Do health insurance companies sponsor research for cures to diseases and illnesses? I would imagine it would be in their best commercial interest to do so, but I have no idea. Of course, this is something so common sense that I doubt it happens.

I thought about this question when I thought about the accusation that drug companies specifically do not sponsor such research since they make money off of people buying their drug treatments at semi-regular intervals, and profits from a cure would be temporary and sporadic. I don't know whether this accusation is pure conspiratorial myth or completely true or somewhere in between, but I have heard it before.

I don't know the answers to any of these questions. Maybe both industries do research into various cures. I can see the reason behind not wanting to find a cure and keeping people on treatments perpetually. Any such research would be for purely humanitarian reasons, which, I guess, would be a good commercial reason as well, or at least the guise of there being research would be a good commercial reason.

What's "rediculous?" I've heard of "ridiculous", but not of "rediculous." Is it something is so ridiculous that it should be red or something so ridiculously red that it becomes "rediculous?"

I'm beginning to notice a general trend about movies lately, at least within my close circle of relationships (friends, relatives, etc.) Many of the males within this circle, inclusive of myself as well, have a pretty good idea of many of the plots of so-called "chick-flicks", and I am often able to predict the entirety of the plots within them. Let's turn the coin over and I can say that many of the women within my circle of relationships have a similarly uncanny ability to predict the entirety of the plots of action, horror, and other such largely male-targeted movies. Such occurrences are are not simply limited to movies either. I have noticed as such with similar mediums.

Am I alone in this oddity of such a situation?

I got an interesting email to this journal entry. I've posted my response below, along with the email.

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 10:47:25AM -0400, <name_protected_but_encourages_author_to_respond_here> wrote:
> >>No war is justifiable, nor will there ever be a justifiable war, not even
> WWII. Was WWII necessary? Yes, it was to protect the lives of innocent
> people. Justice would have been convincing the Nazis that what they were
> doing was wrong, and making them stop without force, but protecting the
> lives of innocent is a more important issue that can necessitate force.
>
> Do you know your history lesson on the root causes of WWI and WWII?
>
> Not a chance in hell anyone could have convinced the Germans (note, not
> Nazis...Germans) that their "exapansion" policy was wrong, in their eyes, it
> was extremely justified.
>
> Bad japanimation aside, try not to mix your ideals. Concentrate instead, on
> backing up your opinions. "Justifying" a war is tricky, but I'm certain
> there are several hundred thousand Brits who would disagree with you on
> whether WWII was "justified" or not.
>
> Something to think about.

I'd rather debate you on my /. journal than over email. If you repost
this there, I'll gladly respond, but...

What makes something justifiable, doesn't necessarily make it moral.
The moral actions that were taken for WWI and WWII were the necessary
actions that were taken. Part of the reason I wrote that journal was
in response to many things, much of which I will not mention, but I
will say that too often, people try to do the "justifiable" actions,
when what they really do is dismiss a person and any possibility for
that person to become better. That's exactly what happens in the
justice system here in the US. People get locked up, and the key is
"thrown" (metaphorically, not literally) away. There are very few
attempts at rehabilitation or helping them to find job skills that
would keep them out of prison when/if they get out. I'd rather have
tax payer money spent on something that may have a small success rate
than just locking them up and hoping they get better.

What the hell is "vauge"? Is it some new French-inherited English term? Is that how all the "young-uns" speak these days?

All dem yoots be speakin' all dat fangle'y new lingo dese days.

Dean lost Wisconsin, which saddens me, but does not surprise me. I had invested so much time and energy into trying to get students at my campus to vote. There seems to be such a blasé attitude around here towards politics, but I blame part of that on campus policies, which were originally intended for solicitors and evangelizers, but people have been using it to depress any sort of political campaigning as well. It seems to be such a shame from my perspective. Noting that, I hear students complain about tuition hikes, unfavorable policies placed upon college students, etc. and they all act as though they are things that just happen to them, outside of their control. If they are not willing to participate within the politics of this nation, then they should not be surprised with what happens to them. Some people expressed the notion that they did not vote because they had not gathered enough information to make an informed decision, which is something of which I understand, but I still place blame upon them since it is simply an extension of the blasé attitude that I had mentioned earlier.

