as tools of discrimination. They will punish illegal Germans, Brits, and Canuks just as fast as they will Hispanics. It just so happens that a vast majority of the illegal immigrants in this country are Hispanics. So, if the laws are going to be discriminatory, then what, pray tell, would you suggest we do?

I would really like to get more information on this. It's driving me crazy. I live and work in the United States. I have done so all my life. I am proud of this land and believe it to be the best land in the world. I am now seeing the greatness of this country being eroded away by the massive influx of foreign nationals. I can hardly go to the grocery store without reading everything in both English and Spanish. There are now more Spanish-language radio stations in my area than English-language ones. When did my country suddenly drop south of the border? And you know what's even worse? I feel that if I try to complain too much about all this, I'll be labeled a supremacist or racist or a bigot or something along those lines. I just don't get it. When did I become unwelcome in my own country? When did standing up for and defending our freedoms become so unpopular?

I would like to talk about rights. I know, I know, the world's all abuzz with political talk as President-Elect Barack Obama prepares to take the most powerful seat in the world, but I feel like certain things need to be clarified.

Rights, as it were, are opportunities afforded to Man that generally cannot be revoked. We often think of rights as things like life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness. There are other rights out there, but they generally all revolve around those three tenets: that a person can expect to live, be free to make decisions, and work to earn property. Now, just because a person has those rights does not necessarily mean that everyone has to agree with that person all of the time. I have the right to make my own decisions, but with that right also comes the responsibility for the decisions I make. Also, I have the right to work and earn property, but I do not have the right to any particular job. That is up to me to make myself a good fit for a job.

So, now we come to this idea of marriage that is so hot in the press these days. There are people all over clamoring about whether or not gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry. Those for allowing them to marry do so in the name of equal rights while those opposed say that it has nothing to do with equal rights. I happen to be one of those opposed, but it is not just that simple. Since this is a discussion about rights, I beg the question: who has the right to get married? Nobody. It is not a right. It is what we call a privilege. Marriage can be taken away if either of the parties chooses to do so or if there is sufficient evidence for the state to do so. It's kind of like driving. In fact, since you have to have a license for both, it is very much like driving. Certain things that we enjoy in our society are considered privileges. Many people would initially think that they are rights, but they are not. Consider the following: watching television, having dinner with your family, enjoying a movie. Rights? No. They are privileges. They are pretty freely available privileges, but to someone who breaks the laws of the land, they can be considered unattainable luxuries.

Now, there are certain rights that come along with certain privileges, but that is a discussion for a different time.

So, as I have described it, gays and lesbians have exactly the same right to marry as heterosexual couples - that is they have none at all. Marriage is a privilege afforded to those who can demonstrate their willingness and ability to treat each other and their offspring well.

Now, I feel that I need to clarify my earlier comment as to being opposed to gays and lesbians being married. I mentioned that they have the same right as heterosexual couples, but that does not mean that I would condone them getting married. The reason is simply semantics: the word marriage has for thousands of years meant a legal and lawful union of a man and a woman. If we redefine it to mean "party A" and "party B," then it loses its sense of sanctity. I am a religious person who believes in traditional family values. I am appalled by the corruption of certain words and symbols in our society. For instance, the word gay used to mean happy and cheerful, but this is no longer the case. The rainbow, once a symbol of peace and deity, has been reduced to a symbol of godless homosexuality. I feel that corrupting the word marriage to mean a union between "party A" and "party B" will cause that word to be one uttered under the breath and in secret conversation. It will no longer be a symbol of stability and unitedness in our society. The family (read: father, mother, children) is the essential unit of our society. Without it, society will tear itself apart. Liberalizing things to a point of no control, even though it be in the name of "civil rights," creates more problems than it solves.

When I was eleven or twelve years old, my dad taught me to run our nice self-propelled Toro lawn mower to cut our 1/2 acre yard. We always had really nice thick grass and some of the yard was on quite an incline. Now, my dad is a wise person and told me "Let the mower do the work for you" when he saw that I was having some trouble getting the machine to do what I wanted it to do. He saw that I was fighting against the mower. Now, lawn mowers and 85lb boys shouldn't get into fights because lawn mowers tend to win. Once I decided to back off and let the mower do the work, I discovered that mowing the lawn could actually be enjoyable and didn't take nearly as long as it had before.

