I know I’m not being as consistent as I should be - work has been busy and I’ve had a chronic little cold that’s been making sleep far more interesting than it should be. Enough complaining, though.

Have you ever had one of those moments where something seems so immediately obvious, so immediately clear, that you can’t believe nobody else has come up with it before? I’m there right now. I’m sure somebody else has thought of this. I’m sure somebody else has written about it. However, to my knowledge, I’m the first person I’ve run across that’s realized precisely why China doesn’t just let North Korea implode or push for it to unify with South Korea.

It’s not because of any refugee problem. China has a refugee problem with North Korea now.

It’s because of us. More specifically, it’s because of the United States.

Pretend you’re in charge of the Chinese military. Who are your threats? Who are your neighbors? To the north, you have Mongolia and Russia. To the west, you have all the former -Stans of the Soviet Union. To the south, you have India, Burma, Thailand, and the various countries in Indochina. To the east, you have Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. You also have, across the Pacific, the most powerful country on Earth, economically and militarily, and they’re getting increasingly nervous about you.

The good news is that most of your neighbors are weak. Mongolia will never be a threat to you, nor will Nepal or Bhutan. Vietnam is an annoyance due to their involvement in the Spratleys, but, if things get really interesting, you have more than enough military heft to deal with them. Burma is in your pocket right now, which is helpful. Thailand is a mess at the moment. Laos and Cambodia are too small to be interesting. India and Pakistan are doing a wonderful job of distracting each other at the moment, and, even if that changed, you have Tibet between your most populous regions and theirs. The other -Stans are interesting as far as their support (tacit or otherwise) of the Muslim uprisings in Western China, but they’re never going to be more than an annoyance to you. Russia is too busy imploding, both demographically and politically, to be too serious of a threat - they just don’t have the resources to take you on in any sort of a prolonged campaign unless they use their nukes, and it’s not like you don’t have a few of those lying around yourself. Besides, Siberia isn’t exactly an ideal staging ground for an invasion of a country of 1 billion people.

This brings us to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. They’re not interesting by themselves - at least, not terribly so. Japan has already tried to invade you once, with catastrophic results. Its people aren’t going to put up with that again. Taiwan is technologically advanced but numerically few; they’re not going to hurt you, but it would hurt you to try to hurt them. South Korea is, as far as you’re concerned, in the same class as Taiwan - they’re not going to push you around, but they’re also not going to be easily pushed around, at least initially. What makes these three countries special, however, is not them unto themselves. It’s that big behemoth to the east that has been protecting them for over 60 years now.

The United States is a problem - a big one. They have the most technologically advanced military on the planet, and it’s backed by the most powerful economy on the planet. The closest they’ve come to military defeat in their entire national history has been the War of 1812, which nobody over there remembers, and the Vietnam War… and you know how well their military really did in Vietnam. The United States was spiritually tired - militarily and economically, they could’ve fought that war for as long as they wanted, and you know it. Worse yet, they learned their lessons well - you saw what they did to Iraq twice. You know that, in a head-to-head battle, your forces don’t have a prayer against the United States, at least in the short term - even if they left your communications infrastructure alone, which you know they won’t, they could run circles around you, striking targets with lethal speed and precision, permanently staying in your decision loop.

Unlike the rest of your neighbors, whom you could bully around a little with your military, the United States is not going to be intimidated by you, and, at least for the next 20 years or so, there isn’t a single thing you can do about it. So, what can you do? The answer is simple - keep that military as far away from you as humanly possible.

How can we do that?

First, some good news. There is no way in hell that Russia will let the United States use their soil for American military bases. That secures your north. The United States is also never going to set foot in Indochina again if they can even remotely help it - that takes care of the southeast. Putting troops in Pakistan or India is also out - not only is Tibet a bad location to invade through, even for the Americans, but the Americans are also not interested in destabilizing a nuclear standoff.

That leaves the -Stans, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan… and the United States has troops either in or around all of those places.

As far as locations go, the -Stans aren’t a huge problem for you - if the United States is going to invade you, you’d very much like it if they wandered through the desert for a while, giving you as much time as possible to defend your industrial base in the east. If you’re lucky, you can slow them down enough and make it painful enough where domestic pressure would send the Americans back home. Japan and Taiwan both have the Pacific Ocean between you and them - granted, the United States has the most powerful navy in the world, but launching an amphibious assault against you would be pretty difficult and expensive, logistically, even for them.

