Alberta Election

Alright. First off, I wish to apologize about my being a month late with my updates. I allowed myself to become distracted by other things. But I promise that I will do my best not to let this happen again in the future. But anyways. The provincial election for Alberta recently ended.

Religion

First off, if you have a strong opinion of religion, I might advise against reading any further, as my opinion may be very different. If you chose to read this anyways, then please be respectful in your comments. I am interested in your opinions on the matter, especially if they are different from my own.

Bill C-10

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Albert Einstein

 I feel that this very nearly sums up bill c-10, passed by the Stephen Harper led Conservative government. This is an omnibus bill, that is to say a bill that contains several smaller bills, that covers things from "violent offenses," to Internet crime, to sex offenders. In my opinion though, the new laws proposed in this bill are blanket laws that will increase the amounts of criminals going to jail, and not really doing anything about them.This seems to be, from the Conservative party's standpoint, a good thing, dangerous people being taken off the streets, apparently for good. 

This seems like a good idea in theory, but there are several problems with it:

• The first problem is that as a general rule, you will get more people who will become criminals even with tougher laws in place, and good people will make stupid mistakes. Both of those groups of people will be caught up in this system and be added to the soon to be growing overall criminal population.
  
• Second problem is that we had a system that was proven to be effective, our crime rates were at their lowest in years, the system we are adopting part of is proven to be ineffective by the government of the United States. Take Texas for example, you probably know what their system was like, and they were having too many criminals for the system to handle, so they tried doing what we used to do in Canada, with rehabilitation programs, and they were actually able to close some prisons as they were no longer needed.
• Third, is money. Lets face it, keeping people in jail is reasonably expensive, about $200per prisoner per day, not only that but it is taxpayers money going towards paying for the continued upkeep of a huge building filled with people who did bad things. This also means that you have to take funds away from other areas, potentially including healthcare, education, government funded rehabilitation programs, etc. The loss of which could cause negative repercussions, or they would have to increase taxes, which would make things difficult for many people.
• Rehabilitation costs about a tenth of the cost of imprisonment, not only that, but it does reduce amount of crime as a notable amount of time they will in fact be capable of becoming contributing members of society again.

 That is not to say that this is entirely bad, as some criminals cannot be rehabilitated and this would take some risk out of the system, but I do disagree with what the government has done. I do hope that this was actually a wise decision. Only time will tell.

Beauty

  I have often wondered, "What is beauty," or more specifically, "What is ugliness?" I never truly understood what people mean when they say that this person is "ugly," or that person is "beautiful." I understand the commonly perceived notion of beauty, effectively a healthy person with a decent muscle to body mass to height ratio, and that "ugliness" can be used to describe someone who has a noticeable physical "defect," but beyond that, should someone describe a person just with the terms ugly or beautiful, only someone who has very nearly the exact same definition of either word would be able to tell what that person is talking about. I, however, have a much looser idea of what beauty is, it is more that I judge beauty based on what I can tell about their personality.

  I actually once or twice asked people at my school what the word ugly means. The answers I received told me that I was probably asking the wrong people about it. I came to the conclusion after some discussions with my parents that the old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," was true. In these eyes, beauty is an unimportant aspect to the overall person; a nice thing to have, but never anything to truly worry very much about. There are many people in fact who are not what people would refer to as beautiful, but are very successful in their careers. This is just my opinion however, and I can not say for certain that you will not find a way of refuting me.

A short Message of Apology

To anyone still reading this, I am sorry that I have not been as vigilant with updates as I should have been. Several weeks have past and this is the first time I have actually thought about my blog in all that time. I will not allow myself to get so distracted from this in the future.
Despite  bump in the schedule, I promise that it will not be made into a regular occurrence, and if something should happen so as to lead me incapable of writing, I will try to leave some notice on the blog.
Once again, to all of my readers, I am sorry, it shouldn't happen again.

Swiss Sanitation Satellite

There are several news stories about the new space probe being developed by the Swiss. The CleanSpace One is supposed to be approximately the size of a shoe box, and capable of latching on to any old satellites or pieces of satellites and bringing it to a relative stop to earth, causing it to fall back to the surface in such a way that the CleanSpace One will burn up with whatever space-junk it has latched onto. This could be quite useful. Due to information given by NASA scientist, Donald Kessler, who stated that the density of objects orbiting the planet could greatly increase in a short period of time. The density could become such that space exploration could become temporarily impossible, or at the very least far more unfeasible for many generations.

This appears to be the opinion that most stories written about these unmanned vessels, that they will work, and are not a waste of resources. This is stated in one article when it states that:

One of the most attractive aspects of the "CleanSpace One" project is that it will reportedly be downright cheap. Initial estimates put the costs for both its production and launch at 10 million Swiss francs (€8.3 million/$10.8 million).

This states that the author believes that unnecessary resources will not be wasted on this project, and that the cost will be downright cheap as far as budgets for space programs go. In addition, one statement that is often said is generally something along the lines of "Is there any surprise that the first people to clean up space may be the Swiss?" This is referring to the waste management systems and the "green" energy practices used by the Swiss Confederation. It seems to be that people expect that the Swiss Confederation to continue with a waste disposal program that is apparently significantly better than many other countries.

The Aftermath

In my last post, I mentioned how it was "one of the most difficult things I have partaken in." I must say that the movie was a "best case scenario." We were not kicked out of the movie theater. In addition to that, the 3D effects were okay by my standards, somewhat blurry at some points, but not that much unnecessary "popping" out of the screen.


Actually, I would like to give a thank you to my friends who invited me to this, as I would not have had a reason to leave the house last night, and would have probably been watching TV and playing Xbox all night. I did enjoy going to the movie, so thank you, all of you.


On a somewhat related note, I am looking forward to the release of the movie based on The Hunger Games, as the books were good, and I would like to see if they are able to do the series justice. My fingers are crossed.


I am sorry if the length of this post is not up to previous standards. I just do not have that much to say today.