About This Blog
A blog about my life, universe, etc. At any given time you might find something endlessly interesting or just me ruminating on something else, which no one (not even myself) finds interesting. That's the way blogs go, I suppose. Anyway, I was eleventh in line, and you weren't. Hah!

About Me
Name:
Sarah
Age:
26
Residence:
Columbus, OH
Religion:
LDS
Political Score:
5.00/-2.15
Job:
Temp @ JPMorgan Chase
College:
Ohio State University
Majors:
Political Science, International Studies
High School: Home Educated
Hobbies:
Reading, standing in line for things, writing, research
Resume:
HotJobs
Email:
lloannna@gmail.com

About My Family
My mom is a lawyer in Pickerington; my stepdad and dad are computer guys, and my stepmom (who works with my dad) is an engineer. My sisters are, in order of age, a photographer, an artist, and a person too young to have her own website. My brothers are, in order of age, living up north, and again, a person too young to have a website. At some point soon I'll be collecting links for my aunts, uncle, and cousins. ^_^

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Message Services
(Please see the notes below the Comment Policy before sending me a message)
AIM:
lloannna
ICQ:
29395930
Yahoo:
lloannna

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My CafePress Designs

Even More CafePress Designs

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Star Wars: Episode 3 Line (Hollywood)
My Star Wars Line page

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NaNoWriMo 2007:
My Novel: Cipere Lumen




NaNoWriMo 2006:
My Novel: The Manatee Conspiracy




NaNoWriMo 2005:
My Novel: Beyond the Cliffs of Kefira





NaNoWriMo 2004:
My Novel: sul Okyar tir taTz'ileea

 
Faith in America - the speech   Liveblogging the Romney speech, yay.

-- President Bush (the first one) looks good for a ninety year old.

-- I did not realize that the first Governor Romney was a friend of the Bush family. Apparently he worked on the Points of Light thing.

-- Dude, Mitt is going grey. We're turning all our best politicians into old men years before their time, anymore (the crummy ones, who stay corrupt city councilmen, obviously not so much.)

-- Everyone likes everyone at this level of politics. I swear it's like watching a fraternity reunion sometimes.

-- World War II versus the Baby Boomers. Heh.

-- Islam, China, Government Spending, Foreign Oil, and Family Breakdown. I think they must have done polls to determine which five issues to talk about all the time: the message control is tighter than ever this year.

-- Woot! Quoting John Adams, yay!

-- Dude. Has it really been almost 50 years since Kennedy's speech?

-- I just realized that journalists must have had this speech at least an hour ahead of time. The captions are perfect.

-- I love this: "A President must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States." Apparently the audience does, too.

-- "Some people believe that such a confession will sink my candidacy."

-- "These are not bases for criticism, but a test of our tolerance."

-- "No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith" is now the MSNBC headline (a second ago it was "I believe in my Mormon faith and endeavor to live by it.")

-- A President Romney would be much more pleasant to listen to than President Bush has been. We should have more public speaking classes in this country.

-- Apparently Romney feels okay with losing the atheist vote.

-- Not to mention the ACLU endorsement.

-- "But I will not separate us from the God who gave us Liberty." Dude, it's like they're channeling the Enlightenment. Someone must have been reading a lot of old pamphlets. Especially the Adams party (Madison, Sam Adams, etc.)

-- "We believe every single human being is a child of God."

-- Again with the quoting of John Adams.

-- He's reused Thompson's claim about no other people having sacrificed more lives "for liberty." (it's arguable, though I wish they'd stop saying it.)

-- "America must never falter in holding high the banner of freedom." Doesn't want the non-interventionist vote, either.

-- MSNBC is using the Adams quote "Freedom and religion endure together or perish alone" as their headline, and attributing it to Romney. Heh.

-- He just referenced Anne Hutchinson! And Roger Williams! And Brigham Young! In one paragraph! It's actually... totally appropriate, given the banishment/journey for religious freedom thing.

-- "Not as a matter of policy, but as a matter of right." Thank you.

-- Ooh, a hit on European secularism. And established religion.

-- And hating on jihad-as-violent-conversion. Good. Makes me think he might actually know the difference (it's not always clear with some of the candidates) between that and the word jihad, which means lots of things.

-- "We do not insist on a single strain of religion."

-- I am SO sure they pulled out the 1765-1800 Adams archives for this. I suppose it's to be expected, the man was governor of Massachusetts, after all.