Korea, on the other hand…

Korea is a problem for you, strategically. Most of your industrial base is in North-East China. If the United States has a clear shot up the Korean peninsula to Manchuria, any hope you have of prolonged conventional military resistance is gone - most of your industrial base will be in American hands within a month. Thankfully, your predecessors realized this, as well, which is why they invaded Korea when the Americans started to get near the Yalu River and tilted the Korean War into a stalemate.

This is where North Korea comes into play, and why it is insanely vitally important for the strategic survival of the People’s Republic of China.

North Korea is a bulwark against complete American strategic domination over you. They have a leader that is more than happy to bankrupt that tiny country to stave off the Americans. Their entire government… heck, their entire reason for North Korea’s existence is predicated on the Americans being foreign devils that must be held back at all cost.

Now, let’s be realistic - militarily, they’re not stopping the Americans any further than you or any other foe of theirs would, at least in the long term (i.e. less than a year). However, North Korea can make a big mess of South Korea in a very short amount of time, which makes South Korea nervous enough to convince them that they should keep the Americans from building up too big of a force there. That’s enough.

Continuing this thought exercise, what do you want to see, or, more importantly, what do you not want to see?

You don’t want North Korea to open up - countries that open up tend to become pro-America awfully fast. You’ve already learned that at home and are having a hard enough time keeping a lid on that.

You don’t want Korea to reunite, a la Germany, unless North Korea finds a way to force the issue on its own terms, which isn’t happening. South Korea would overwhelm North Korea, politically and economically, in no time, which would give the United States complete and unfettered access to your most vulnerable border.

You don’t want the leadership in North Korea to become so suicidal that they genuinely scare their neighbors enough for South Korea to decide that a military solution, with all the pain and destruction that would entail, is preferable to the status quo. This means you would rather North Korea keep its nuclear status vague - at the very least, you’re going to make very certain that the leadership down there realizes that launching a nuclear missile against one of their neighbors would be an exercise in extremely poor judgment for all parties concerned.

You want North Korea to remain rabidly anti-American and remain perfectly willing to self-destruct in order to hold them off for you. If that means you deal with some refugees, fine - it beats dealing with an American force at your northeastern border. The good news is that the powers that be in North Korea are of the same mind as you. In order for them to stay in power, their only hope is to keep their populace in a state of perpetual fear and poverty. Isolation and rabid anti-Americanism plays quite nicely into that.

This is why North Korea is going to remain a thorn in the side of the United States for a long, long time. China can’t afford for North Korea to not be a thorn. It’s the one shield they have, strategically, against a much stronger, much more powerful foe, and they’re not going to let that go peacefully… even if it condemns 20 million people in the process.

For far too long, I’ve been using an RCA cable modem with wireless transmitter as my router/wireless access point. There were a couple of problems with the unit, however. Firstly, it was an 802.11b wireless router, which meant the range was terrible - I had serious difficulties getting a signal reliably in the living room (the unit was in the bedroom). Secondly, what security settings it had would get blanked out whenever I unplugged the unit, which was often because it would freeze up every week or two. After dealing with this for over a year, it finally got bad enough where I felt compelled to purchase a new wireless router. At first, I was going to find something with known DD-WRT compatibility. However, in a moment of excessive frugality (I have these moments often), I saw a Belkin F5D8233-4 802.11n wireless router on sale at Walmart for only $70. Since there were plenty of Belkins on DD-WRT’s compatibility list (albeit not this particular one), I figured I had a fighting chance of getting a cheap, long-range, possibly Linux-compatible router for my home.

Initial Setup

Getting it set up was mostly painless, at least at first. Hook it up to your network like you normally would, insert the setup CD, and follow the bouncing ball. The CD, however, is only Mac and Windows compatible - it wouldn’t run on my Ubuntu box under WINE. I settled for doing the initial setup on my old iMac. The documentation you get with the unit is extremely sparse; there’s no information in the box on the LAN IP address, passwords, or anything of that sort. The online documentation at Belkin is marginally better, in that the user guide actually includes that sort of information.

