Have you ever read Patrick Henry’s famous “Liberty or Death” speech? If not, it’s certainly worth it. Certainly, it’s more meaningful if you know all the history, but the speech is powerful enough sans context to stand on its own.

“Give me liberty or give me death” is often repeated by people who don’t mean it, people who, when it came down to it, would very quickly fall to their knees, giving up all freedom, if faced with death. Heck, I might very well be one of those people, as much as I like to think that I’m not.

Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez is not such a man. At first glance, his story might seem silly. Here is a man starving himself because he wants to access the internet. I’ll say that again. He is starving himself because he wants free (as in speech, not as in beer) access to the internet, something so ubiquitous in many of our lives that we consider it almost trivial.

Hernandez is starving himself because he’s being denied the freedom to receive uncensored information. He is starving himself because Fidel Castro’s Cuba is a land of oppression and tyranny, despite what you might hear some famous celebrities say from time to time. He is starving himself because he would choose death over a life without liberty.

Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez is a hero, and he and all the rest of Castro’s victims are in my prayers.

Many people would have us to believe that the reason that blacks make up a disproportionate number of those who are living in poverty is racism. I don’t deny that there is some racism in the world today, nor that it makes things more difficult for some people, but racism isn’t as institutionalized as it used to be, and it’s a problem that can be overcome much more easily than it could be forty years ago.

If that’s true, though, why would a disproportionate number of blacks be living in poverty? According to Dr. Walter Williams, there are four keys to avoiding poverty:

• Finish High School
• Work, even if you can only get a job paying minimum wage.
• Get married before having kids, and stay married.
• Avoid criminal behavior

I’m sure that a bit of research would provide me with enough information to write a huge post on each of those points, but it’s the third one that piqued my interest today, thanks to an article from the Washington Post titled “‘Marriage is for White People’“:

That’s what one of my students told me some years back when I taught a career exploration class for sixth-graders at an elementary school in Southeast Washington. I was pleasantly surprised when the boys in the class stated that being a good father was a very important goal to them, more meaningful than making money or having a fancy title.

“That’s wonderful!” I told my class. “I think I’ll invite some couples in to talk about being married and rearing children.”

“Oh, no,” objected one student. “We’re not interested in the part about marriage. Only about how to be good fathers.”

And that’s when the other boy chimed in, speaking as if the words left a nasty taste in his mouth: “Marriage is for white people.”

Assuming Dr. Williams’s “keys for avoiding poverty” are reasonably accurate, if doing those four things would almost guarantee that one could avoid poverty, it seems like an attitude that marriage is only for “white people” is unnecessarily crippling to these young people.

Blaming the culture that these kids live in is likely to get me branded as a racist, but I can’t help thinking that the problems that many of these kids face has nothing to do with the color of their skin and everything to do with the culture they live in.

( þ The Smallest Minority )

So, one of the cities in Oblivion is dealing with a corrupt government that imposes insane fines and takes property if you can’t pay them. One house in particular had guards outside of it who told me I wasn’t allowed entry because the property had been confiscated. Being a sneaky thieving type, I couldn’t let that pass, so I walked around the house, snuck in behind the guards, picked the lock and went in to liberate the confiscated property. When I came out, the guard still wasn’t looking my way, so I figured it was a good opportunity to practice my pickpocketing. When I stole the second castle key, he caught me. I resisted arrest and ran away.

I was actually getting some distance between me and the guards (he found friends) when I saw another guard on horseback in the distance. Knowing I couldn’t outrun him, I darted up into the woods just as I saw him jump from his horse, sword in hand. Remembering the lessons learned from Grand Theft Auto, I ran back down toward the horse, jumped on its back and raced for the Imperial City, where I met with my Thieves Guild contact and got my bounty cleared up.

Yeah… this is an awesome game. I may even start doing the main quest eventually.

Take a look and tell me I’m wrong.

I suppose that these people are technically “Phishers” or something, but still…

I received an e-mail today that informed me that Amazon.com was running a database update. Let’s look at that:

In order to maintain the integrity of the entire Amazon.com system , our crew members is running an data base update . This decision was taken by the High Executive Beaurau of Amazon.com and it should be followed by all of it’s customers .

To follow the procedure just click on the link bellow:

https://www.amazon.com/cmd=login-run/webscr.php

We encourage you to log in and perform the steps necessary to help us in our progres .

Thank you for understanding
The Amazon.com Team

(That link, incidentally, points to http://b206d.static.pacific.net.au/ /amazon/index.html. No one should really go there and fill in the data.)

I really wish these people would hire someone who can actually, you know, speak English before trying to defraud English-speaking people.

“…our crew members is…”
“…an data base…”
“…Beaurau….”
“…it’s customers…”

Those are the errors I found in a quick skim of the first freakin’ paragraph. If you’re a spammer, please, at least take a little bit of pride in your work. Geez.