So like I said earlier, this was actually a really good year. This is a year where I saw Paris. PARIS! I went to Bruges, which is the single most amazing place I’ve ever been. With the possible exception of Paris. What is there to complain about in a year when things like that happen? I should reiterate how good my trip to Europe was. Despite the fact that I missed out on Amsterdam, I saw a lot, and had a really good time. I was thinking about the soccer game that I went to the other day. That was a trip that I will probably think about for the rest of my life.

And right after I got back from Europe, I got engaged. How can I complain about a year where I got engaged? And then just a few months later, I got married. MARRIED! I still can’t believe that I got married. And got married to someone who is really damn awesome. Someone so awesome that it almost makes me feel bad when I read or hear about stereotypical bad marriages and bad wives. Because I don’t have that at all. I’ve got it really, really good. And I’m pretty sure that we had the best wedding in the history of weddings. Rollerskating, cake, and deer. I don’t know what else you need.

Speaking of roller skating, I got first place in my event at Regionals. Again, it would feel wrong to write a bitchy letter when I had a year where something like that happened. And even though I totally tanked and sucked at Nationals, I still went and competed, and made a comeback at my next event by taking two second places.

Oh, and somewhere in all of that, we remodeled our bathroom and have the most kickass bathroom in the world. If you had ever been to my house and seen the old bathroom, you knew how bad it was. Well the new one is probably a million times better than that one.

But since people like the bad stuff, I guess I can throw some of that in as well. Mom and Dad still haven’t sold their house. So that means we won’t be going to Disney World anytime soon, which is a pretty selfish way of looking at it, but I know that I’m not the only one with that view of the situation. And Kelly and I found out that her house is worth significantly less than she owes on it. So we’ve had to rent it out, which has been good for money reasons, but not so good for stress reasons.

And I guess in the process of ripping out the bathroom, we destroyed the kitchen, so we’ve basically been living without a functioning kitchen for close to a year now. But you know what? That is about to get remodeled too, so it is hard to complain too long for that.

So yeah. This has been a really damn good year. I know that things are hard out there for a lot of people. I know that the world isn’t a terribly happy place. And if you follow the links I post on Facebook, you’ll see that I’m getting more and more frustrated with our government, and even our system of governing. But still, I think all of that is pretty inconsequential in light of all of the good things that I’ve had happen to me this year, and so at least for the last little bit of 2010 I’m going to choose to focus on those things, and not so much on the bad things.

Nothing.

That’s right. None of the issues that I went into the meetings hoping to get solved, did get solved. The first meeting was about this woman at work who completely lied about me. So the meeting was about how to make her happy with the software that I’m writing for her. We brought in some experts to look at what I had done. And you know what? They said that my software looked amazing. Just like the liar-woman had said herself a few months ago. But then, right after the meeting, we tried to get a hold of her. No luck. Not responding. What a shock. At least I think my boss now understands that I have been telling the truth about her and the situation.

Meeting the 2nd was at Dad’s work, to figure out an issue for how they do inspections and how we are tracking them in a piece of software I am writing for them. And you know what? After three hours, nothing was solved. If anything, we were further away from the solution than we were when we went in.

The third meeting was today. A planned follow up meeting about the liar woman. But she still hasn’t responded, so the meeting was basically pointless, and just ended up being over an hour of my boss talking about other things. It wasn’t bad, because I like my boss, but it didn’t solve the issue at hand. We actually even discussed stuff from the meeting I had at Dad’s, but we weren’t able to come up with any other solutions.

So I guess I’m just wondering, what is the point of having meetings? Do they accomplish anything? I’m not sure that I’ve ever really been in a meeting that has accomplished anything. In fact it seems like most things get accomplished when someone just goes and does something, and then faces the consequences later.

Which brings me to the point that I’m trying to make. I think that China has a very good possibility of bypassing the US in a lot of ways, such as technology, because at the end of the day the government can just say “Go do this. Build elevated trains in that city.” Here we have meetings and decide that we’ll put off things until the next meeting. Democracy.

Democracy has failed.

“But I freely concede that in an open and free society, with the dangers inherent in Jihadist terror, in an age of mass destruction, there will almost certainly come a time when we will have to endure serious human and physical damage. Unless we get much smarter or get really lucky, this will happen. It only takes a handful of people in a vast country with relatively open borders to do enormous damage, as we found out on 9/11. And they didn’t even have WMDs. If Jihadists really want to murder us (and they do) and if weapons of mass destruction get into their hands (and what are the odds against that at some point in our lifetimes?) then we will have to endure what the British endured in the Blitz and the Germans endured in Dresden and the Japanese endured in Hiroshima.

And if we do not have the Constitution on the other side of it, the victory will be theirs’. Yes: that’s what America means – freedom, not total security. Man up and face it, like the first Americans did. Believe in our system as powerfully as they believe in theirs’.”

Is it just me? What the hell is going on here?

I don’t know if anyone else has been following this, but one of the most appalling things is basically that the higher ups in the gov’t wanted information to go to war with Iraq. They needed a link between Al-qaeda and Iraq. So what they did was they tortured, and got false confessions, because that is what you get from torture. Then they used that information to justify going to war.

How is that allowed? How is there even a debate about this? How can ANYONE try to justify that behavior? What the hell has happened to this country?!

I’m sorry, did I say love? I should have said hate. What I hate about 1984is how relevant it is today.

I don’t know if you saw, but the “torture” memos were released today. These were the memos that the Bush justice department put out that basically said “It is okay to do these things that are torture because we say that they aren’t.” Well one of the things that they did was put a guy in a box with an insect that they said would sting him, because they knew that he was deathly afraid of stinging insects.

If you’ve read 1984, you know where this is going. The room where they make you experience the “worst thing in the world,” in order to break you. And I quote:

“‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’”

Yeah… It is just a silly book about stuff that would never happen.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html

Update: It looks like the the Salon website is mucked up right now. Sorry about that. But not really, since I don’t think it is my fault.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/04/how-america-became-the-soviet-union.html

If Obama doesn’t start looking into this stuff, and start opening up his administration like he promised, he’s lost me.

Thing #1. The Texas Board of Education just ruled that schools do not have to teach that the Universe is ~14 billion years old, as is stated by science. They now can teach that the Universe is around 6000 years old, as stated by some fringe religious elements.

Thing #2. South Carolina has a budget shortfall in education, such that they are possibly going to have to lay off hundreds of teachers. And in response to this, Mark Sanford, the governor who obviously is hoping to be President someday, is turning down 700 million in Federal stimulus money specifically earmarked for education.

I’m constantly amazed that education is something that is so easily cut from government budgets. It makes no sense to me. It has somehow been tagged as a liberal thing, and the Republicans don’t want government interfering with local stuff, but come on. Education is the most important thing, in my view, in a country. You’d be hard pressed to convince me that defense is more important. I would argue that education IS national defense. Who do you think has been designing all of the weapons and systems that we’ve been using to be the world’s strongest super power? Magicians?

It baffles me, because I think that some people think that the USA is the “greatest” either because of God, and that he wants us to be the “greatest”, or simply because we are. We are the USA, and so we are the best because we are the USA. That’s the kind of vibe I get off of mouthbreathers who claim that you can’t say anything bad about “Amurika” because it isn’t being patriotic. It goes hand in hand. The country can do no wrong because it is the best country in the world. It is the best country in the world because it can do no wrong. Because of God.

I’m becoming very disillusioned lately. I fear for the future, and I don’t know that there is anything that can be done to change it.

Well I’d just like to say that I called it. So in your faces!