One hitch that burned me for a while was that the Belkin would not acquire a DHCP address from my cable modem. After a bit of research, I found out that the default firmware on it (3.01.10) had a glitch in its DHCP client that prevented it from successfully getting an address from DHCP on a consistent basis. Fortunately, the latest firmware on Belkin’s site (3.01.14 as of this writing) fixed that. Since you need an Internet connection before you can download the firmware, I strongly recommend either downloading the firmware before installation of the router or, in a pinch, plugging a workstation directly into a broadband modem long enough to download the firmware. That said, I don’t recommend the latter approach unless you’re really confident in your resident software firewall.

Wireless Setup

Getting the wireless setup was largely self-explanatory. It supports WEP, WPA-PSK and WPA2-PSK, just like any self-respecting wireless router of this day and age, which is nice. One thing that did burn me was the “Wi-Fi Protected Setup”, or WPS, which allows laptops to authenticate against the router with a certificate instead of a standard wireless key. Though my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn laptop was able to authenticate against the router easily enough, the same could not be said for my significant other’s Windows XP laptop. Disabling WPS caused the router to behave like a normal wireless router, authentication-wise, which was what I was looking for. With a little more time and effort, I might have been able to figure out how to use the router with WPS enabled, but I didn’t see the point.

The range was vastly improved over the RCA - where I used to get one bar, I now get three to four consistently. Better yet, the configuration doesn’t wipe itself every time the router restarts, which is also handy.

DD-WRT

Unfortunately, what I found online indicated that the F5D8233 was probably not compatible with DD-WRT or OpenWRT due to the possibility of it having a Realtek chipset. I haven’t had the guts to try it by myself, nor, at least at present, the inclination - it does work in its current configuration, after all. Belkin provides almost no information on the unit online, as far as what its chipset is or anything of that sort, which means I’d probably have to crack the thing open to find out what’s inside. For now, that’s not happening. I may change my mind sometime next week, though, depending on time and inclination.

Final analysis

For $70, it’s not bad. It has good range, it’s fairly easy to set up, and, with a little time and patience, it runs reasonably reliably and well. At least for now, I wouldn’t recommend it for the homebrew types, nor would I recommend it for those that aren’t already familiar with setting up wireless routers - it’s just not reliable enough out of the box for that. If you’re willing to spend a little extra, I do recommend going for either a more upscale Belkin or possibly even a Linksys. Think of it as something akin to a Chevy Aveo - you get what you get and that’s pretty much that.

I was browsing around aimlessly when I stumbled into this thread. It started off innocent enough - where can you get a motherboard that isn’t made in China? Then I read this comment:

quote:
Originally posted by DyDx:

quote:
Originally posted by waitex:
Um what are you trying to avoid?

I mean stuff made in other countries still source a ton of components from China. Everyone got burned with the capacitor fiasco. Its not like everything from china sucks. The rule of you get what you pay for still applies.

I’m not going to speak for the OP but it would be nice not to have to buy products made in a country run by an oppressive regime.

That comment (and my response) will lead to the soapbox very quickly.

How about one that doesn’t use torture? Ooops, can’t use made in USA products.

How about one that doesn’t support spying of their citizens without a warrant? Ooops, warrant-less wiretapping is done here in the USA.

Government buying news stories in the press? Yup, the feds paid Cuban-American journalists to write stories.

So, define “oppressive” regime

It’s not as easy to say that with a straight face any more as an American.

Anyways, that really should go in the SoapBox.

—
Back to the OP,

if you can endure what American Megatrends has to offer, that’s about it.

I did look, and the website was not very clear about where they manufacture their motherboards. It could very well be an outsourced production contract/factory in China.

ECS actually does a ton of production for other companies including some well beloved enthusiast brands/companies. The contracts spell out how much QC is done.

I can’t even begin to describe the level of frustration that I reach when I read stuff like this. When I see people regularly compare the United States to an authoritarian dictatorship and say, “See - we’re no better!”, it completely blows my mind, especially since the kind of people that make that comparison are rarely people that actually know what it’s really like to live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Heck, I have no idea what it’s like to live in one.

