Random musical stuff

So, I've been listening to a lot of music lately, trying to find a whole lot of new stuff. I try to get a lot of diversity going in my musical selection, as I do in my library of books and movies. Lately, one of the bands that I have been listening to is a pretty good up and coming local band, which I like, and for whom I occasionally jot down lyrics. I will share a link for any who are inclined to take a listen. I am going to try and post another review and another discussion piece soon. Hope you enjoy. Her is the link I mentioned above. Enjoy!

http://www.reverbnation.com/play_now/14038447

To the Victims, Family and Friends, of the Aurora, Colorado Shooting

To the victims, family and friends, of the Aurora, Colorado shooting. I was deeply saddened to hear of this terrible tragedy. Things of this nature do not happen often, but when they do, they cause the entire nation to take a breath in shock and say a silent prayer or hope for the victims and their family and friends and the survivors.
To the victims, family and friends, of the Aurora, Colorado shooting. I was deeply saddened to hear of this terrible tragedy. Things of this nature do not happen often, but when they do, they cause the entire nation, and sometimes the world, to take a breath in shcok and say a silent prayer for those involved, or to hope for their well-being and safety.
Take heart though, because for every one person who is willing to commit such an atrocity there are many more who are willing to help. There are those who will help you recovery, both physically, mentally and emotionally, there are those who will help you with your loss, with your grief, with your medical bills, and there are those who will help you in your quiet moments of stoic sadness.
For every person who kicks at a homeless person on the street, there are multitudes more who will give him money or food or shelter. There will always be more of the kind-hearted than those who are wicked. They, and we, are here for you know in your time of loss and pain. The kind people, those who go out of their way to help others do not always make the news, unless they do something truly heroic or die trying, but they are out there, and they do help, and they will be there for you. I hope that you are able to move on from this tragedy and find peace, I hope that you will live better lives, and that you will remember that there are always kind, cheerful people in every walk of life.
To those who lost their lives, I hope that you are in a better place, a place where you can know eternal joy and happiness, where you do not have to worry about the cruelties of the world, where you do not know weariness or pain or sorrow.
I hope that everyone can find it in themselves to be better people so that tragedies like the one that we witnessed, or saw on the news or read about do not happen, so that we may all live in peace.
Let it be known that I did not, and do not, intend to offend anyone by writing this. It truly is something that touches me deeply, and I hope that everyone can move on from this without too much emotional, physical or mental damage. I hope that everyone who was involved finds peace and happiness. My thoughts and prayers are with all of you. I also hope that the man who committed the atrocity can realize what he has done and be truly sorry for it. Perhaps he will find the time while he is in prison.

The American Dream

What happened to the American dream? Where did it go? Our world rating has slipped and fallen through the ages, dropping to where it now stands, to where we are no longer the top dog, to where we are no longer the biggest kid in the playground. What happened? Did we just get tired? Did we just give up? We need to get back to the olden day,s when we worked hard for our futures, where we worked hard for our kids, rather than just saying "Hey, they can make their own way." That is bullshit, we have to push ourselves, push our country to be the best. We have problems, we have recession, we have this, we have that. I can't do it. Stop crying.
Hard work brings about the American dream, hard working people like my Grandparents, like my parents, like my friend Sam Rios, who works hard for a future for his wife, for his daughter, for his step-daughter, while they grow up or go to school. That is the American dream. We do not need to go and help out small, breaking countries like Haiti, so what if there was a natural disaster there, so what if they needed our aid? We need our aid! We did not have the money to give to them, we had money, but not our money, money that was borrowed by a country that is deeply in debt. What happened to helping yourself and your neighbor before you help the next town over, working on your community before you decide to go to another country and help them while your own community is rotting from the inside out behind you? I am not saying that we should not help, only that we should look to our own country before we help others when we cannot even help ourselves.
We dig ourselves deeper into debt every year, we help every one out, where is the help for ourselves? Where are the projects to bring our country back? Where is our New Deal? There are other countries but we outsource, we give ourselves up. Our presidents cannot stop the corporations from outsourcing anymore than they can wave their fingers and magically fix our problems. Do you know who does that? We do, by getting behind our president, by getting behind our congressmen and our representatives and telling them "This is what we want!" Not complaining or pointing fingers and playing the blame game.
We need to get stop being so infatuated with the media, I am not speaking of news, I am talking about how we are fascinated with what happens on the shore of New Jersey, how we cannot wait to watch housewives whine and complain about how their lives are hard, or how we love to watch immature high-schoolers try to raise children even as they try to form their own personalities. What happened to us? We used to work hard, take care of ourselves, take care of our families. Our divorce rates are climbing, poverty is rampant especially among children and we do nothing. We are America. We were great, we helped storm the beaches at Normandy, put a man on the moon, we made great scientific discoveries, brought democracy to the impoverished and oppressed, and now here we are, a nation obsessed with the individual, not ourselves, breaking apart like so much glass, each shard going its own way.
We help every one but ourselves, we wage wars on ideals, not evil, we are failing in almsot everything. We are too concerned with how we could live longer, how we can look prettier, what our telivision and movie stars are doing and not enough with what are politicians are doing. Our politicians are elected by the people to work for the people. How can they work when their boss tells them nothing! How many people do not even vote anymore, how many people know people who do not vote? We are giving up on America and it makes me sad to see it. We are becoming individualistic, sad, apathetic people, more focused on living our own lives than living together. That is our problem, it is not oil, it is not job loss or outsourcing, or any number of other things. It is apathy, the apathy of the American people, and that, that one little word, is the real reason why the American Dream is dying.
We let the American Dream die, we stopped working hard and pushing ourselves, at least the majority of us did. We became apathetic, we started focuising on our lives more and more, on "my" rights, not on our rights. We stopped being a country and divided into individuals. We were great, but we threw it away so that we can complain and whine about how we are poor, or how someone else has more money, or just because we can whine and complain. We are America. It is time we started acting like it.
Work hard, dream big, do not let yourselves be smothered by a dead end job or a mountain of debt. We are, and were, a great country, not because of our accomplishments, but because of the dreams, and the dreamers, who made those accomplishments possible, and that is what we need to do again. It is time to elevate ourselves once more, to fire up the ballast tanks, to pump up our patriotic pride and stride forward, letting the world know that we are here and we are proud, and we will not let ourselves slip into the shadows, We Are America.