Now, I find myself in my dad's shoes from time to time when I see people using computers. I see this tendency for people to misunderstand the ability and design of computers to work together. A computer by itself really doesn't do a whole lot other than just idle. I mean, when you buy a computer and just use it for word processing and browsing CD-ROMs, it really defeats the purpose of the computer. Computers are capable of so much more. Even simply attaching it to the "Internet" is really just scratching the surface. People need to "let the machine do the work."

Sometimes when I work with people and their computers, they will comment that they have a document, but it is on that other computer. Drat! So, dejectedly, they fire up the other machine and save the document on some physical device and transfer it to the computer they are working on. This results in several versions of the document floating around. I have to bite my tongue a bit here because this could have easily been solved by networking the two computers and simply accessing the document remotely. When some people see this, they are blown away that they can access something remotely. But, this feature is one of the greatest strengths of computers and the networks that support them.

Sometimes people set up home networks with three or four computers hooked to them. What's funny is that these computers just act as Internet portals, almost completely unaware that other computers exist on the network. Some people will set up each computer with its own printer and gigantic hard drive. That's a waste of money and resources. That's trying to cause the computer to be an island, which it really is not. The strength of the network is that printers and storage can be spread across multiple nodes for simplification and redundancy. The network can act as its own backup. Software packages can be installed that periodically back up files on one computer to another computer in the event that one computer fails.

One really cool thing that I would love to see on my personal network is the thin client concept. This really emphasizes the previously mentioned network strengths by completely removing those big clunky client computers and replacing them with diskless clients that do all their computing over the network. For example, a family could have a terminal server set up that runs constantly. This server would have to be a very fast, powerful machine with lots of storage. Then, each member of the family could have a cheap, simple thin client that boots up very quickly and does nothing more than log into the terminal server. This scenario aleviates many of the problems of conventional "thick" clients that have their own memory, disk storage, processors, etc. If a problem happens, it can be more easily tracked down and resolved. No one would have to worry about their hard drive crashing because the clients have no hard drives. All this is made possible through the network.

So, I hope that I have been successful in illustrating how to let the machine do the work. Computers should not be viewed as isolated appliances for doing mundane tasks. They are high-precision instruments capable of great things. We should never cease to be amazed by what our computers can do. We just need to allow them to do what they are designed to do.

Next: Real computing power: virtualization.

I'm having a very difficult time wrapping my mind around this story from KSL. It would appear from the details of the report that Mr. Jesus Jimenez, the getaway driver in a deadly shooting last year, will receive at least 21 years of prison time. Great. Moreover, his companion, the trigger man, a Miguel Mateos-Martinez has fled to Mexico seeking asylum. They say that the DA's office is having trouble extraditing him because Mexico won't allow people to be extradited if they face the death penalty. Okay, that's a bit hard to understand. In my opinion, and correct me if I'm wrong, you do the crime and you do the time. It doesn't matter if you've fled to some other country that "doesn't believe in" the death penalty. That's the reason for extradition. If you commit a crime in some location, you are bound by the laws of that location, not your origin.

Another part of this story I don't understand is how Mr. Jimenez is going to appeal his sentence. How in the name of all that's holy and pure does he have the right to do so? If he's an illegal immigrant, (which I believe he probably is) he has NO rights. This is precisely where I think immigration reform needs to happen. As it currently stands, the United States has a very tough time properly castigating those illegal immigrants who are caught here. The border is nothing more than a revolving door. You come across, commit a crime, get deported, come back next week. It's a vicious cycle. Immigration reform needs to be made more hard-nosed and given very sharp teeth. You get caught in this country illegally, you face some very stiff penalties. And, to top it off, since you are not here legally, you have no right to a) a trial by a jury of peers, b) legal representation, and c) to be able to properly understand the charges being leveled against you. If you don't speak English, that's just tough. Under my plan, illegal immigrants may also be improperly treated during the execution of their sentence.