Let’s recap the differences between the United States and your average dictatorship:

Torture: In the United States, waterboarding is considered a controversial form of torture, subject to much political wrangling and hand-wringing. On the rare occasion that someone is actually seriously injured or dies from officially-sanctioned torture, careers are ruined and those responsible go to jail.

In an authoritarian dictatorship, waterboarding is considered the first date of officially allowed and encouraged torture methods. Death or severe permanent maiming is frequently a pleasant byproduct of the officially allowed torture methods.

Warrantless wiretapping: The United States has numerous policies and procedures that either strictly forbid most warrantless wiretapping or, at worst, allow it to occur, provided there is some judicial oversight. When laws are amended to allow more wiretaps, the laws are subject to public review and examination - this can lead to people either voting out the bums that chose to write such laws or encourage their representatives to not vote for such legislation. When unauthorized wiretapping occurs, it’s discovered and reported to the press.

Authoritarian dictatorships don’t have warrants, and certainly don’t bother to publish or announce their wiretapping procedures and policies.

Government buying news stories: In the United States, the government may buy some news stories, perhaps sponsoring a reporter to write a favorable piece in a newspaper or something.

In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t buy news stories - they simply send to jail anyone that writes something they don’t agree with.

Here’s the biggest difference, though, between the United States and a dictatorship:

In the United States, you get to choose what your government will do by electing people that agree with your views. If you don’t like them, you can vote for someone else every two to six years, depending on the office. In a dictatorship, the government does what it wants for as long as it wants whether you like it or not.

Any questions?

Strayed across this news story today… Saudi king asked to free condemned witch:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Feb. 14 (UPI) — Human Rights Watch called on the Saudi king Thursday to void the conviction of a woman facing execution for witchcraft.

[…]

Several witnesses claimed that Falih had bewitched them, including one man who said she had made him impotent. In court, Falih said that she was beaten repeatedly during 35 days of detention by the Saudi religious police.

If anybody ever needed proof that Saudi Arabia is stuck in the Middle Ages, well, there it is. The only reason we have to suffer the opinions of these backwards twits is because their nations happen to be resting on the fuel for our entire civilization. If we ever find a better source of that fuel, or, better yet, a different fuel, we can finally ignore these witch-burning idiots once and for all.

Courtesy of the BBC, I bring you Burkina’s white gold fails to deliver wealth:

In a landscape scattered with mud houses, donkeys and carts, under the clearest of clear blue skies, Mr Moussa explains how his seven-hectare cotton farm brings in 500,000 CFA a year, helping him care for his three wives and seven children.

At harvest time, cotton buyers negotiate their trucks on these mud tracks, eager to get the cotton, which the Burkinabe people call white gold, to market.

But earning the money he needs to keep his family fed, clothed and in school is getting harder as cotton prices fall.

Three years ago, he got 210 CFA per kilo of cotton.

In the year ahead, he expects to get 165 CFA per kilo.

Mr Moussa sees only one reason for lower cotton prices, namely America’s subsidies to its own cotton farmers.

These have led to oversupply on the world market, and this extra supply is depressing prices.

“In the US, the state helps them, here the state doesn’t help us,” he says.

It’s true that the United States subsidizes domestic agriculture to the gills. That’s a lovely byproduct of the desire of many of our forefathers (Jefferson, for example) to turn the United States into an agrarian utopia. Of course, our founding fathers didn’t create farm subsidies, but they did create a method of government that disproportionately gives more power to less populous states. This, in turn, leads to politicians buying votes by currying favor with the smaller, more agricultural states, which means farm subsidies.

That said…

I understand that, since there isn’t a whole lot of industry in Burkina Faso, you have to run farms the old-fashioned way - with lots and lots of labor. Consequently, having more children would be beneficial to you; more children means more free labor. That said, could the reason that cotton farmers in Burkina Faso are so poor be that they’re having to support families that are three times the size of ours with less land?

I do find it curious that there are still large swaths of the world that act and live like it’s the Middle Ages, only with a few industrial anachronisms sprinkled in here and there. What is it that keeps Europe so special and keeps Africa living like it’s 1699? Why are Asia’s economies booming and Africa’s stagnant? Very curious.

