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This was a letter I wrote to a columnist at the Washington Post. Take a look at the article first (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sarah-palin-and-other-ignorant-candidates/2012/03/12/gIQAoOPG8R_story.html), then read my reply. Hope you enjoy!

This letter is in response to your March 12th column titled “Sarah Palin’s foolishness ruined U.S. Politics” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sarah-palin-and-other-ignorant-candidates/2012/03/12/gIQAoOPG8R_story.html).

Your article surrounds a movie on HBO called Game Change which is a step away from the book which is a step away from reality. When you say Sarah Palin ruined America, I think you’re wrong. I think it’s America which is already ruined. The will of the people in Alaska put her into her position. When she ran for President, the will of the party put her into the role of McCain’s running mate. What does that say about the people who vote and the people who make up the Republican Party?

When I read articles like yours that marginalize Ron Paul and say that “he appears to be running for President of some theme park” I become disheartened with the reporting on Dr. Paul. From my point of view, he is clearly the best candidate in the current Presidential race. It is not hard to see that most candidates flip-flop and pander just to get elected. Once in office, they do whatever they think without considering the will of the people. With Dr. Paul, you know what you’re getting. He is the most consistent one in the race and he never panders to get supporters. His speeches and explanations are identical to his past speeches and explanations and yet he still gains supporters.

Furthermore, Dr. Paul is one of the most intellectual candidates out there. He actually knows what he’s talking about. If you think Palin is an ignoramus, it would be obvious to you just how intelligent Dr. Paul is. He accurately references history and knows what being the President means. He would turn the power of government back to the people rather than governing the people while climbing on their backs. It is a wonder why he’s not a shoo-in for the Republican Nominee. This should be the point of view of any critically thinking American.

Dr. Paul the only one that is awakening the minds of Americans including non-voters, Independents, and Democrats. Frankly, the Republicans should welcome him for circling these new Republicans into the dying party. If they push him out, his followers will most certainly go with him. Dr. Paul is the only candidate that is starting an intellectual and idealogical movement within politics that you’re surely not going to be around to see come to fruition. I can only hope I am around to witness it or even participate in it.

By the way, the theme park you refer to in your article is actually the current state of America so at least you nailed that.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors. – Plato

Sincerely,

Andrew Gibson

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I think it’s hilarious how everyone was peddling fear in regards to the then upcoming deregulation of the electricity industry in PA. I’ve noticed my bill dropping sharply since the deregulation started. Then today I saw this article in the paper.
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=366563

I think I’m going to switch from Met-Ed for my generation to PPL… it looks like a savings for about $18 per month according to this site.
http://www.papowerswitch.com/shop-for-electricity/shop-for-your-home/by-distributor/met-ed/rs/sort/price-low

This is a good example of when the government puts it’s hands on something, prices skyrocket. When they withdraw, prices plummet.

I think in this case, electric companies charged up to the max that they could… sounds like legalized price fixing. When the cap was removed, they had no choice but to compete against each other on price.

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I was raised and was surrounded by Democrats most of my life. Very few of my family and friends were anything but Democrats, at least those of them that spoke of politics. What I found curious was that many people didn’t know why they were members of a specific political party. They demonstrated their support for candidates based on very, very specific issues and sometimes even on superficial qualities such as sex, race, looks, mannerisms, etc. I just felt that the whole process was thoughtless and everyone was just going through the motions. In 2004, I voted for John Kerry by pressing the Democrat button at the top of the ballot. This was my first time voting. I remember being taken to vote with my Dad many, many times when I was a child. I don’t remember exactly how he voted, but I believe he did the same as I had in 2004. At this point in my life, I was 19 years old and perhaps needlessness to say, my thoughts weren’t very worldly. They were typical of a 19 year old. I was a junior in college and was struggling to adjust to the workload of college. I had a steady girlfriend, a nice sports car, some money in the bank, and a nice part-time job. I wasn’t exactly worried for our future as a country.