Now, if Mr. Jimenez is actually a citizen, then I can understand his desire to appeal. That is what I would do if I were accused of a crime. Now, when I travel outside of the U. S. I carry a passport and make sure that all the documentation has been authorized for me to legally enter the country. That way, should I inadvertently commit some crime, I have some immunity provided by the United States. I must stress the word some, because if I were to be caught knowingly violating laws of another country, I would expect the full penalty of that law to be leveled against me. That is where the United States is falling short with the illegals. They pretty much face no consequences for their actions. They commit a crime and then go running back home like the little cowards they are. Please don't misunderstand me. I have several good friends who are decendents of Mexican nationals. I do not have any ill feelings towards them. They are good people. They are productive members of society and they are full citizens of this nation. The problem I have is those who are here illegally, for whatever reason. Usually, liberals will say that they are "seeking a better life." Well, that's fine. They can do it legally. As a tax payer, I am not interested in paying for them to "seek a better life."

The system is broken and it needs to be fixed. This incident is one in a long string of news reports I have read in the past months and years that makes me believe this more and more. Though, fixing the problem does not mean softening the consequences.

So, my wife was reading from the Book of Mormon this evening in 1 Nephi, chapter 12, I think. This is a section where Nephi is receiving a witness of what his father, Lehi, had seen. Of course, in chapter 11, we get to see the vision of the Tree of Life and we get a more expanded view of it than in chapter 8. However, I believe that in chapter 12 (I know, I should know for certain) Nephi expounds more on the symbolism of the vision. In this chapter he discusses the Mother of All Harlots, the Great and Abominable Church, and so forth. Well, as my wife was reading this, I got thinking, as I often do, as to what is meant by monikers such as The Great and Abominable Church and the Mother of All Harlots. None of this is new to me. I have pondered this before and come to the same conclusions. I just have never written them down and looked at them.

Some in the Church tend to think (and I do think this represents a(n uneducated) minority) that the Great and Abominable Church is an actual church, namely the Catholic church. Depending on the locality of the LDS, it may be the Baptist church or the Episcopalian church, but some do believe that it represents an actual religious organization, one that is bent upon the disruption of the work of the True and Living church. Being a student, so to speak, of the teachings of Jesus Christ, I find this somewhat disturbing. First, as an LDS person, I am taught to rely on the promptings of the Holy Ghost for my basis of truth. When someone says that this Great and Abominable Church is an actual church, I get no such confirmation. Second, in the scriptures, we are taught that whatever teaches of Christ and brings people to Christ is of Christ and therefore should not be esteemed as evil. These other churches do teach people to love and serve each other and to worship Jesus Christ. This cannot be bad. They may have incorrect interpretations which lead to stumbling-blocks in understanding the true nature of Jesus Christ, but the followers are, nonetheless, faithful to Him. So, to tell me that this Mother of All Harlots is an actual religious organization is to tell me that you do not fully understand the scriptures.

In no way do I claim to have a complete and full understanding of the scriptures, but this one thing I do know: the Great and Abominable Church spoken of in both ancient and modern scripture has more to do with the natural man and his surroundings than with any organized religion. This Great Church spoken of actually represents worldliness and pride. It represents the stumbling-blocks I spoke of earlier. It's what people hold on to that keeps them from uniting themselves with Christ and fully understanding and embracing His gospel. People may not even be aware of it. Most people don't go through life wondering what they may be doing that is keeping them from more fully comprehending the ways of God. However, we are all imperfect beings who tend to follow after this Mother of All Harlots once in a while. It is up to us to start recognizing when we are and try to fix the situation. We need to make ourselves more aware of how we are different from our Father in Heaven and try, do our best, to make up that difference. Of course, we will not succeed at this, but that is where the grace of Christ comes in to play. It makes up the huge difference that we imperfect beings are incapable of covering.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the Good News that we all seek. It is the message that we have the opportunity to justify ourselves with our God and be perfected in Christ. It does not promise us that we are already saved through no part of our own. It places the ball in our court and gives us the opportunity, the great opportunity, to be perfected and return to live with our Father. I like the word opportunity because that is what it is. If we view it as an opportunity, it should incite us to action to become more faithful and more righteous, not shunning others and not thinking we are better than they. This is the big challenge of this life: to overcome the Great and Abominable Church (read: the world and all its things) and become disciples of Christ. We have to 1) love God with all our heart and with all our soul and 2) love our neighbors likewise. If we master, and I do mean master those concepts, we can easily say that we are perfect like Jesus Christ. Of course, none of us can really do that, so we need Christ to fill in the gaps; and believe me, there are some real doozies of gaps in pretty much everyone's life.

