Spoke too soon. My laptop privileges were taken away not too long ago. Well, looks like the only time I’m going to have my own high-tech electronic devices is when I can afford them. I mean, the only nice electronics I own are my iPod and my cell phone, and that iPod isn’t even mine, because my dad sometimes shares it (although nowadays I think he just gave up on it), and my cell phone has a whopping five hundred prepaid minutes.
FOR THIS ENTIRE YEAR.
That’s right. For those of you who think that my parents are more frugal instead of cheap, this’ll prove you wrong. Jason gets a thousand minutes A MONTH while I get half that amount for TWELVE TIMES that cell phone plan period. I even asked Sean on his viewpoints of my mom’s fiscal habits, and he said (and I quote), “Cheap. If she was frugal, she would repair the broken handle on her car door.”
And the sad part is, he’s not even exaggerating. The left passenger (from the rear end of the car) door’s inside handle had been ripped out of the car, so now you have two choices if you’re too lazy to go out the other side: 1) Roll down the window and open the door from the outside, or 2) have someone else get their uptight tush off their seat and open the darn door for you. Like a really pissed off chauffer.
So, if you still don’t think my parents are stereotypical Asians, you have got one of the densest minds I have ever seen.
Obama is no longer the celebrity of this year’s election. The media has now moved onto Palin, McCain’s vice presidential candidate, whom has brought back support for the Republican party, whether it’s because a) she’s a woman, b) she has a pregnant teenage daughter, or c) her inexperience and therefore her stupidity.
Sean’s dad argued in favor of Palin (Partly because he himself is a very right-wing Republican), saying that her daughter is seventeen or eighteen years old, and therefore old enough to make her own decisions, so if she went and got pregnant, it isn’t Palin’s fault.
But I just think that Palin should take some responsibility, because, after all, she is the mother of the pregnant teenager, and while she may legally be an adult, she may not actually be one. It’s better than Jamie Lynn Spears, who got pregnant at 15, but to modern society’s standards, pregnant at 17 is still not a good choice, and with successful, (mostly) intellectual parents like Palin, I think that maybe her teenage daughter might’ve been raised to make better decisions.
But that’s just my opinion. Which is biased, because my mom controls every aspect of my life.
Anyway! I’ve found a few hilarious comments on Time’s Middle East Blog, which posted a summary of an ABC interview on Palin’s foreign policy views:
September 12, 2008 9:28
Posted by Scott MacLeod
Other vice presidents and even presidents have been relatively inexperienced in foreign affairs, but Palin’s limitations are laughable for someone seeking the second highest office in the free world. She said that until she traveled to Kuwait and Germany to visit Alaska national guardsmen last year, her previous foreign travels were only to Canada and Mexico. Until recently, Americans were not even required to obtain a passport to visit those bordering countries… Palin had obviously never heard of the “Bush Doctrine”–the justification for launching unilateral, preemptive wars. You’d expect even an ordinary hockey mom would know about that, especially if, as Palin proudly noted in the interview, that very day she was sending “my first born, my teenage son” to the war in Iraq launched under the self-same Bush Doctrine. She committed a faux pas concerning the Cold War in claiming that America had defeated Communism “without a shot fired.” The prospective vice president seems unaware that the Cold War involved hot proxy wars throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe and Latin America during a span of 45 long years. The U.S. alone lost 58,000 troops in Vietnam, and the Cold War nearly led to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
What I find more worrying than Palin’s lack of experience is her lack of humility about it. “I’m ready,” she declared, after Gibson challenged her to “look the country in the eye and say ‘I have the experience and I have the ability’.”… Palin had duly rehearsed the pronunciations of difficult foreign names like Ahmadinejad and Saakashvili. Very good! Then she sounded sophomoric, as McCain has done, in straining to argue that Alaska’s close geographical proximity to Russia was tantamount to providing her with foreign policy expertise. When Gibson asked her what insights into Russia the proximity gave her, she replied, “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” (I wonder if she can look inside Putin’s soul from that distance–Bush didn’t do so well in that regard, and he was standing right next to the Russian president.) Nearly as bad, Palin argued that her support for developing Alaska’s oil and gas reserves was another foreign policy “credential.” Maybe we should ask Bill Gates: does owning a computer, or even having seen one once, while shopping at Best Buy, qualify someone to be the next vice president of Microsoft?
This is the same type of genius present at the local Model UN convention center that I endured last year in April (I regretted it so much), where the participants were, like politicians, all talk and no substance. Did I tell you that on the issue of blood diamonds in the General Assembly, one of the representatives wanted the UN to put tracking devices in every single illegal diamond in Africa, and actually sounded serious while he was presenting his ideas?
The rest of the article is pretty interesting, too. I just don’t understand enough about the Iraqi conflict to comment about it.
(But honestly, you don’t need to know that much to understand the message of the article.)
There was a few good things that Palin did, though, that brought the election back for the elephant party. I just can’t remember what they were…
Also, in one last effort to save myself, I have decided that I will try mom’s way of doing things for awhile and see if maybe it’ll cure my depression and anger (which I have treated with gluttony for the past year, much to the displeasure of my mom). It’s hard to adjust to such an ascetic lifestyle. It’s even harder to accept that at the end of the second semester, I’m going to willingly go to that state piano competition and win something against everything a rebellious teenager stands for.
I’m not getting sick from sleep deprivation anymore, yay!