Whites to become minority in US by 2050, according to Yahoo:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the United States by 2050, with immigrants and their children driving 82 percent of U.S. population growth in coming years, a new study said on Monday.
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The U.S. population will grow to 438 million in 2050 from 296 million in 2005 if current population trends continue, the Pew Research Center study found.

Non-Hispanic whites would account for 47 percent of the total in 2050, it concluded.

By that time, one in every five Americans will be a foreign-born immigrant, compared to one in eight in 2005.

This might seem rather scary to a lot of people, and that’s understandable. If you think about it, 128 million is a lot of Latino people. However, I don’t think this is going to be a huge concern for pale-faced Americans - the people that are really going to experience some trouble with this trend will be the flat-lining 13% African American population, many of whom are already competing with the immigrant influx for jobs, housing, and political pull. If this study is even remotely accurate, we’re not going to care about Jesse Jackson or his progeny any more than we care about Native American activists in 50 years.

(Ponders a world without Jesse Jackson for a second…)

I am hereby expressing my complete and unadulterated support for the opening of our borders and the mass immigration of Latino people! Viva Mexico!

Is, well, they fail:

NEW YORK - A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday.

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many of the 12 million worldwide BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

This is why putting all of your eggs in the basket of one company can turn into a really, really bad idea. It’s true that large companies generally have more resources than small ones, and that gains in redundancy and reliability can sometimes be had as a result. However, if something goes wrong with that company, for whatever reason, you are the one that suffers. It’s bad enough when your data is locked into a company’s software. It’s worse when your data is locked into the same company’s hardware. It’s absolutely out of my mind, however, when people voluntarily lock themselves into the company’s network on top of all of that.

I’m all for convenience. Heck, I even like Macs - if they weren’t so expensive and I wasn’t so cheap, I’d probably have a MacBook right about now instead of the Compaq V6000 laptop that I’m typing this on. However, there are ways to pull data off of a MacBook and put it on to my Compaq, were the need to arise, without the use of any service from Apple. The same, however, can’t be said for Blackberry - if their service isn’t on, you’re done, and that scares the crap out of me.

To each their own…

(Yes, that headline is a horrible, horrible pun, which must be taken out back and shot.)

Via Instapundit, I ran across an article on Pajamas Media titled, “The “Golda” Standard of Female Leadership“. From the article, these two paragraphs immediately stood out:

As I watched the life of the former prime minister unfold onscreen, I chuckled at the thought of how our 2008 obsession with identity politics seems to forget the great leaders — who just happened to be women — who have long had the attention of the rest of the world. After all, Oprah is not the most powerful woman in the world; that woman is, as ranked by Forbes, German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But Merkel is a conservative. Meir fought for Israel’s survival in the Yom Kippur War. Even Condoleezza Rice’s term as secretary of state has not been hailed as a great advance for women and/or African-Americans. So is a leader who happens to be a women only hailed as advancement if she pursues a feminist agenda outlined by NOW or the Code Pink sisters?

The answer, of course, is yes, provided you’re either a member of NOW or Code Pink or at least a sympathetic follower. If you’re not, the bigger advancement is that we now have twice the number of people to find great leaders from. What is also interesting, however, is that most identity groups in this country lean to our left. This is not to say there aren’t right-leaning conservative groups - most white supremacist groups would sooner “mix blood with the darkies” than vote Democrat, I’m sure. However, groups like NOW, Code Pink, Muslim Brotherhood, and countless others are all left-leaning groups, and powerful ones at that. Code Pink is so powerful, in fact, that they have their own parking spot according to city edict. How many other interest groups can say that?

Here’s the catch, though - if you’re motivated enough to fight your city for a parking spot in front of a Marine recruiting center, don’t you think you’re showing up for the primaries? If you’re leaning left, whose primaries are you going to attend?

This, more than anything, explains why, even though Bush is almost historically unpopular, we may yet end up with yet another Republican President when all is said and done. Why? Because Hillary and Obama have to make all of these one-issue interest groups happy so they’ll get past the primaries, which means not only being a woman or being black but pushing “women” issues and “black” issues. The end result is that, though people aren’t happy with Bush in particular and the Republican Party in general, they’re going to be much more inclined to vote for “Maverick” McCain than they would be if the Democrats didn’t insist on overplaying their hand.