So, this Great Church spoken of in the scriptures is not an actual church. It is everything we have in our lives that keeps us from being with God. It's our challenge and responsibility to see this life as an opportunity for learning and understanding. It's our chance to be better than we are currently. I say let's go for it.

I was going to make this blog about the evils of illegal immigration and how the government should pull all programs and benefits for illegals, but I have decided against it. I may still write that article, but for now, I wish to focus on the great consumer deception known as the hybrid automobile.

Back in 1900, there were more electric cars on the roads than gas-powered cars. Of course, the roads were still mainly meant for horses and buggies, so having a complex gas-powered engine could prove disastrous to a trip. Also, folks were really wary of carrying all the explosive gas around with them. Could blow up at any moment. Since that time, roads improved as did the internal combustion (IC) engine and we saw such engines take off, moving way out ahead of those electric contraptions. (Thus, the birth of the burnout, wheel stands, and fart cans.)

By the 1970s, cars had achieved their full size, some stretching 19 miles* from stem to stern. They often dwarfed those who drove them and the garages they occupied. It's a good thing that they designed garages to fit a 1976 Chevy Caprice because when the 2000 Excursion came along, it had a place to live. Anyhow, these enormous monsters of the late 60s and early 70s were known for their comfort and not much else. They drove kind of like an SR-71 at full speed -- they required about three states to turn around. Now, these huge cars were very good for one thing: you could drive over a whole switching yard of train tracks and never spill your cup of coffee. (Notice how the hot coffee lawsuits have only come relatively recently?) These cars were also notorious for something else: horrid gas mileage. "Mileage" was better measured in inches per gallon rather than miles per gallon; it made it look better. Your typical '76 Caprice got about 8 MPG on a good day with a nice stiff tailwind and the engine shut off. Hey, that was a 1970s hybrid, after all. :) It might get better mileage if you put up a big sail on the antenna mast for those tailwinds.

Fast forward a few years to the year 2000. Cars are generally smaller than the hulking land yachts of thirty years prior. I did say cars, not trucks, were smaller. In the year 2000, we have monstrous machines like the Ford [Take an] Excursion [to go around it], but generally, cars are smaller, lighter and more fuel efficient than their older brethren. In this time of general renewal (I mean, c'mon; it is the new millennium) Honda, the Japanese maker of lawn mowers, weed eaters and some pretty nice dirt bikes, introduces the Insight. It's basically a gussied up, modernized CR-X combined with a golf cart. Somewhere inside there is an engine. It gets great gas mileage and doesn't look half bad to boot. (Of course, I've always kind of liked the futuristic-looking cars, myself, so I'm somewhat biased.) Unfortunately for Honda, they only sold six of them. The liberal environmentalists (another invention of the late 90s and early 2000s) didn't even seem to notice them. They were still trying to save the world by driving 1972 Land Cruisers and VW Micro buses.

So, we jump now to 2001. Someone at Toyota got some balls and decided to ship a Japanese-market car west and land it in California. It was sure to get noticed there. Sure enough, that little car known as the Prius, started selling. They sold ten of them, and then 14, and then 21... The sales kept on going. Now, the Prius was not a new model. It had been living in the Land of the Rising Sun since 1997. The thing that made the Prius sell where the Honda Insight did not was the fact that the Prius had four proper doors and seats for regular-sized people. It also had an engine. The only thing wrong with it was that it was (and still is) really ugly. When I first saw it, I asked, "Why is it that new-technology cars have to look so different (read: butt ugly) than their normal-tech counterparts?" To this day, I haven't figured it out.

So the environmentalists and the environmentalists-at-heart gobbled up the Prius. At one time, there was like a two-year waiting list to get one and once you had one, it actually appreciated in value. What other car has done that? None that I can think of. In 2001, gas was at a pain-inducing $1.30 per gallon. People clamored after these "hybrid" cars because they were supposed to get great gas mileage (if you learned to drift behind semi-trailers and drive 17 MPH on the freeway.) As the gas prices went up, so did the value (and cost) of these hybrid vehicles. More and more models were introduced. Different body styles showed up, all bearing the "Hybrid" logo. I think you can now even get a hybrid Abrams tank for your urban assault vehicle. There's nothing like 57 tons of steel powered by a gas-electric hybrid engine. :)

Now, all this hybrid stuff actually sounds pretty good. On a good day (again, with a stiff tailwind and running downhill) you can actually get motorcycle mileage out of your hybrid car. For those of you who are not motorcyclists, we're talking 50+ miles per gallon. Great! I love it! NOT!!! What's up with 50? My gas-only car gets pretty close to that on good days. Why should I spend a bunch more money on a car that only gets somewhat better gas mileage and looks kind of like a pyramid on wheels? I don't get it. But, I decided to just admit that hybrids must be the way of the future...

