Below are several character traits or states of mind that people may find worth striving for in this life. The idea behind this exercise is that you are to rank the following traits for yourself, from most important to least important.

This is supposed to be done privately, so don’t think you have to post your final ordering in your comments. Hopefully you’ve never done this, and I will deliver the "punchline" after everyone has had an opportunity to rank their most desired qualities, and maybe a good discussion will follow. The qualities up for ranking are:

1) Money
2) Happiness
3) Integrity
4) Power
5) Hardwork
6) Selflessness

I’ve purposely excluded a quality such as "loving God," because while it is important, that love should be manifested in tangible ways. If there are any glaring qualities I have omitted that you cannot have meaning without, feel free to let me know. This exercise was performed in Mr. Bradbury’s chemistry class when I was in 11th grade.

I encourage everyone to at least think about those five qualities and have an idea which are most important to you, and which are least important. And while you may not need an update from me to understand the significance of your ranking, I will be back to give it to you. Post if you’ve thought about these so I know people are reading.

Update: I’ve added selflessness to the list of traits at the suggestion of Mike (servanthood seemed restricted to religious meanings, so I thougth selflessness was a little more broad). Selflessness seemed different enough from the rest. This is not the "moral of the story" update, so keep thinking about your rankings.

Update 2: I think Amy actually touched on the whole point of the exercise in her comment. The point this is trying to make is really a matter of priorities, and that when push comes to shove, the way you value the above traits will impact the decisions you make. For example, if you were to come across a lost wallet with $100 in it, the qualities about money and integrity would come into play. The point Mr. Bradbury was making is that if you truly value integrity more than money, you would turn the wallet in. The "big idea" is that your choices are driven not only by the qualities you value, but the order in which you value them. I would say that you cannot place equal priority to all the above traits, because at some point or another in your life one will conflict with another. When that happens the trait that you value more will win.

Are these actual traits or desired traits like Amy posed? I think it can be both. While we can have a desired priority for our values in life, always living up to them is a tall order. I think when I took this "test" I put down happiness as my number one, and I can see how my life has been impacted by valuing that above other things like money and power. I think it impacted the career path I finally chose. There are flaws in this of course (money and power CAN have an impact on one’s happiness), but pitting the values against each other really makes me think about what’s most important to me in life, and the choices I will make because of them.

So was it everything you hoped for? Curious to hear why people picked what they did, if you’d change your choices, and whether or not your life has been impacted by the values most important to you.

Today I DVRed news shows all day long to see what went on around the country. I now sit down to suffer through hours of mainstream media for YOU!

7:00 AM – Good Morning America

They keep calling it "a day without immigrants." Why don’t they just be honest and call it a day without illegal aliens. Immigrants are great! It’s illegals we don’t want. Uh oh, your favorite dry cleaner or restaraunt might be closed.

Goya Foods is shutting down today. I don’t know who they are, but I’m not buying there stuff. (They showed a picture of kidney beans, sick.)

They took some time to bash Rush Limbaugh. Some "legal analyst" claims he had 10,000 pills, but Drudge has a link saying the charge was only for 40 pills. The whole time their headline is "Did Limbaugh Get Off Easy?" which of course makes people think he did.

8:00 AM – Good Morning America

"Immigrants are flexing their economic muscle!" This has to be utterly frustrating for immigrants that migrated here legally. The media is lumping all immigrants into the same group. Not ALL immigrants are supporting the boycott!

So Good Morning America was pretty much pointless. They’re mainly scripted, so very little live coverage.

11:00 AM – ABC 7 Eyewitness News

Downtown LA at the beginning of the first march. Wow, this is going to be really painful listening to a bunch of buffoons.

One lady compared this to past civil rights battles. "It’s cyclical, where one group is marginalized until people band together and do something about it." This is NOT a civil rights battle. This is about people breaking the law and coming here illegally.

Someone is holding a sign that says "CREATE CONSCIOUSNESS: Don’t Bite The Hand That Wipes Your Ass."

Haha, vendors are selling flags and rally t-shirts. Isn’t that against the boycott?

In Riverside protestors were gathering. These folks, the National Alliance for Human Rights, are a little confused. They have signs that read "A Day Without Mexicans," "Stop Racism, We’re All God’s Children," and shirts that say "Stop Racism."

Their Eyewitness Poll shows that 32% of people support the boycott, and 61% oppose. Also 31% think they boycott will help achieve their goal, 19% no effect, and 48% think their will be backlash. We can hope. Politicians that like to change with the wind should be paying attention.

I see another sign that reads "I came here for a better life. Everybody deserves the same chance." No, they don’t! According to this idiot if they entire country of Mexico wanted to move here they should be allowed to. You DO NOT have a right to move here!

A sign reads "The White People Stold the Country…" and I think it ended with "From My Ancestors" but it was blocked. So some people think this is a civil rights movement for illegal Mexicans…and others saying white people stole this land. A little scary.

Haha, 50 illegals got caught trying to cross the border this morning.

Another sign reads "Please latin american countries boycott american goods and services." So he wants me to believe that he is a part of this country, but he’s telling other countries to boycott us?

Vincente Amador owns Atwater Screen and Glass said "I believe everybody forgets how much we contribute to this economy. We are a few but very strong in every aspect of the business world, but as a big group we are huge, and people seem to forget that we are here." You would think that congress made being an immigrant a felonyKarla.

Fed Alvarez said "They (illegals) take our jobs from us, they live on the streets, they go and get minimum wage jobs, get $3 jobs, and us Americans we’re out here collecting cans." I assume he’s homeless, but it’s the first anti-illegal thing I’ve heard (and from a slightly crazy homeless person at that.)

Another sign reads "We Are All Immigrants." No idiot, I was born here.

