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Just a couple of days ago this story popped up: giant volcanoes on the sea floor of the arctic. It doesn’t take much thought to follow this discovery to: molten rock-hot gas spewing hole to the center of the earth = really frickin warm. Ice over really frickin warm hole to the center of the earth = melty things happening. Go figure, a natural phenomena that we have absolutely no control over erupts causing arctic ice to melt. Poor polar bears. But well, there it is. Not my bad.
Then, today, this story appeared in the Independent. Good googlie mooglie. Do they not fact check at all?
Susan Sarandon has threatened to leave the country if John McCain is elected. Is this announcement somehow supposed to make me change my mind? Do I even care? If I remember correctly, Alec Baldwin once threatened to leave the country if George Bush won. Fat lot of good it did me to vote for Bush, Alec’s still here. Dang it, if these celebrities who make these ridiculous threats don’t ever carry them out, how are we, the little people, ever going to learn?
Whatever, I’ll wave at them from the tarmac. Heck, I’ll pack their china. Please, just go, already. Bye.
Yesterday the guy behind me at the checkout in Safeway piled the belt high with all organic product. Organic juice, organic milk, organic toiletpaper (I’m not kidding.) Most of what he purchased were organic convenience foods. Organic macaroni and cheese, enchiladas, etc. All stuff you can heat in a microwave. All crap.
On TV I heard a celebrity state, in tones of hushed wonder, that she bought the organic apple because that’s what she believes in! Alice Cooper wears organic cotton shirts on the golf course (in the dessert mind you).
The first guy accomplished nothing for the environment by purchasing all that prepackaged food, he gets no street-cred for that. Not unless he can effectively compost all the packaging. Even then he loses because of the production and shipping costs. He’s also lost any gain he may possibly have had from eating food because it’s all pre-packaged. It’s rather like smoking organic cigarettes.
Want to accomplish something for the environment? Something really meaningful, something that will make a difference now and a difference in your wallet? Plant a garden. Grow your own organic tomatoes, radishes, brocolli, strawberries, etc. There is no shipping involved, no oil or corn is burned in a combustion engine getting the strawberry from your patio to your lips. Another thing you can do is learn to cook. It’s not difficult, really, and the benefits far outweigh the time/cost. Most of the time, ingredients are cheaper than a finished product. Most of the time the food I make from scratch is of far better quality and far tastier than anything Annie’s or Stouffer’s can muster. Plus, my leftovers go into reusable bowls, I compost the vegetable waste.
Want to accomplish something local? Buy local produce, shop from the farmer’s market and in roadside stands. Even if it’s not ‘organic’, it’s better for you, fresher and more nutritioney.
Just because it says organic on the label doesn’t mean anything much, especially not if that organic food is wrapped in layers of plastic, cardboard and print. Conventionally raised products won’t kill you.
I love shopping at farmer’s markets and roadside stands; they carry many more types of produce than the supermarket does, it’s fresher and I get to meet the people who grow it.
If you’ve spent any time reading this blog you will have discovered that:
- I think Global Warming (as stated by Algore, many Newspapers, and many others) is a crock, an attempt at a new religion that requires throwing virgins into volcanos (metaphorically, it’s the economy of every first and second world country that gets thrown in, not to mention the effect on all third world countries when everyone else is in the crapper).
- I believe that the earth is a planet, not my mother.
- I do not think that climate/weather/shifting patterns of weather are controlled because I use one or two squares of toilet paper. (Thank you, Sheryl Crow, for that most cringe inducing suggestion. I just vomited a little.)
This is how I will celebrate Earth Day:
- Lobbying for more drilling in the US of A, please pretty please can we just drill in ANWAR already?
- Nagging my congress persons for more local nuclear power plants. (For crying out loud, if the French can manage to build safe ones, and since no one was actually hurt at 3-Mile, can we just get on with building safe, productive, CLEAN, nuclear power plants?)
- Lobbying for more coal burning. (Why? Because the less oil we burn for electricity the less we import, the less we import, the….well, you figure it out.)