...Until I discovered diesel. "Diesel!?" you say. Isn't that the stuff that powers those big smoke-belching, headache-inducing pickups that weekend warriors like to drive around in just to intimidate the rest of us? Well, yes, it is. But, isn't diesel smelly and greasy and aren't the engines noisy and rough? No, not really. I mean, they are if you're driving a Ford truck, but consider that most small cars in Europe run on diesel. Most newer models make almost the same sound as their regular gasoline counterparts. They don't belch out smokescreens and their engines are not constantly covered in grease. Engine technology as well as fuel technology has gotten much better for diesels in the last ten years. Consider also, that diesels get better mileage than their gasoline cousins (even surpassing hybrids) and with little or no modification, they can be made to run on stuff that you wouldn't normally imagine they could run on. Take corn oil, for instance. Your typical diesel engine can run on the same stuff you cook your fried chicken with.

Now, of course, for this to be any sort of controversial, I have to mention the environment. We all know that burning petroleum is as bad for the environment as last year's Christmas fruitcake. What makes it this way, though? Why is it that cars running on petroleum are simply flatulating our atmosphere out of existence? Well, it all has to do with something we call the ecosystem. You probably remember the little circular diagrams depicting the water cycle and life cycles and various other systems associated with our environment. In these diagrams, everything was recycled. Well, you see, long ago, our planet was much warmer than it is now. There was a lot more plant life than there is now. Over the eons, these ancient plants and animals died and the carbons in their bodies were returned to the earth. These became trapped as oil deposits, completely taken out of circulation, so to speak. Our climate cooled off and humans came along.

Then, one day, we determined that we could do a lot with the energy released from burning these fossil fuels (carbons taken out of circulation). In that instant, we reintroduced those carbons back into our environment, effectively putting them back into circulation. Well, the environment as it is currently, really wasn't meant to have them put back into circulation. The "new" carbons bond very quickly and securely to the existing oxygen in the atmosphere and other places. It creates greenhouse gases. So, burning these fossil fuels, such as gasoline, petrodiesel and coal, is bad and is contributing to damage to our environment. (Go ahead and say global warming, but I'm not going to jump on the AlGore bandwagon just yet. It's having an effect, but to what extent is debatable.)

"But wait, Turbo, you said burning petrodiesel is bad," you say. "Didn't you just praise diesel for all the good things about it?" That I did. Burning petrodiesel is bad for the environment. It introduces the new carbons the same as burning gasoline or coal. However, diesel made from current biological sources does not introduce these new carbons. It takes carbons already extant in our environment and simply moves them. They follow one of those cycles I mentioned earlier and gets recycled back into something else in the environment.

"So what does this have to do with hybrid cars?" Well, those blessed hybrid cars that everyone is so ga-ga about right now, don't do anything to help the environment. In fact, they simply drag out the problem longer. Auto makers would like you to believe that hybrids are completely benign when it comes to environmental impact. But, this simply isn't true. They run on good ol' gas the same as every other car.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are arguably worse yet. While a hydrogen fuel cell car produces no emissions in an of itself, the process for hydrogen extraction requires a great deal of energy. Hydrogen's bond to oxygen is extremely strong and requires the use of fossil fuels to produce enough energy to separate it.

So, really, what we need to do is put our money into development of small, clean and efficient diesel engines and then run them on biofuels such as corn liquor or general biodiesel. If you want to have a near-zero impact on the environment, that's how you do it. The history of the automobile is one of innovation and progress. Unfortunately, for now, we are stuck using 19th Century technology in our internal combustion engines. It's time to move on and work with the environment and not against it.

*Slight exaggeration. Cars did not actually reach 19 miles long, but they were pretty close, and there's something beautiful about the classic American road barge.