Fast-forward to the next election cycle. By this point, I had graduated college and had started a job related to my college degree. I started thinking about my political party affiliation very well ahead of the 2008 election environment. Even after the election, I was unsure of where I stood. In about late 2006 and early 2007, I graduated college. I sold my sports car. I sold a lot of my material items. I was preparing my finances in order to buy a house. I also started seeking a job in early 2007 and became employed starting April 2007. During the four or so months between my graduation and my start date at my new job, I started researching a lot of things. I starting to think about where I stood on a lot of issues. One of these things was my political party affiliation. I had no idea where I fell in the political field. I didn’t know what much of the terminology beyond Democrat and Republican meant. I basically knew where I stood on issues, but I didn’t know which corner that painted me into. I searched the Internet for a bunch of stuff and started to stumble upon Ron Paul. When I started watching his videos, I was intrigued. I found this Libertarian Republican who had yet to announce his candidacy for President. I started seeing how my views aligned with his. I took a few of those quirky online quizzes about where you fall on the political spectrum. All of them said that as a result of my answers I was a libertarian on the social scale and a very slight left position on the economic scale. This a good visual representation of the scale that I’m talking about: http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2.

I am typically a very introverted person and don’t really like to discuss my ideas unless I’m a little more than sure of them. So here I am, a newly enlightened, political thinking person at the age of 22. I began to talk openly about my ideas in order to arouse curiosity in others. I spoke to my many Democratic friends and family members. Most of them didn’t pay me any mind. Over the next year or so, I kept investigating Ron Paul and solidified my belief in him. I donated to his campaign for presidency a couple times. In late 2007, I changed my political registration from Democratic to Republican in order to vote for Ron Paul in the Republican primary in early 2008. As we all knew, Ron Paul did not win the Republican nomination in 2008. I introduced one of my friends to Ron Paul. He ended up making his mind up on his own and voted for Ron Paul in the primary as well. He also wrote-in Ron Paul during the general election in November. Keep in mind, I wasn’t trying to convert people into Ron Paul supporters, but rather talking about him in a way that would inspire and cause curiosity.

As November 2008 neared, I realized that Ron Paul had been squashed too much by the media (just take a look at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzImw1ofVbw). That, coupled with the fact that he wasn’t the Republican nominee led me to believe he didn’t have a chance to win the election as a write-in candidate. In the order of full disclosure, I did not write Ron Paul in during the 2008 general election. I voted for Barack Obama on “Change we can believe in” and the appearance that we were going to end the wars we were unnecessarily involved in, among some other good ideas put forth in his campaign. Compared to John McCain, Obama was a no-brainer.

Fast-forward to 2011. We all know how President Barack Obama is doing as president. His policies to expand our war state, expand our welfare state, bailout big business, and ineffectually stimulate the economy are clearly far from his campaign promises. In hindsight, I view voting for Barack Obama as a major mistake, especially when I was fully backing Ron Paul prior to the general election. “Hindsight is 20/20” as the saying goes. I thought I did the best thing knowing what I knew at the time.

From now on, I will endorse Ron Paul as openly as I possibly can. I wear shirts and buttons in public. My house is adorned with Ron Paul signs. I follow his progress online and share his videos, quotes, and news with my friends and family as well as with my limited followings on Facebook and Twitter. This time around, I openly and proudly support Ron Paul for the Presidential Election in 2012!

In conclusion, I feel like we as a nation are on the edge of a precipice and it has nothing to do with what political party is in power. If we don’t or refuse to realize this, we deserve to fall off the edge. However, I truly believe that Ron Paul and his policies and beliefs are our best chance of stepping back from that precipice and putting that close encounter with demise in the history books. We are at a very touchy time in terms of American History. Our nation has been beyond reckless with its laws encroaching on personal liberties. We have been far too quick to desire a welfare and warfare state. We haven’t been thoughtful in our treatment of our enemies and our own citizens. We’re on the wrong path and we need to recover. And quickly. With the leadership of Ron Paul, we just might have a chance to save our nation.

Ron Paul 2012.

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I have had Voice over IP (VOIP) phone service since I moved into my own home, or for about two years now.  My parents suggested that I didn’t get a Verizon land line phone because service is so bad in my neighborhood.  It was either order VOIP from Comcast for $20 per month or find another provider.  My mother had recommended VOIP.com to me as she had used it for a few years prior.  The service was okay and it was something like $15 per month if you prepaid the entire year.  It worked well for the most part but the service was sometimes shoddy.  Furthermore, the ATA device had to be rebooted frequently because sometimes there was no dial tone.  Midway through 2010, I was having tons of issues with poor call quality and dropped calls.  At the suggestion of VOIP.com, I upgraded the entirety of my home networking equipment.  Turns out, it was something on their end.

