To President Murano, Vice President Weber, Executive Director Garner, and the Battalion:
I consider myself to be a proud member of the Aggie family. Both of my parents, an uncle, my wife, two of her cousins and my younger brother attended Texas A&M University. I graduated from Texas A&M with my B.S. in Computer Science in 2004 and have been a doctoral student at A&M since. I was born and raised to be an Aggie and believe that the Aggie spirit is one of respect, civility, and decency. However, today I found myself ashamed to be an Aggie. I saw a undergraduate student wearing a shirt with the slogan “Beat the Hell Outta Obama”. Regardless of one’s political stance, I find it to be un-American, distasteful, and a betrayal of the spirit of an Aggie. The students current and past of this University have dedicated their lives, and in many cases died, defending our country. To promote physical violence against a Presidential candidate is a tactic that one would expect in a fascist or communist dictatorship not in the land of the free. Both candidates love their country. Both candidates want to see America prosper. The decision should be based on facts and issues not slogans, rumors and thinly veiled racism. We as Aggies should stand for a better nation that does not resort to cheap tactics and illegitimately co-opting Aggie traditions for the sake of an election.
Paul Logasa Bogen II ‘04 ‘10
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Computer Science
Filed under: Politics, School on September 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »
So on a June 20th of last year I made my predictions for the 2008 race. McCain/Huckabee and Edwards/Biden. While I was wrong, much to my surprise and delight, about Edwards. Looks like I did get the VP for the Dems (in addition to the Rep Presidential nominee). I’m still crossing my fingers on the Rep’s VP but at this point I’m betting Lieberman or Romney.
Filed under: General on August 25th, 2008 | No Comments »
So I’m watching a interesting program on the history of the meat packing and butchering industries on the History Channel. The program ends and a new one called “The UFO Hunters” starts. The topic of today’s episode is reverse engineering of alien technology. In short, they are claiming that the majority of major engineering breakthroughs of the last 60 years was reversed engineered from crashed alien spacecraft. It pisses me off. How dare they accuse so many brilliant people of being frauds secretly working for the Government just because they like the intelligence to understand modern technology and such a low opinion of the creative genius man is capable of. As an engineer (although that can be debated) myself I found it disgusting that anyone could believe such nonsense. The only evidence is a series of documents that could have been easily faked. An “expert” who refuses to answer any questions that could be used to prove or disprove his claims. A supposed eyewitness account by a now dead Astronaut who never filed a report on his “sighting” and when asked about it up to his death insisted the story wasn’t true and was made up by someone else. Anecdotal accounts of US-Soviet technology theft during the Cold War (afterall if we can reverse engineer a Soviet technology why not that of an Alien race). The biggest underlying theme is that human engineers can’t possibally be smart enough to create Fiber Optics, or Stealth Aircraft, of Flying Wings, etc. I can see this crap showing up on the Web or on a television network not presenting itself as factual non-fictional content. But the History Channel should have higher standards. At least be fair, investigate the sources, do not take a eyewitness account as undeniable proof, especially when he could easily set the rumors to rest but is supposedly to afraid of being murded by the US Government to say anything more.
Filed under: General on July 25th, 2008 | No Comments »
I consider myself a patriot. Not in the sense the right-wingers want us to think it. I do not wear American Flag pins, I don’t blindly follow the President, and I don’t see America as flawless. I am a Patriot by the true American sense, by the founding fathers sense. I believe in the rule of law and that the Government rules under the law, not above it. I believe in rationality guiding our decisions. I believe in supporting countries who share our principles of rule by the people under the law. I think Jefferson’s advocacy of continuing revolution was correct and I believe the American culture should be a protest culture as loud as the Pakistani or Korean protest cultures. I believe that Americans should be free to make choices about their own lives as long as it doesn’t harm others. I see the Christian conservatives as neither good Christians nor conservatives. They betray the message of love and brotherhood, the claim that God does make mistakes, and they reject the notion of Free Will. Conversely, the left-wing is too quick to make the logical error of believing that lack of proof is disproof and often approach easily solved problems through sound economic reasoning with hand-tying regulation. Not that I am a Libertarian either, they make the same error as the Communists by substituting common sense and rationality for wishful thinking about the supreme goodness of man. This again places me in the same position as the Founding Fathers, I am suspicious of extremism and factionalism. I am proud to be an American, I believe that we have found one of the least bad forms of Government and that we can and should improve on our system through rational introspection and not blind extremism.
Filed under: General on July 22nd, 2008 | No Comments »
So for Father’s Day 2008, our local paper had a best father-child photo contest. Some facts about the winning photo. It was a grandfather-grandchild photo which is slightly outside the rules, but not so bad. The really bad part was the number of votes. 1.4 million. Yes a paper in a metro area of 150,000 got 1.4 million views on a single image over a month. So every 2 seconds someone viewed this photo. After numerous complaints by people in the community, including myself, the paper said who care that the rules said no automated scripts, they were going to let the cheater win.
Here is the link: 
Filed under: General on July 4th, 2008 | No Comments »