However, going back to Dean, I cannot figure how people can just seemingly ignore what he had done in Vermont. He balanced the budget there (in fact, he turned a $60M deficit into a $100M surplus), brought in jobs, got almost everybody health care coverage, particularly those under 18 (~96%, with an additional 3% that are eligible). Not only that, he's not trying to promise everything plus the stars. His promises are realistic goals that can actually be met.

About that last point, one should take into consideration that he is a medical doctor. That means he is a scientist. Scientists must often make decisions based upon preponderance of evidence. A preponderance of evidence allows for objectivity when making a decision. That is, however, somewhat of a weak, and fallacious argument. It is, nonetheless, something to consider, although a decision about political candidacy should not be made upon such a characteristic.

Some people do not like that he was born into a rich family, however, that is as fallacious as my point about him being a medical doctor.

Overall, this is simply my own rant. I needed to write about it somewhere, and I decided to write it here.

Dean may not become the Democratic nominee, but the first link that I provided gave me some hope that something will come out of Dean's historical campaign anyway, and I sure as heck hope so. I want something for all my time and effort here on campus. Maybe he will become the running-mate to who ever wins the nomination. Even if he does not get that, I hope that maybe some type of political action committee will be formed with all the funds. I voted for him, not because I agreed with everything he stood for, but because I felt he could do the best for our country out of all the people running for the presidency. Perhaps, by some miracle, things will turn around in the next few elections. I have heard that Dean's campaign is very large in New York (as was related to me by some of his campaign managers that came here to Oshkosh).

Interesting links:
A very interesting post about Dean's positions on various issues
Selling Dean Short
How not to argue

What the hell is "whinging?" I'm seeing people use that word here more and more often. From whence the eff did it come? I understand that it is to mean "whining," but poor spelling is just a sign of a thoughtless troll.

People also need to learn the proper utilization of "there," "they're," and "their." It is not of much difficulty. If something or some group is not possessing some other entity/object and replacing it with "they are" does not make sense, then "there" must be used.

The "dict" command is available and installed on many *nix systems, and yet it seems underutilized.

For a site that prides itself upon its knowledge, and extols the virtues of *nix systems, I find myself boggled that such erroneousness is so prevalent.

I could write a composition detailing all the spelling and grammar errors that would be of equitable length to that of a modern novel.

I apologize for the rant, but the grammar and spelling here is getting worse everyday, which is both frustrating and demoralizing.

I've been spending too much time writing stupid little scripts (and other things that I'm too lazy to link to) over the last few days. I need to get some real work done. I need to earn some money. Money, yes, I remember money. I remember being able to get stuff with it. These days, I just make the lame excuse that I'm a poor college student, ok, so that's not really an excuse, but I'm too lazy to have my employer come around and drop off the checks he owes me. Wait, that doesn't seem right. Oh, that's right, I remember now, I get paid crap.

I should ask Elizabeth out. I know that everyone is going to think she's rather odd, but I don't really care.
</streamofconscience>

War may be necessary, but it is never justifiable. What would be justifiable would be changing people's lives and ideas into what one believes to be right and truthful. However, the threat that certain people pose to others may necessitate immediate use of force. No war is justifiable, nor will there ever be a justifiable war, not even WWII. Was WWII necessary? Yes, it was to protect the lives of innocent people. Justice would have been convincing the Nazis that what they were doing was wrong, and making them stop without force, but protecting the lives of innocent is a more important issue that can necessitate force.

Was the war in Iraq necessary? I consider myself to be rather liberal, far left standing, but I am not sure. Getting rid of an evil regime that would murder its own people is a compelling reason. The motivations of terror and WMDs seemed to rely on sketchy evidence, at best. Throwing people's lives (the lives of the people of Iraq, in this case) into chaos seems be a compelling reason against the necessity of war. War brings to point the darker sides of human nature, which cannot bring about justice.