Around January 2011, I was having more and more problems similar to the months prior.  This time, it was caused by a transition of ownership of VOIP.com to phonepower.com.  I got all setup with some new port forwarding settings on my router, a few ATA reboots, and I was back on track.  However, I had been fed up with the near constant echo on the line.    I contacted support about this and wanted to upgrade my device that was leased to me for free.  They wanted to charge me fees to do this.  I was kind of upset about this and started to research free VOIP calling.  I’ve stumbled across this topic before but never had the desire to learn more about it as I was somewhat happy with my VOIP.com service and I have been generally busy recently.  Since I use the phone for business calls, I can’t have any dropped calls or constant echo.  I guess I just became accustomed with the shoddy service that I didn’t remember what a good home phone service was like.  I had to draw the line.  I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the service levels from VOIP.com and later phonepower.com, so off to the post office to return the VOIP.com provided ATA and to the internet to seek out free VOIP calling.

I have been using my Google Voice account to receive and transcribe my voicemails for my home and cell phones.  However, I’ve never used it to make calls even though calling is free to and from anywhere in the US and Canada!

I bought a Linksys SPA3000 ATA from ebay.  I setup a SipGate phone number (somewhere in CA) so that my ATA could connect to it via SIP.  Once this was setup, I setup my Google Voice to forward calls to my SipGate number.  That way, when my Google Voice number rang, so did my SipGate and thus my home phone.  However, you have to purchase calling credits with SipGate in order to make outgoing calls.  The problem here is that when you pickup the receiver on the phone and try to dial, you’d get a message about not having sufficient calling credits.  I could initiate outgoing calls via the Google Voice website, but this was far from efficient as I don’t always have a computer on me when I want/need to make a call.  Furthermore, everyone in my house would require access to my Google Voice login to make a call, which I didn’t necessarily want.  I put up with this for two days while I did some more research.

I finally landed at a site called NerdVittles where I found the best information yet.  Here’s the exact blog post that I used to set my system up. Most importantly, you should setup a new, dedicated Google Voice account because you can’t use Google Chat while using Google Voice on the same account. Basically, I needed to setup a special PBX system in order to make/receive calls with my Google Voice account.  This is certainly overkill, but there are alot of great features such as voicemail, etc.  You can read about the features at the NerdVittles site.

The specific PBX software I chose to use is called The Incredible PBX.  It includes a software called Asterisk.  The good thing about Asterisk 1.8.1 is that is natively supports Google Voice.  I slapped together a computer to function as my PBX, installed the PBX in a Flash software, then downloaded and installed the Incredible PBX installation script, configured it with my Google Voice account, setup my voicemail and extensions, connected my ATA and I was home free!  Now I can make and receive calls on any of the phones in my house with my Google Voice phone number!  So now I went from spending about $250 per your with VOIP service that was shoddy at best, to the cost of electricity to run my own PBX system connected to a FREE Google Voice account.  I calculated that the added electricity usage will be about $35/year!  Not bad!!

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What is love? Love to me is a form of friendship. It’s knowing someone inside and out that you can see things about them that they are unable to see. Love gives you the strength to tell them about such things. It applies to a significant other, family or friends. It takes you on a never ending journey and when you take time to notice, it becomes difficult to determine where you are. It is a roller coater of ups and downs. One minute you love the person, the next you hate them. Some times are good, some times are bad. There’s even a bit of misery tucked in there somewhere. I’d like to think that overall the average is better than worse, but I can’t be sure. This roller coaster ride is turbulent and uncertain. When you think you’re about to get off, you vomit, get disgusted, and everything somehow centers itself allowing the ride to continue. It might sound as if I’m with the wrong person, but I am uncertain and I can certainly say that about everyone else too. If it was all peaches and cream, I’d be suspicious. Nothing in life is all good or all bad. Along with anything good comes bad. I’m a believer that if something is very, very good, it can’t last and will soon become very, very bad. Everything has a naturally centering force to it, almost as if something else is controlling the cycles of life. In fact, it’s this principle which I use to get through tough times… it can’t last forever.

