No Grasp of Your Reality

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday. When Specter was on the radio pitching for Santorum, he was lamenting the fact that the people of Pennsylvania are punishing Santorum over an unpopular war. He ridiculed this idea, since the Senate wasn’t to blame for the war… it was Bush and the rest of the executive branch.

It’s sad how many elected officials forget that they are responsible for war… it’s in the Constitution.

It’s very difficult for us real conservatives nowadays. I was listening to Senators Rick Santorum and Arlen Spector on the radio the other day. Santorum is in a tough fight right now with Bob Casey, and Casey has taken a rather large lead in the polls. Now, personally, I have little reason to believe that this is due to anything positive about Casey, but more because people are pissed off at Santorum.

Now, granted, Santorum has some conservative leanings… he puts on a good act. But, as I’ve pointed out over and over, he (and most of the other Republicans) seem to have forgotten what it means to be a conservative. Remember when conservatives were for smaller government? Somehow, the Republicans have turned from the conservative party into the fascist party.

Anyway, apparently this guy, Tony Kondaks, called into Sean Hannity’s show the other day. Hannity kept cutting him off, and he didn’t get a chance to make his point, so the Lew Rockwell site (a true bastion of conservatism on the Internets), gave Kondaks an opportunity to truly get his thoughts out there.

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Ubuntu 6.10* (a.k.a. Edgy) was released yesterday to great fanfare.

Edgy is a “minor release”, while their last release, 6.06 (a.k.a. Dapper) is known as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. The LTS releases are “supported for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on servers.” However, for those of us who like the cutting edge, and the slight pain that goes along with upgrades every new months instead of every few years, Edgy seems to be worth it.

The biggest additions to Edgy are the release of Firefox 2 (I highly recommend you Windows users download this now.), Gnome 2.16, and OpenOffice 2.0.4.

Depending on how you look at it, the upgrade was easy, but the only problem I had would have been disastrous for the average user. After running the upgrade steps, for some reason Xorg, the Windows Manager, never loaded. So, I was stuck with a system with no Windows. Thankfully, the fix was a simple command to add to the Xorg package (”aptitude install xserver-xorg”), but I’m sure this would have panicked any home user.

Oh, well… in their defense, I’ve never seen an easy OS upgrade, even with Windows. So, for anyone in my vicinity, my offer still stands. I will come over and convert your system from Windows to Ubuntu, and support your transition. You have nothing to lose but all the spyware, adware, and viruses that are part of the Windows world.

* A quick note about version numbers. The pre-dot number is the year the version was released minus 2000 (in the case of Edgy, it’s 2006 - 2000 = 6). The post-dot number is the release month, in this case November. Ubuntu has so far been very committed to their release dates.

100+ degrees in Tampa. The Eagles are losing. McNabb throws a touchdown, pukes, recovers, throws another touchdown.

That’s pretty cool.

We received a package today from Grant McCabe, the Stated Clerk for the new Philadelphia Metro West Presbytery. The package contained a cover letter describing the members of the commission appointed to hear our complaint we sent in a few months ago. While no date has been set for the actually commission hearing, they’ve given two weeks for people to look through the package that was sent along with our complaint, and respond to the sufficiency of the packet.

And Micah has just spilled blue paint all over himself and the dining room. I’ll write more later.

I tried to get on loan recently on Prosper.com and found out an interesting piece of information. Pennsylvania actually limits how much interest one person can change another for a personal loan, and it’s a very low 6%. Prosper has created a web page listing all the states and their limits on personal loans.

Well, not being one to passively sit by and live with it, I sent a letter to Pennsylvania State Senator John Rafferty, and to State Representative Tim Hennessey asking them to consider looking into raising the interest rate limits in Pennsylvania, especially since, in the 1980s, Federal laws were passed that made those state laws not apply to banks and credit card companies.

Dear Senator Hennessey,

Recently, I have been participating in peer-to-peer lending via the “Prosper.com” website. I am finding that loaning money to other people to be a good investment, and is serving to help others at the same time. However, the laws in this state are currently limiting the participation of Pennsylvania state residents in the Prosper program, and other programs like it.

As you may know, different states have set different limits for the maximum rates of personal loans, for the purpose of preventing people from being victimized by predatory lending. Pennsylvania has one of the lowest rates in the U.S., limiting the interest rate of personal loans at 6% annually. However, due to federal laws, banks and credit card are exempt from these limitations. Pennsylvania has one of the lowest limits in interest rates, while states like Idaho, Illinois, New Hampshire, and California allow people to have personal loans at up to 30% interest.

While I appreciate the original intention of the usury laws, it seems that the laws currently only serve to prevent individuals from competing with the large banks and credit card companies. I personally have desired to borrow through the prosper site, but have been unable to do so due to limits of the states laws. I have also found that entities like Prosper have allowed people to help other people out, and keeping capital in the hands of individuals, and not putting more money in the hands of credit card companies.

I am writing to ask that you consider looking into legislation raising the interest limit for personal loans to a rate that would allow people like me and other Pennsylvania residents to borrow at a rate competitive to residents of other states.

Yours Truly

Thomas Albrecht III

I’m interested to see what their reply is…

Currently, I’m working on regrouping after having baby #5.

The Organized Home website - complete with free printables to help plan and organize everything from cooking to cleaning to homeschooling to shopping - has been an inspiration today.