In the anime series, Trigun, Vash the Stampede refuses to kill anything, human and non-human alike, even though he himself is superhuman. He grows up with the notion that all life is precious, in stark contrast to his brother Knives' view that only the lives of people like themselves (Vash and Knives, who are in every manner superior to humans) are worth saving. Knives' motto is to "kill the spider to save the butterflies," whereas Vash's motto is "all our lives are open [ended]" (or something like that, I do not recall the exact quote.) Vash, ironically, has a $$60 billion bounty on his head, and is well-known to be an ace gunman. He does sport a gun throughout the show, but he always uses it to save the lives of others. His idealism leaves him with large scars all over his body. Knives, on the other hand, lives in secrecy using his henchmen (the Gung Ho Guns) to carry out his plan to destroy humanity (who he considers inferior.) Legato Blue is the top ranked Gung Ho Gun, who, ironically, does not carry a gun, but he does not need to. He has the ability to control people telepathically, and so therefore he can kill people without a gun. He is, arguably, more evil than Knives himself, and is one of the best villains I have seen in any show (second only to Vicious from Cowboy Bebop.)

Redemption and forgiveness seem to be notions lost upon many Christians, in spite of their constant preaching of them. If God gave people their freedom, why can people not give each other freedom? It is one thing to preach the wrongness of a viewpoint or lifestyle, but a wholly separate issue to enforce the Christian lifestyle upon others. They seem hell-bent (no pun intended) on pushing and enforcing their lifestyles and viewpoints upon others.

Brought to you by an organized and (hopefully) grammatically correct flurry of stream-of-conscious thought.

Sort of... Not really. I'm just signing up to a whole bunch of mailing lists. I don't really get any spam, though, and I don't get a whole lot of personal email, so my inbox was rather boring. I'm hoping that the mailing lists I've signed up to (debian-kde, kde-devel, mono-users) will help spice that inbox up a little.

I am a journal, and I am writing. Stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff... Muahahahaha! You can't get away from my nonsensical mannerisms.

Anyway, I still want to write some story about aliens and stuff. I just don't know what I want to write. Well, they really wouldn't be aliens, but rather us, humans, from the future, only we, humans of today, know nothing of that. That's my theory in a nutshell...a pistachio nutshell that is, not a peanut nutshell because I don't like peanuts.

Sometimes I somehow realize that I've written stuff in places that I really didn't wish to write that stuff in...

I'm having that realization right now...

...got modded up to five, but now it's back down to three. And all I did was rant. I really didn't expect to have any responses, or even moderation points from it, I just felt like ranting. Its strange that people even bother reading such flamebait. I usually ignore it, even as moderator.

I have this constantly nagging feeling in me and it won't go away. No, it goes away when I'm with a girl. I feel better when I'm with women. I'm not sure why.

If that doesn't happen, then I always feel it. Yeah, maybe I need a girlfriend, but why can't I just ignore this feeling. It doesn't matter what I do to distract myself, it's always there. This constant feeling of loneliness, emptiness. Not even writing about it helps right now.

Why is it that the things that you hate are the things you are really good at? That doesn't make any sense to me. I hate politics, partly because it's too easy for me, as is philosophy.

However, the things I like are the things I'm not that great at, for example, soccer. I love soccer, but I've never been that good at it. I made my high school's varsity soccer team my senior, but I didn't my junior year. Once I was on the team, I admittedly didn't contribute much to it.

Do I just dredge through my one time at life? Que sera, sera? With that out look, how can people look at life and say it's so beautiful?

Perhaps life isn't about doing what you're best at? Perhaps I'm placing too much emphasis on how good I am at something? I have a hard time doing something if I know I'm not doing that well in it though.

What's the point though? I've done this type of reflection a million times over. Why haven't I found the answer to these questions yet?