Religion Vs. Evolution

(Author's Note: This is another post that was originally on my tumblr. This will be the last of such posts. Enjoy!)

This is just a theme that I’ve been thinking of lately, trying to get back into science, one of my passions, which I’ve been neglecting as of late. The following is not meant to offend anyone, just state my view, and hopefully help others who are confused or interested in discussing the topic. Religion and Evolution have been at odds since the theory began. Religion states that the world has been created by intelligent design; science states that it was created by a “big bang,” but who is really right in this scenario? In whom do we place our collective trust? I am a Messianic Jew, some might call me a Christian, but the basic belief is the same, I believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, which some may say skews my scientific beliefs. The old adage states that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. I propose that I’ll take my slice of cake and stuff my face with it. In my opinion, science, namely Evolution, and Religion, namely Christianity and Judaism (the two with which I am familiar) can go together, and indeed work better together than separate.“Then God said, ‘Let the Earth produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that crawl, and the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds.’” For some reason unbeknownst to me, it seems to be assumed that every creature on Earth looks today like it did at the creation. Why is this? In my mind, it limits God to think this, and as Christians the last thing that we should do is limit God, to place human restrictions on a vast and superior being. Why, if God knows the future and all strands of time and space, could God not have made “the wildlife of the earth according to their kinds” evolutionarily; already set up along the lines of adaptation and survival and extinction? There is a chaos to evolution, to “natural selection” that confuses us, but what if that evolutionary confusion is actually the master at work, behind the scenes, what if that chaos is actually guided evolution? To me, that is exactly what it is, guided evolution, a series of adaptations along the predestined course of a genus.“Then God said, ‘Let the water swarm with living creatures, and let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.’” This passage is from the bible, Genesis, and it states that life began in the oceans, just as the theory of evolution does. Who are we to state that this creation took place in one 24 hour day? It could have just as easily taken place over thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years. In the bible (find verse) it states that God sees time differently than us, a second to us can pass as a hundred years to him, and a hundred years to us may pass like a second to him.  According to evolution life began in the ocean, just as in the bible, another reason why religion and evolution mesh together.Religion, or some theologians, states that the earth is around 5000 years old, while science states that it is billions of years old. The writer Don Goldstein in his book "I Have A Friend Who's Jewish, Do You?" uses modern mathematics to prove both theories correct, dividing the 15 Billion year age of the Earth against the rate of expansion and using Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, he proves that the Earth is both 15 Billion years old, and was also made in 6 days. It is very interesting and is, I feel, a step towards the reconciliation of science and religion, however, this is getting off of the topic.  The problem with us, as humans, is that we see things in a very short time frame, days, months, years, decades, centuries, but we do not see things in the long run, millennia, hundreds of thousands of years, millions, billions of years; these ideas are so far out there, on the edge of our imagining that we can talk about them, but not actually grasp the concept of true geological time; which means that we cannot truly understand evolutionary time either, not without years of training, which in most cases strips away religion and replaces it with the church of science.  The original evolutionary theory was change over time, not macro-evolution, genus jumping evolutions that allow a bee to become an octopus, or an ape to become a human. My final argument for my case is that people are always going to be opinionated, whether they believe in God, a Christian God or otherwise, or not. To me it is clear, an all-knowing God would not doom animals to evolutionary stagnation, as he would not doom us to evolutionary stagnation, in an ever-changing world, where the lack of evolution (adaptation) means an almost certain death.With the scientific community coming even closer towards finding the "God" particle, it seems that that could be a very interesting way for God to be viewed through our eyes, at least in one aspect, as a particle. This explains the Big Bang in a better sense towards both religion and science, as well as evolution. 

Recovery. It works, but it is hard to do so on an emotional level. When you go through any experience, whether it is stressful, horrifying, or very enjoyable it will always be a part of you. Recovery states that the bad experiences should be able to be put behind one's self, to be moved on from and that they should not trouble one anymore. The definition of recovery is "restoration or return to any former and better state or condition." (Source - Dictionary.com, definition number 4.) If recovery also holds true for emotions as well as the physical, then the experiences, the bad ones, should be something that we can separate ourselves from as surely as we can separate ourselves from mold or cancer or the common cold, however, we find that this is not the case.

No matter the experience, it stays with you, in fact your experiences define you, so your emotions and your experiences define you, emotions and experiences that should the holder should have long since been recovered. However, when you experience something it stays with you (i.e. rape, war, assault, etc.) and that proves that recovery, at least on the emotional side, is at its core a broken tenant of the human vocabulary.

Those who have been through assault will never look at a darkened city the same just as those who have been to war will never feel the same about those of the ethnicity they fought, never feel the same way about tight spaces or other things of that nature, just as those who have experienced rape will never view the opposite sex in the same way, and never have the emotional intimacy of their past.

My point is that recovery, at its base is a false hope, physically, for the most part it works, emotionally, well, its a long way off, in my opinion.

Hello everyone. I decided a while back to start a blog, in order to get more of my writing out there, and hopefully have an online portfolio of sorts for when I begin my journalism career. I had used tumblr for a bit, but I did not really like the way that it was turning out, so I have now made this. So, without further adieu, here it is...