Karla Rodriguez, a high school student, skipped school. She said "There’s actually no point of going to school if they’re gonna pass a law that doesn’t make us go to school." What the crap are you talking about? Go back to school and actually learn something!

That was a lot more to report on than I expected, so I’ll start another post for all the protests from the afternoon.

One of the biggest gripes I have with liberals (greens, dems, socialists, many republicans in office, etc) is how much faith they put in the government. Besides the fact that they think a government entity should decide where MY money goes beyond vital infrastructure (see social securty, food stamps, hand outs, etc), these people put a HUGE amount of trust in the goverment.

After both 9/11 and Katrina the government doled out large sums of money. Shockingly people abused (FEMA abuse) the money handed out by the government! (Take a moment to catch your breath, I know it’s hard to believe). Why on earth do liberals trust the government with their money? How naive can you be! The government is not a support system for all the lazy, no good, worthless people in the country. I think as Christians we have a responsiblity to love our neighbor, but I don’t remember God entrusting that responsibility to the stinkin’ government. It’s no wonder that red states give more than blue states, because many liberals think paying taxes is charitable giving. Taxes are to charitable giving as cash is to a drunk outside a liquor store.

The government was not created to give handouts. If you want to throw your hard earned money at people that pay for cable tv and then sign their child up for free or reduced lunch be my guest. Nobody is stopping you from doing idiotic things with your own money, you don’t need the government.

Breaking news out of San Quentin: Tookie Wookie’s vein was hard to find, and the execution took a little longer. "He did seem frustrated that it didn’t go as quickly as he thought it might," said San Quentin State Prison Warden Steven Ornoski. "Yah, this sucks. When I killed those four people they got to die a lot faster. What a rip off," Tookie Wookie said right before he died. "I’ve been waiting 26 years to die, and now they are saying it’s going to take a couple more minutes!"

CNN’s headline isn’t that a convicted murderer was killed, but that poor Tookie Wookie didn’t die fast enough. May God have mercy on his soul.

Poor Tookie Wookie

I stumbled across a website that only reports Happy News. A few posts back we touched on alternative news sources. It is amazing how our sources of information influence our opinions on current events.

Drudge has a link to a poll of Iraqi people showing that 71% say life is going good. The link is to ABC News, so I thought I’d check their frontpage and see what they consider the "top stories." The top headline reads "Bush: 30,000 Iraqis Killed," and below that is a link that says "Related: Iraqi Poll." Several things jump out at me. First, the main headline is presented in a very manner of fact way, as if 30,000 regular old Iraqi citizens have been killed. No mention that most have been terrorists, or the enemy, just "Iraqis." Then the link to the poll is generic (as if it’s not important), and the first line in that article says "Surprising levels of optimism prevail in Iraq…" well no duh idiot! You morons at ABC love all the bad news, god forbid you notice the good things happening. Here is a screenshot in case it has changed…

Larry Elder made a great point the other day. He said that if your only source of information is the nightly news, you will have a perception that crime is very high. However, if you stopped watching that trash every night, your perception of crime around you would be quite different. Whether your news sources only focus on the bad, or has a particular slant (any which way), we must understand that news and fact are not the same thing.

History has taught us many things over the years. The horse drawn carriage was lame, and the car much cooler. WWII was worth it, and France hasn’t changed at all. Some things like ovaltine will apparently never go away even though I’ve never heard of one person to ever buy it. Since we have learned so much from our past, I think it’s about time we started learning something from our future.

This column will feature predictions about the near and distant future. I would prefer the distant future, like things that can’t possibly happen until we’re all dead. This way I can never actually be wrong, but potentially right, because potentially right is definitly better than actually wrong. If anything I predict does come true and you make millions of dollars off a new business venture directly related to my ideas, you owe me all the money. This column should not in any way be considered heathenistic, because I will not be consulting any dead souls or entities named the devil. Every idea will come directly out of my brain, so I think God will be cool with it.

The Blarg Predicts

BOOO! I typed a whole entry and got some server error and it got erased! argg. Everything is now going to be shorter and less witty.

Worship tonight was good. Students in the band are cool, I’m proud of them. Good job.

Stacie and I get keys to new house, less than 2 weeks. Oooh scary. Mario rules, bought us a giftcard to Home Depot, we buy paint.

Next month, young adults go see Star Wars. It be awesome. Maybe first Saturday it’s out, during the day. We can camp outside for a few hours and eat otterpops in line. I go plan that, bye.

Sorry, I started to get witty there at the end with the otterpop thing, my bad.

Tonight I held the first ever "Big Burrito Challenge." This is a contest between two burritos available at your local Stater Bros. The first contestant is in purple called Tina’s Burrito, and costing only 33 cents! The challenger is the Primera Burrito, weighing in at 99 cents! Here are the challengers.

And they’re off!

Turns out Tina’s burrito tastes nasty. It’s supposed to be beef, but I couldn’t find any, not a good sign. The Primera burrito was head over heels better. It had much better flavor, came in chicken (Tina only has beef), and the meat was easily identifiable.

If you remember the awesome chimichangas from Jr. High that came in the tan/brown wrapper, the Primera is very much like that. Two thumbs up for the Primera burrito, and Tina your burritos are horrible!

Update: Kevin Wilkinson adamantly defends Tina’s burrito, even though it’s horrible. He had these words of wisdom to add…

kevin wilkinson: When we get to heaven, God will great us with a Tina’s burrito
nathan118: is that like getting knighted? he’s gonna touch us on the shoulder with tinas burrito and make us great?
kevin wilkinson: not
kevin wilkinson: it’s the food of the gods
nathan118: haha, way to be polytheistic
kevin wilkinson: haha
nathan118: pagan