- Driving, alone, in my own personal vehicle to work. Both ways. AC on, windows down.
- Mocking all the hilarious hippie types who dance barefoot worship a large, molten cored, spherical spinny thing. (That would be the earth.)
More importantly, I’ll be celebrating the lovely Charlotte’s Birthday. Since Charlotte lives in South Africa and I can’t drive to her home, both ways, alone, in my car with the AC on and the windows down, I’ll be doing something much more funner. Toasting to her health! YAY for Charlotte! YAY for her Birthday!!
This past weekend I was reminded of my hatred/distaste for modern American weddings while watching an episode of ‘Whose Wedding is it Anyway’ on the Style channel. One of the brides joyfully deceived her father and bought a second dress just for the reception, a dress he had expressly forbidden her to purchase. The other wedding highlighted featured a bride who couldn’t make up her mind about the color of the table linens, right up until it was time for her to get dressed for the ceremony. I’ve seen other episodes with their collections of bored grooms, demanding brides, strident or exasperated parents, put upon relations and bizarre bridesmaids, all presided over by a wedding planner with a cell phone glued to her head.
I’ve also been privy to numerous nightmare nuptials. Brides who lock the church doors for their stroll down the aisle to ensure the right atmosphere for her “appearance”, scream at their hairdressers, slight their mothers, regularly have melt downs, make unreasonable demands, and generally make the months leading up to their wedding days a living hell for those around them. All the while these young women justify this bad behavior with “It’s my wedding day, it has to be perfect”.
Firstly, if you practiced applying correct theology to your real world life you would know that in this life there is no such thing as a perfect anything, so get over it now. Secondly, a billion or so people will be experiencing that day at the same time, so it is, in fact, not YOUR day. Therefore behave like a lady, be grateful that anyone would want to suspend their schedule to watch you walk down the aisle, be respectful of your parents and don’t don’t don’t expect that you can ask them to go into debt for your party. All that’s really required for a wedding is a minister/judge, a bride, a groom and a couple of witnesses. Notice nothing was said of Jordan almonds or new dresses. Everything after the people actually involved in the ceremony of covenant is cake. That means that the dress, flowers, pretty church, bridesmaids, reception and honeymoon are all actually unnecessary to the actual “get married” part of a wedding. Treat it like that. It’s all whipped cream and cherries, non-essential window dressing.
There is so much more to offend here than just the churlish behavior of a bride or two. The extravagance of a modern wedding is, to my eyes, grotesque. Most people can not afford to host these shindigs without going into significant debt, and for what? Dry, rubbery chicken, sickly sweet tasteless cake and a bill for cleaning the carpet in the church hallway where Great Uncle Leroy vomited up that seventh chivas and coke. You’ve got a dress you can’t wear again, a photo album full of almost good pictures and a debt load that cripples your first years together.
Not to be too cynical, but since 50% of all marriages end in divorce doesn’t fiscal common sense demand that you save the $50,000 blow out party for your 50th Wedding Anniversary? Seriously, I’m not kidding. At 50 years together, the couple have completed a monumental and daunting marathon of relating worthy of a bash to end all bashes. By then they have accumulated grown children, grandchildren, likely even great grandchildren, long time friends and a life time of memories, some of trials faced and won, happy things, sad things. In short, it’s a hallmark of two lives lived in sacrifice and steadfast love.
And please, don’t get me started on those 16th birthday parties. WTH is that all about?
A teacher in Colorado has been suspended for comments made in class. He is a geography teacher, in geography class, and he harangued his class on the evils of the current administration, calling George W. Bush Hitler. I’m not sure what that has to do with geography, but I’m glad he’s not a history teacher.
It happens constantly, especially lately, someone calls Bush Hitler, says someone else is a Nazi, likens something to a concentration camp, calls the people killed in the Twin Towers “Little Eichmans”. All these descriptions are incorrect, all of them used for the shock value alone, all of it horrid propaganda to try to guilt people in to agreeing with a view that is questionable in it’s logic and so must resort to name calling and labeling to get a misguided point across. And they get away with it. How is that? It’s because people have a myopic view of themselves and a twisted view of history. How else can it be? If you think you are put upon, censored, and discriminated against, it follows that you would make that analogy. But are those feelings valid? Are you just being required to face the natural debate of a free society? (I have a censorship soapbox speech for another day.)