-- "Any believer in religious freedom has a friend and ally in me."

-- There should be a moratorium on standing ovations. They make crummy television and are an invitation for candidates to make themselves look stupid.

-- Related: I am SO glad Romney doesn't grin like an idiot when he's pleased with something (cf. Les Miles.)


MSNBC mostly likes it.

Labels: mormon, politics, Presidential race, religion, romney

posted by Sarah at 10:56 AM. | 0 comments |

 
CafePress Madness, Part Three (The Danger Zone)   So we started out with my lovely non-political, geeky, happy, writerly, snuggly goodness type designs. Yay. Unless you get offended by made-up swearing or are a Wolverines fan, you're probably not miffed.

Then we took a look at my LDS designs. If you are an "OMG Cultist! UR so going to Hell!" type, go away. If you're LDS, you might find them cute (or hideous, whatever,) and the rest of you probably don't care much. Phew.

But now we have my authentically make-people-mad-for-the-next-year stuff. Half of which I came up with either because I was annoyed or amused by something I saw somewhere. Word to you folks who are going to send me nasty letters: I don't think any of the Democrats are Satan. I don't think that Hillary is in league with the devil. I do think it's a sad commentary on our political culture that the "Hillary/Satan 08" design, which I came up with on a lark, is my highest-selling logo to date, and it's only been there for 9 days. The Spoiler Free one, which had been king, has been up for over three years now. Sigh. On the other hand, this makes me think there's probably a market for crazy candidate hate out there. Depending on how much more desperate I become, you may soon see nutty anti-SuchandSuch slogans on this post. I mostly think it's funny.





I am an (increasingly marginally) pro-Mitt person, though that's always subject to change. With my political designs in particular, I'm often responding to ugliness in what other people have done. I hate, hate, hate a lot of the political designs on CafePress: they use poorly chosen images, they pick nasty fonts, they don't seem to care about readability, and they're often pretty insulting. My conspiracy t-shirt is probably the most direct commentary on what I've seen there.

Oh, and I'm totally freaked out about the idea of us going more than thirty years with the same two families occupying either the Presidency or the Vice-Presidency. No American under the age of 45 has ever voted in a US Presidential election where neither a Bush nor a Clinton was on the ballot. That's just creepy. So I made the "28 More Years" ones.

By the way, for the curious, the shop-builder that I use only lets you link to individual products (instead of whole stores.) You can get to the full list of things with each design by clicking the item, though (there's a link on the next page.) So it's not like I only made, say, a single tile coaster with the "Faith" logo, and just the black shirt for the Cylon Overlord one. That would be crazy, and inefficient, and wouldn't explain all the hours I spent making alternate versions of each design to fit on all the different products. Phew.

Labels: art, culture, design, politics, Presidential race, projects, romney, working

posted by Sarah at 1:47 AM. | 0 comments |

 
2008 Election   Does anyone else wish that we could see a Lieberman/Someone-Like-Cheney-Was-Circa-1992 ticket? Anyone? Sigh. I can't come up with a setup as good as the VP opponent set we got in 2000, out of this bunch. I don't like or admire anyone running. How depressing is that.

(Yes, this is what I'm doing on a Friday night. That's pretty depressing, too...)

Labels: politics, Presidential race

posted by Sarah at 12:40 AM. | 0 comments |

 
What Romney Actually Said   People are annoyed (I was at first, too) about what Mitt Romney may or may not have said during his CPAC speech, which immediately preceded a speech in which Ann Coulter embarrassed herself, conservatives, and the entire human genome (as is her custom.) Some have said his comments were along the lines of "woohoo! Ann Coulter's on right now, yeehaw I loves me some Ann Coulter!" Others have said no, he said something more like "Haha, they're scheduling that crazy loon to talk after me, I just love it when they get gentle, loving moderates to talk more often!!"

I invite you to judge for yourselves which is the more accurate paraphrase. It's in the second paragraph of this 8-page PDF. ^_^

EDIT: note, I'm still looking for audio/video to see what he said, as opposed to what he planned to say. It seems that liberal commentators all heard "yay for Coulter" and pro-Romney commentators heard something close to the planned remarks. I'll update this post if I find anything.