I will say this - if the Democrats can’t get a President elected this year, they’re going to be in deep, deep trouble…

This just in from the Telegraph - Street lights to be switched off at midnight:

Street lights in suburban areas are to be switched off after midnight as part of council plans to save energy.

A series of trial blackouts will be carried out over the next few weeks by local authorities in the Home Counties, Hampshire and Essex among others.

Buckinghamshire council is reported to be switching off more than 1,700 lights along 25 miles of road in an attempt to meet energy targets.

It says the scheme will save £100,000 and reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 600 tons a year.

[…]

Residents’ groups, police organisations and motoring groups have expressed fear that the darkness could cause increases in crime and road traffic accidents.

Here’s a thought - instead of turning the lights off, why not use motion sensors to leave lights on wherever there are people, and turn them off whenever nobody’s around? I’m telling you, America, this is the kind of groundbreaking thinking that you get from me, which our former Colonial Overlords will never receive!

(I had to write something here. It’s nearly been a week. I’m just tired of trolling Rachel Lucas’ forums. I’m “Oatworm”, by the way. Long story behind that, but it’s really not that interesting.)

So sayeth Variety. This really isn’t that surprising. What cracks me up, though, is one of the comments:

So typical. Americans were watching the mental diarhea that is American Idol rather than following the election. Talk to the people around you and you’ll discover that most who have or plan to vote are voting on an extremely limited understanding of the candidates, their platforms, and their histories. Our democracy only works when the people are invested in its future. This article is proof that too many in this country could care less so long as the brave new world is around to keep them blissfully ignorant.

Contrary to what so many people think, it is completely possible to follow the primaries and have American Idol on the TV. There’s a simple explanation - people aren’t getting their information on the primaries from TV. Considering how well the TV pundits have handled the primaries so far (way to go on New Hampshire, everyone!), this really isn’t that surprising. Besides, a person can handle the talking heads repeating the same misguided points over and over and over again for only so long before they’re going to change the channel.

So, where are they getting their information from? Well, word on the street is there’s this thing called the “Interwebs” or something like that, and it’s full of useful information on things like potted meat food product.

So, immediately following the Super Tuesday primaries, what happens? A bunch of tornadoes rip through the South:

Feb. 6 (Bloomberg) — Tornadoes swept through Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois late yesterday, killing at least 47 people and causing a deadly explosion at a natural-gas pipeline near Nashville before heading east.

The “extremely dangerous” twisters, spawned by unseasonably warm temperatures, prompted the first high-risk weather alert issued in February in 10 years, AccuWeather.com said. Heavy rain, damaging winds and hail are possible from the Carolinas to southern New Jersey today, AccuWeather said.

There’s a pattern here. According to MSNBC, here’s the breakdown of how each state has voted thus far:

Arkansas
Huckabee 123,402 60%
McCain 41,482 20%
Romney 27,317 13%
Paul 9,860 5%
Uncommitted 881 0%
Giuliani 591 0%

Tennessee
Huckabee 189,949 34%
McCain 175,221 32%
Romney 134,791 24%
Paul 30,854 6%
Thompson 16,046 3%
Giuliani 5,092 1%
Uncommitted 1,813 0%

Illinois
McCain 418,118 47%
Romney 253,502 29%
Huckabee 146,372 17%
Paul 44,531 5%
Giuliani 11,049 1%

Notice - there’s a pattern here! These are all states that Romney lost. In fact, in two out of the three that have had their primaries, Huckabee was the winner. This clearly proves that God is punishing those that dare to ignore His will and don’t vote for His candidate. All hail Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints or be doomed! Doomed!

From the AP: Beer gets seatbelt. Child doesn’t.

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (AP) — A woman pulled over for allegedly running a red light had a 24-pack of beer strapped in with a seat belt but had a 16-month-old girl unrestrained in the back seat of her car with the toddler’s mother, authorities said.

[…]

A 24-pack of Busch beer was strapped in the passenger-side seat belt, according to an arrest report.