Here are some quotes that make me feel like others should understand my feelings on love:

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.” -St. Augustine

“Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship – never.” -Charles Caleb Colton

“I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.” – J. D. Salinger

“In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.” – Erich Fromm

“Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes… just be an illusion.” – Javan

“Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.” -W. Somerset Maugham

“Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.” -John Lennon

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Everyone who knows me, should know by now that I’m cheap. I’m openly cheap and I don’t have any issues at all with being that way. In fact, I’ve been cheap way longer than this recent recession/depression.  Everyone who has increasingly been feeling the effects of the poor economy and has recently turned cheap, has got absolutely nothing on me!

In addition to being cheap, I am all about being natural and green.  I drive a car that gets 37mpg regularly, take my own bags to the grocery store, and now, make my own laundry detergent.  It’s really simple.  You get a bar of soap that you like, shread it up using a cheese grater or a food processor and mix it with Borax and washing soda using a wooden spoon.  I’m on my second batch and really recommend using the food processor, because it takes like 20-30 mins to manually shred up a bar of soap!

In addition, it works great in a front load, so called high efficiency washer.  I use 1 tbsp for normal loads and 2 tbsp for extra dirty loads.  The reason it works well in the front load washer is because they require a low sudsing soap, which is exactly what this recipe yields.

Ingredients:

1 bar of soap, shreaded

1/2 cup Borax

1/2 cup washing soda

Here are some links that I’ve found useful in my quest for cheap, all natural, functional laundry detergent.

http://diynatural.com/simple-easy-fast-effective-jabs-homemade-laundry-detergent/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Laundry-Detergent

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I was watching 2012 with a friend. We were discussing a point in the movie in which many people were loaded onto several large boats (very similar to Noah’s Ark) in effort to withstand a coming global flood. One of the characters was trying to rally other boats to open up their gates and allow the many desperate people outside to board. One of the American characters refused. He was worried about not having enough resources and being over capacity.

My friend said “Russia would never agree to open up the gates.” For some reason, my reply was out of haste, but got me thinking even more. “Would China?”, I prodded. He said in a matter of fact manner, “No”. At this point, I felt as though I was wildly misunderstanding socialism and communism. My understanding is that those views are less individual oriented and more group oriented. For instance, they would dislike how 1% of Americans control the majority of wealth in our country. They would rather that the wealth was distributed equally among the population at large.

With this in mind, I feel like both Russia and China would be more likely to open the gates than the Americans. This only considers the basics of socialism, communism and capitalism, without taking into consideration how those nations employ the principles of each, respectively. For instance, America is supposedly “by the people, for the people” but there is some debate as to how accurate that statement is when applied to the historical actions of the American government.

Perhaps I’m simplifying this far too much because there are many degrees of socialism/communism/capitalism/etc. However, with less people on the ship, the Americans would feel as though they’d be more likely to survive individually. I think the Russian/Chinese view would be with more people on board, there may be more casualties, but the group as a whole would have a better chance of surviving. Another difference that I see is that the Russians may want to select certain people from the outsiders to board the ship based on their ability to contribute to society as a whole; whereas the Chinese would be less selective.

Thoughts?

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In the past approximately nine months, I’ve gone through a great deal of changes, most good. This past Saturday I was at a Labor Day picnic and was asked by someone who hadn’t seen me in over a year, “Hey Andy, what’s new?” The only reply I could think of was, “Well, a lot!”

In the past year, I’ve gotten a raise (pretty substantial), moved out of my Dad’s house, bought a house with my longtime girlfriend, Sarah, spend 6 months unpacking my junk (and some junk that a few people dumped on me during my move, the most of which ended up in Goodwill), developed a petting zoo in my new (4 fish tanks, 2 cats, a dog, 2 guinea pigs, and a Chinese Hamster), cut down 7 trees on my property (most of them were dying or too close to the house), bought a brand new mower, replaced a non-working washer and dryer set, worked on and repaired in excess of 14 computers since having moved… the list goes on. But in the spirit of being “connected”, I’ve decided to update my blog, which will also be posted to Facebook for all my “friends” to enjoy…

I’ve also learned to appreciate the things (not material) that I have… a great girlfriend (whom I’ve should have married sometime in the past 8 or so years and my entire family agrees with that idea), a great first dog, Petey!!!! and a great family.