Labels: coulter, politics, romney

posted by Sarah at 10:48 AM. | 2 comments |

 
Why a wall is a stupid idea...   Fences may make good neighbors, but a wall across our Mexican border would probably bankrupt us, if we actually did it well enough to keep people from crossing it. Join me in a pointless attempt to avoid studying for my Russian exam; I was just reading some blogs, and then this post on Millenial Star got me typing and now look where I am:

Assuming we can't build a wall so strong and so tall as to keep people out -- we'd have to put an absolutely ridiculous amount of manpower into patrolling it. We have 8,500 people living at Guantanamo Bay -- 2,000 civilian family members and 6,500 sailors, Marines, airmen, coasties and civilian staff. Their guards -- and there are hundreds of them -- are staring across a relatively small fence (in terms of total length: 29 kilometers), guarding it twenty-four hours a day:

A map of Guantanamo Bay.

The only reason that we didn't (before 2004, when we turned over patrolling to the South Korean military -- 600,000 strong, primarily focused on defense against North Korea, with which they share a 151-mile long border) have the majority of the 40,000 or so US troops in South Korea patrolling that border is because we'd been down to just two observation points for years; to adequately guard the whole border would take far more people, and that's to defend against a presumed invasion, involving large military vehicles you can see from a satellite. Not small groups of people crossing a desert border, which really would require essentially line-of-site observation 24 hours a day.

Say we had patrols with one or maybe two men stationed 20 yards apart (line of sight, roughly,) with "observation stations" ala North Korea every 40 kilometers (25 miles), all along a fence with Mexico (remembering that our border with Mexico is 3,141 kilometers long, or 108 times the size of that border with Cuba,) and we won't be able to rely on their soldiers shooting anyone who tries to cross (like we can with Cuba).) Assume 8 hour patrols, and two support/administrative types for every guy who's patrolling:

-- 40 kilometers/20 yard patrols: 2188 patrol sections per station.
-- 3 shifts per section: 6564 patrolling personnel per working day.
-- Giving everyone two days off out of every seven: 9190 patrolling personnel per station.
-- Giving each patrolling individual 2 support staff types (including doctors, kitchen patrol, prison guards, DHS immigration officials...): 27,570 personnel per station.
-- A station every 40 kilometers for 3141 kilometers: 79 stations.
79 stations times 27,570 personnel: 2,178,030 personnel.

That's almost exactly the size of today's active and reserve military (1.4 million active, 860,000 reserve,) and I think we'd still get a lot of people sneaking past these patrols. Oh, and it's about the same size as the only active military with more personnel than ours (China,) and the size of the next two down (India and Russia) put together. It'd require nearly 1% of the total population of the United States to manage, and we'd still have another half a percentage point doing other military/defense work outside of this border defense force, and the borders with Canada (continental and Alaskan: 8,893 km.) Assuming 3 year terms of service, that the majority of those patrolling won't be in the military right now, and an average increase in the number of military-age citizens of 4 million annually, that puts us into a situation where more than one out of every six people (18%) turning 18 is enlisting in the border patrol.

If you give us two guys walking together, 20 yards from the next one down, we're up to 1,452,020 men who spend every single day of their work week walking along that border. That's the size of the entire active duty military in the US right now. 30% patrolling is a relatively generous estimate, based on how the US Border Patrol works today, and how the military services work -- the Marine Corps is the only one above the 30% infantry range, with something like 65%; the larger the task and the more complete its operational discretion, the larger the support staff required. The US Army has five clearly combat-related areas: infantry, armor, cannon field artillery, short-range air defense artillery, and special forces. They make up about a third of the total Army force.

As to why I think so many patrolmen would be necessary:

Anything short of line of sight patrolling is going to be very difficult to manage, just because you're going to have to start blowing people up from a distance or trying to track them while they're still on the Mexican side (or, if you're in one of the really rural areas on both sides of the border, put your trust in being able to track and catch up to AND catch them before they reach safety, defined primarily in terms of a city or other population center, where they can blend in. Unless you don't care how many people you let through, in which case why expand beyond the 11,300-man Border Patrol present today (we've got a proposal out there to add 10,000 border patrol agents, 1000 investigators, and 1250 port inspectors, which would shift the balance of the Border Patrol significantly.) You also need to consider the availablity of other patrollmen to show up and support anyone in difficulty; 20 yards is less than a minute's run. You can probably do strict vehicular patrols at a greater distance, but that would put them on the wrong side of the wall (either on the side with all the immigrants, or cut off from the immigrants -- there's no driving on the wall itself; even the Great Wall of China isn't big enough to really do that.) Also, that'll increase the number of people sneaking through.


