A Brief Introduction

Hello, fellow denizens of the Internet!  First off, a bit about me.  I am a freshman studying physics and international politics at the College of William and Mary.  I hope to become an engineer eventually.  When I'm not working, I enjoy model United Nations, reading (mostly science fiction and international politics with some history and the odd technical or cyber-security manual thrown in), SCUBA diving, rock climbing, video games, and occasionally working on my own science fiction novel.  I'm usually a very private person, so I haven't really tried to write a blog or be politically active before.  However, as I listened to some of my fellow students arguing politics, I realized that discussion of any issue is dominated by the extremes on both sides, while the moderates tend to stay silent and keep our heads down.  It then occurred to me that this may be why our political system is dominated by people who even members of their own party consider utterly insane, yet keep voting into office for some reason.  As a side note: Get out and vote in every election.  Big, small, doesn't matter.  Just do it.  Don't say your vote doesn't count.  It absolutely won't count if you do not vote.  I don't really care who you vote for, just vote.  Voter turnout in this country is frankly shameful.  If you can't vote in person, get an absentee ballot or something.  Anyway, discussion and moderates.  The reason all discussion and political debate seems dominated by lunatics is because they are the ones who shout the loudest.  In fact, they are the ones who speak out at all.  I was sitting at my desk, reading Facebook posts and lamenting the fact that no one ever seemed to speak for the middle, when I realized I was doing exactly what I was complaining about other people doing.  What right do I have to complain about how people like me never speak up if I don't do it myself? And so, despite my usual disposition against bringing attention to myself, I did something.  Specifically, I started this blog.  A word of warning: pretty much everyone will likely find something to be offended about in my posts.  I don't ask you to ignore that, but please, if you feel like filling my inbox with hate mail about what a terrible person I am for believing what I believe, just think about it for a minute and ask yourself why it offends you so badly.  I'll update this blog every week or so, assuming I'm not too busy to get around to it, in which case I'll probably just post a cat .gif or something.  Thanks for reading.