When moving, I’ve been pleasantly reminded of who my true friends are. Certain people, some unexpected, came out of the woodwork to help me into my newly discovered, total freedom from authority (read: parental) figures. Though, not everyone can be totally pleased.

Some people have seemingly alienated themselves from me which I am apparently the only one who can be blamed for such divisiveness. I guess those are the same people who accuse me of being antisocial. Let me just say, they can’t be more wrong. Everyone close to me knows, they have an open invitation to visit with me, some of those know they have a place to sleep/live if they should so need. I don’t know what it is about people, but I think everyone’s always looking for traits in others which reflect their own inadequacies and like to knife you and twist it… letting you know your issues and scream them from the rooftops… let me just say this to you, keep your mostly wrong opinions to yourself. If you think someone else is the issue, I first ask you to internalize that judgment and think, “is it me?” In my experience, it’s almost always been me when I’m faced with the aforementioned internalized interrogations.

On a lighter note, I really, really appreciate life. More so than ever. Even though daily, we face obstacles that try us and prevent steady progress, in the end we become stronger from walking tall against any issues in our way. I’m speaking very generally here, but always realize that you can do whatever you want, it’s a matter of will. Do you want to? Make sure you do, and understand that you can!

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I just received an email from T. Boone Pickens’ email subscriptions… The subject line read: “URGENT: OPEC is tightening the noose around our neck”

From the desk of T. Boone Pickens

Hey Army,

I’ve told you this all along — our addiction to foreign oil could bring us to our knees, and there wouldn’t be a damn thing we could do about it. Now take a look at today’s headlines. OPEC just announced it’s cutting production by 2.2 million barrels. Remember – this is on top of the 2 million barrels in cuts they’ve already made since this summer! These guys are serious about getting the price of oil back up right where they like it: $75 a barrel, $100 a barrel, $150 a barrel.

This is exactly why now is the time to pull together and Push the Pickens Plan. Every time the price of oil drops, America falls asleep. The Saudis don’t. The Iranians don’t. The Venezuelans don’t. But we do.

President-elect Obama said it best a few weeks ago on 60 Minutes. “Oil prices go up, gas prices at the pump go up, everybody goes into a flurry of activity. And then the prices go back down and suddenly we act like it’s not important, and we start, you know, filling up our SUVs again. And, as a consequence, we never make any progress. It’s part of the addiction, all right. That has to be broken. Now is the time to break it.”

I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got to break that addiction now. Before it breaks us.

Click here to join your Pickens Plan District Group. Better yet, sign up to be the leader if there isn’t one already so you can help bring in 500 more members to the New Energy Army in your Congressional District before Inauguration Day. Those first 100 days are right around the corner, and the way OPEC is playing we’re going to have to move fast.

-Boone

The sad thing is, everything in this email happens in real life.  Now that gas prices are down again… people are happy.  They’ve already forgotten  how bad it felt to pay $4.00 per gallon. As a matter of fact, gas prices are so low, they’re as low as they were in the early 2000′s.  However, people should really be upset because we’ve had to go into a recession to witness gas prices this low. Did we forget that part of the equation?  Shouldn’t we be more upset over recession/depression than we were over $4.00 gas prices?  Why do we experience a level of satisfication with ourselves as a nation when gas prices go down?  The situation at hand today is even worse because we’re actually stepping back in time to 2002 or so where gas was as cheap as it is in the 4th quarter of 2008.  We’ve seen a decline never seen before.  We should ask “why did this happen?”  Instead, we say “well, its really cheap, let’s go on another vacation” which yields more and more consumption.  Over time, when we start demanding more gas, the prices will skyrocket since the supplies are at reduced levels.

In summary:

We’ve cut our consumption as a result of $4.00 gasoline.  We’ve seen the prices fall through teh floor.  We’ve realized how bad it is because we’re now acknowledging that we’re in a recession, but we’re not maintaining our consumption, in terms of gasoline.  OPEC is cutting production at record rates. We’re likely going to increase consumption of gasoline because of the return of the lowest levels of gas prices in the last decade.  Thusly, gas prices will skyrocket once again.  And this time, we’re in a recession.  Keep that in mind people.

Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!