Florida's State Flag

American settlers crossed the St. Mary's River to Amelia Island on March 13, 1812, to establish the "Territory of East Florida." President James Madison did not recognize the claim and the settlement did not last without federal recognition. Soon after, Jackson would come in with military backing and Florida would be recognized as a U.S. territory in 1821. My hometown is located near the historical conflicts and near both Spanish and French colonial fortifications and appropriately named "Jacksonville"

I've been lurking around the net for years looking at any news I could find about politics, budgets, economic forecasts, media issues, and international strategic issues. I ended up majoring in political science at a local university and thank God it wasn't the typical liberal institution! Our economics department was great, they didn't teach the typical Keynesian socialist insanity and our history department actually taught about the importance of military and global strategic conflict. Classes weren't necessarily dominated by younger kids with no career or experience, we also had Navy Officers from Mayport enrolled and contributing to the debate (ever seen a naive hippy peacemonger put in his place quick? LOL)

I've been paying a lot of attention to China and North Korea lately and I think there are fundamental strategic reasons why North Korea may be willing to give up its nuclear program because even China is sick of their impotent sabre-rattling. In the 21st century, you're not really in the global game unless you can have decent relations with America - and that just means not building up insane nuclear weapons programs and at least making a good faith effort to participate in open trade with high standards. China is still a hundred years behind when it comes to quality, but since Bush took over they've been a supportive, yet competitive rival. So North Korea realizes it only has two choice: It can try to play nice with America and China, or it can side with fanatical Islamic terrorists. I don't think Kim Jong Il is particularly smart, but that isn't exactly a tough choice either.

I spend a lot of time at work looking at free money for college tuition so I've started up a website to keep track of some ideas and cool scholarships I find.

• Florida Bright Futures Scholarship Courses, Community Service Hours, Languages GPA, and SAT / ACT scores required
• Credit Crunch: Higher Student Loan Rates Banks are less inclined to take risky loans these days, and students are starting to take the hit
• Reasons to file a FAFSA Other than Federal Aid Even if you know you won't qualify for Federal tuition assistance, there are good reasons to fill out the FAFSA
• Student Loan Scandals and Rising Tuition Federal Subsidy = More cost
• No registration scholarship search - There are a lot of great free scholarship search engines, but many of them require you to register a profile with personal information that is often used for marketing purposes. Try this customized Google scholarship search to skip the spam & solicitations

In addition to underground politics I've been building so many websites that I've had to dedicate an entire website to, well, website building. Now, I've learned a lot about how search engines work - and politically speaking, this is a huge means of influencing the national debate and changing politics. Latest updates of my squidoo lenses are listed here. These are free sites anyone can set up with a pretty straight-forward and non-technical interface