The girl was in the back seat with 20-year-old Amber Tedrick, who is the toddler’s mother. It was not clear if she would face any charges, but the child was released to her care, according to The Florida Times-Union.

Before we cast judgment on her, I have one question: What kind of beer was it? If it was Keystone, she clearly needs to go to jail for a long, long time. However, if it was something more exotic, like, say, Hefenbrau or something, well, we may need to take that into account when sentencing her.

In other news, the South really, really, really, really, REALLY hates Mormons. This should come as no surprise to anyone who’s seen a Baptist and a Mormon in the same room. Of course, this also means that we’re probably looking at McCain on the Republican ticket. The one bright spot is that the Democrats are throwing Obama or Hillary out there to go against him, which is hilarious. I’m not sure the Democrats realize that, though people don’t like Bush, it’s not because he hasn’t increased federal spending.

A couple days ago, a friend of mine and I were talking about the Republican primaries. Though I’m not a big fan of primaries, at least as they’re currently run, I’m still keeping some track of them, especially the Republican ones in particular. Like a lot of people, I’m not conservative - politically, I lean closer to Libertarian on domestic issues. However, both Obama and Hillary disappoint me both domestically and internationally, whereas the Republican candidates at least are talking a decent game, foreign policy-wise, and are making noises about slowing the growth of the government down a little. I’d be lying if I said that was ideal, but, seeing as I live in a swing state (Nevada), voting my conscience would do more harm than good, which is why I’m paying attention now…

Anyway, the conversation focused on which of the remaining two candidates was preferable - Romney or McCain? Romney has some issues - he definitely has a relatively liberal track record in Massachusetts, but is now making some noises about being a conservative. The one advantage that we could see was that, since he was the governor of Massachusetts, i.e. the home state of the Kennedy clan, we could safely assume that many of his policies and positions of his governorship were a direct result of having to work with a heavily liberal electorate and legislature. McCain, on the other hand, has no such excuse. However, after some careful thinking, we realized something - McCain, in many ways, is quite similar to Nixon. Both had/have relatively strong positions on foreign policy compared to much of the contemporary political spectra. Both possess(ed) relatively strong liberal positions domestically. For example:

Nixon on the media:

In the media now life is totally dominated by the Jews. “Newsweek” is all owned by Jews and dominated by them (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

“The New York Times,” “The Washington Post” — totally Jewish ownership.

The other thing, don’t forget all three networks except for (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Brinkley or Cronkite may not be of that persuasion but the writers (UNINTELLIGIBLE) 95 percent are Jewish.

Now what does this mean? Does this mean that all Jews are bad? No, but it does mean that most Jews…

This, of course, is a microcosm - let’s not forget Watergate, among other things.

McCain on the media:

The McCain-Feingold Act, which is definitely not one of the more “pro-First Amendment” pieces of legislation in American history.

Nixon and the Economy:

Instituted wage and price controls and eliminated the gold standard.

McCain and the Economy:

Much more conservative, apparently. The last debate indicates that he’s somewhat lukewarm when it comes to big anything - previous statements indicate he’s not a fan of government interference (i.e. voted for the Balanced Budget Amendment, routinely votes for tax decreases) and also not a big fan of large corporations. Highly unlikely that he’s going to institute price controls or anything that heavy-handed during his term. He also consistently votes for free trade agreements.

Nixon on the environment:

Created the EPA and the Clean Air Act. Need I say more? Nixon also created the Legacy of Parks program, among other things.

McCain on the environment:

Not too far off from Nixon - he’s a big fan of national parks and the EPA. He’s also made noises about global warming as of late, too.

Nixon on welfare:

Hello, Family and Assistance Plan. What would happen if people started advocating flat payments to everyone that qualified, regardless of where the money went?

McCain on welfare

A key proponent of modern welfare reform.

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Look, the list goes on like this. Compared to Nixon, McCain isn’t too far off, for better or worse. In some areas, he’s better (free trade, welfare). In other areas, he’s certainly no worse than Nixon’s equal (the environment and the media). So, the good news here is that, of McCain and Romney, the worst we’re going to get is a modern day Richard Nixon. Then again, it took about eight years and Jimmy Carter for the Republican Party to fully recover, so maybe it is that bad…