Oh, and way before we've reached the point where we've got a population the size of the entire public school enrollment of the Los Angeles Unified School District patrolling the Mexican border, people will have started coming in along the coasts, or taking boats/planes to Canada. A grand total of 12,034 km of land boundaries and 19,924 km of coastline to watch, then...

(this reminds me of playing "Age of Empires"... at a certain point, it becomes so difficult and expensive to win using a military defense strategy that you have to become powerful economically to win; the computer opponents leave their populations behind everyone else technologically, and resort to a campaign of attrition against the entire world, trying to goad you into building a wall around your island to keep them out -- they will always break through the walls eventually, so you've got to either have a ton of allies to join you in an assault against their territory, or succeed so much economically that the computer opponent decides to resign.)

Someone brought up the IDF security fence:
As far as Israel is concerned, they have a) a border of 365 km (about 1/9th the size of our border with Mexico) that they want to fence in, and b) universal conscription with three-year terms of service for combat personnel (which, essentially is the group doing the patrolling: those called up choose either the IDF or the Border Police) Every healthy man between 18 and 43 is officially in the IDF and can be called up at any time for active duty. Also, they're dealing with an environment sufficiently hostile that sticking to the roads is the only sensible option for the overwhelming majority of travelers, and a population of terrorists who want to blow them up living next door. Moreover:

"During 1950-66, Israel spent an average of 9% of its GDP on defense. Defense expenditures increased dramatically after both the 1967 and 1973 wars. In 1996, the military budget reached 10.6% of GDP and represented about 21.5% of the total 1996 budget."

(anyone who can get a tourist visa to Israel and a letter of good character from their local police station -- and, presumably, can speak Hebrew -- can volunteer to serve on a Border Police guard patrol, or at a checkpoint. That sounds like fun!)

[I got everything here from the CIA, the IDF/Border Police website, and WikiPedia... it's a crummy bit of blogging not to link, but then again this was a two minute comment on someone else's post not very long ago; if anyone wants I can hunt the links down again.]

Labels: analysis, border, Mexico, politics

posted by Sarah at 9:30 PM. | 0 comments |

 
Sure, why not?   I'll sign onto this one. The Abramoff situation is appalling, especially considering the kind of effort that ordinary people put into getting these politicos elected. For crying out loud, I handed out signs for one of those congressmen -- and I was just a kid at the time. Anyway, none of the other candidates for majority leader are looking too great; at least this one is behind something I can support.

Labels: Abramoff, congress, politics

posted by Sarah at 11:48 PM. | 0 comments |

 
Note to the Blogosphere:   This is how you ought to be handling your coverage of Ariel Sharon's condition. I'll give you three guesses as to why the latter half of this is tacky, opportunistic, rude, and frankly disgusting. And the first two guesses don't count. A man is dying, for crying out loud. We could well be staring down a return to the worst of the last twenty years in terms of Israeli-Palestinian relations. This is not a time to be tooting your own horns. You'd decry that kind of treatment from the main stream media you're so thrilled to be "better" than -- you ought to remember own obligations as well. Ugh.

Labels: Ariel Sharon, blogosphere, international affairs, Israel, Peace Process, politics

posted by Sarah at 9:40 AM. | 0 comments |

 
Ariel Sharon   Roundup at Mere Rhetoric.

Go read the whole thing.

First what we do know: First, Ariel Sharon's political career is over. He will not recover fully from this operation, but even a miracle will not allow him to either run for or to execute the duties of an office.

Sharon was not the only Israeli alive capable of negotiating the diplomatic and military situation that Israel finds itself in - he was the only one capable of handling the political crises that he put Israel into and that he intended to lead Israel out of. What will happen to the politicians who left careers in other parties to join him - planning to ride his popularity until Kadima could grow roots - is anyone's guess.

In other words, it doesn't look good. At all.

Oh, and the Palestinians are in the streets, celebrating. Because Sharon was the only Israeli who ever gave them what they asked for -- land for peace.

(now, go back and click that link at the top of this post, and read the whole thing!)

Labels: Ariel Sharon, international affairs, Israel, Peace Process, politics

posted by Sarah at 8:31 AM. | 0 comments |