Ron Paul 2008, YEAH!!!

I never thought I'd vote republican for the 2008 election, but now I understand that republican != neo-con.

I've watched a lot of his videos on ronpaul2008.com and they all seem to be very consistent with my views.

Gold is money

One thing that surprised me about him is his allowance for investing in Gold without being taxed on it, this is HUGE for muslims, because I think that's the only way to legitimately avoid interest living in the US. He said that Gold is supposed to be a type of currency according to the constitution, who woulda known.

Pro home schooling

Another thing that surprised me was his pro-home-schooling stance, he understands the benefits, and has seen the positive results home-schooling has brought. So, on top of that he wants to give some tax money back to home schoolers, this would be very significant.

Health care: a hybrid approach

Yet another thing is his stance on health care. Yes i watched Sicko. So there are 2 extremes:
1. keep it the way it is, where health care is run by the corporate monster
2. completely socialize it.

The problem with the first option is obvious. W/ the second one the problem is that gov't has a tendency to crapify everything it runs. When we think of the DMV, the place u go for vaccines (forgot what it was called), etc we get an immediate feeling that its going to be a huge hassle. The workers tend to be very slow and seem to not care about the people they serve, etc. Another problem is that in the US we have some of the best doctors in the world, we have the best medical instruments, etc, and it's all I think because of the extra money that's sent in that direction, so it makes me wonder if that trend can still continue if health care were totally gov't-ified. Also if it were free, people would abuse it, and go to the doctor for the most minor things, and i've seen this in pakistan where healthcare is super cheap, it only screws up the system. Well Ron Paul's model seems to be a hybrid approach, which is where you start giving people an allowance of how much you can spend, then after that amount is reached then you start dealing with health insurance. This would push people to go to the doctor only when they REALLY needed to, and would also provide the extra money for the extra quality we see in doctors, medical instruments, pharmaceutical research, etc.

... that's kind of how Adobe's (my) health plan works. We get an allowance per year which accumulates year to year (roll over style), and once we exceed the allowance they pay 90% up to a certain max-out-of-pocket for me, then they pay 100%. No co-pay at all, period. It works very well.

Foreign Policy

Maybe the biggest thing that I like about him is his stance on foreign policy. He actually listens to "the other side." He wants to pull the troops out of other countries fully. That means not just out of Iraq, but also out of saudi arabia, afghanistan, etc. Instead as for his defensive strategy, he wants to rely strongly on the navy. This makes a lot of sense. He also realizes that NOBODY, including iraq, iran, etc is even close to being able to invade the US. This is very true, it's just an image we're given by the media to keep us scared which will cause Americans to allow the gov't to spend tremendous amounts of money on our war machine, and allow us to steal oil more effectively.

I'd really like to know his stance on the israeli/palestinean issue. I haven't seen anything yet, but i'm assuming that he doesn't want to talk about it, cause the Media is fully zionist controlled, and would completely focus all its efforts on taking him out of the competition if he spoke out against zionism.

Conclusion

Other than that, yeah, i love that he's such a straight shooter. The guy is a soft-hearted doctor that wants to make a difference, that's all. I truely don't believe that he is in it for fame or the money.

The only thing is, that he just seems too good to be true. Whenever there's an environment bent on doing the wrong thing (because of whatever material benefits they have at stake), and there is one person that wants to stand up to do the right thing. The environment just crashes down on that one good person. The neo-cons just control way too much, and on the democrat side, they'd want a piece of him just cause he's the competition.

Hafiz Kamran Riaz visits Cali

Sidi Hafiz Kamran Riaz from Chicago, IL visited nor-cal last week, and alhamdulillah we loved having him here. He was first in my arabic class at Zaytuna, he gave us some advice and said some really inspiring things about the Arabic language. It was very motivating, and gave us quite a rush. He later gave a talk at masjid muhajireen , and again motivated especially the youth to excel in all that they do, both in matters of the deen and the dunya.

One of the things he did was recite the poem by Al-Asma'ee. He told us the story of how the Ummayad Khalifah Abu Jafar (ra) tried to play the local poets to try to score some free entertaining poetry out of them, and how a great muhadith and scholar Al-Asmaee set things straight.

Here is the entire story (you really need to hear it all to appreciate the actual poem):


and here's the poem itself:


... and of course listening to it on the internet isn't nearly as powerful as experiencing it live. But FWIW, there it is.

"I am a Muslim" FEATURED youtube video

featured on youtube:



... it was pretty good, good job MAS. 1.14M views, excellent.

And here is the bay area version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoQbMlcK3Pk


haaaaaaaay

and to that we could add "I am an engineer at ____" ... and fill in the blank with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, Ebay, Boeing, NASA, JPL, KLA, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, PeopleSoft, and so on... yes i know AT LEAST one muslim at each of those companies.

Muslims write the software you run, create the products you use, and yes, even build the airplanes you fly in.

Here comes another bubble video

That's good stuff, good observations. I take it as a vid theorizing what i've been pondering myself. It seems like in the tech industry there are waves of ups and downs in terms of money. So when there's a "boom" there are all these companies addressing human needs which equate to money. Out of a gazillion such companies, one or two are extremely good and sweep the floor with the others (such as google, ebay, etc), all of the business gets pushed into them, they get filthy rich and the "startups" all die out, and in the death the smart ones cash out, others are unfortunate.

Then there's a period of death in the tech industry, where the only ones left innovating are the fat cats that survived, they further develop the tech infrastructure, and make more things possible. Then all the sudden it becomes possible to be able to fill new human needs, like with facebook there's the need for socialization and at the least a fancy online phone book -- RIA technology and overall advances in hardware (allowing AJAX to get crunched faster than before) make this possible. With youtube, there's video and widespread broadband capability.

Now this video claims that there's another bubble about to pop -- however i disagree. I think there will be bubbles that pop, such as the social networking bubble, it's just too hard to compete with facebook and myspace... so other social networking start ups might die out. But then there are many other endeavors, such as the race for high-def internet video, and this endeavor will be on a cycle as well, but since it will be on a different phase from the social networking "bubble," the entire tech industry won't really feel the loss because the unemployed from the social networking bubble will move to video which might be in its peak at that time.

Now if you mix in all the other technology endeavors, such as the IDE, virtualization, RIA-ifying "Office" apps and creative apps, the future looks fairly bright for the tech industry... when one endeavor dies out, another one is still full in boom. The only thing that might happen, and i think it will, is that it will just stop growing at the rate it has been.

I guess overall you can call it "maturity".