Hitler and the Nazi’s were a singular evil, they are not “like” much of anyone else. They used German industry, know how and 400 years of building anti-semitism to produce a war machine that systematically slaughtered millions. Nazis were voted into power and then took over in a coup. They outlawed being a Jew, a gypsy, a homosexual, senile, insane; retarded and deformed people were also outcast. The Nazis deliberately and with great precision rounded up all the “undesirables” and shipped them off to work camps, and if they couldn’t work, to death camps. The goal of the Third Reich was to dominate the entire world and make everyone else a slave to the Aryan race.
That isn’t George Bush or the Republicans. You may not agree with the policies of this administration, you may not like what they do or say, but you can not begin to honestly compare the two. To do so is to so greatly inflate your feelings about an issue so as to have committed a war crime yourself. By comparing the two and calling them the same you have cheapened the truth of the holocaust as to render it a little thing. It was not a little thing. 12 million people were ripped from their homes, divested of all they owned and murdered. That number is only the dead, remember that it does not include the millions upon millions who survived the death camps, the marches, the slave labor, or the ones who hid, living as fugitives, in the hopes of surviving hell on earth.
There are no medical experiments, no vivisections, no tortures for the joy of torturing a Jew, homosexual or Christian caught hiding Jews. None of that is going on.
To play the Nazi card you have to know what the Nazis did, actually did, even then, you had better be careful. Robert Mugabe is such a one. Look him up. Just because you feel something strongly doesn’t make it so. Calling a person a Nazi is an insult that is nearly unforgivable. Don’t do it.
The microwave is a lovely thing to reheat food but it’s useless when it comes to cooking in the first place. It’s too fast and uses the wrong kind of heat to properly get the best flavor out of a product. The internet and satellite communication does the same with news. Great for repeating accurate information, not so great for getting out accurate information in the first place. Rumors start quickly and easily, humans love them and love to repeat them. Now when everyone is a phone call/email away from everyone else it is just too easy for the wrong information to get loose. Trouble always comes from rumors, among the worst is that correcting the wrong information is nearly impossible to do, people have moved on, are thinking of other things, have cemented the first erroneous reports in their heads and nothing else will stick. Two things reminded me of this today.
The Sago Mining Disaster:
Early this morning family members waiting anxiously to hear if their father/brother/husband/son was alive were told joyously, but falsely, that they were, only to hear the true and tragic news several hours later. I have no idea who is to blame, but fact checking could never be more important that when delivering such personal and life changing news. Read more here.
Katrina Victims:
There have been so many epithets thrown, so many accusations made and all before the information was complete. See the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Study Here.
Shasta Groene suffered at the hands of a monster while her mother, two brothers and her mother’s boyfriend died, for what? So the wheels of a crooked justice could spew a monster out of jail to satisfy some weak thought process? Shasta spent a month and a half, 45 days, 6 weeks, in the hands of a despicable creature that should have still been in jail.
At some point the laws of this country have to change to protect children. I appreciate that we have to treat everyone humanely. Check, got it. But what we don’t have to do is allow predators to walk the streets hunting children for their sick pleasure. We would shoot a killer bear, why do we think these predators are any less dangerous because they have to “register”? Already we’ve seen that is an ineffective deterrent for child sex offenders. (see story on Jessica Lunsford below.) Again, why do we expect law breakers to be law abiders all of a sudden once they are convicted. Has something momentous changed? No, it never has.
I’ve said it before, child sex offenders should be imprisoned for life, no chance of parole ever, first offense. (It’s the first time they got caught, it wasn’t the first time they perpetrated.) If they killed a child during the commission of the crime, they die. Period.
Now, the Judge that let that man go so he could prey upon the Groene family should be made to pay a penalty also. He can’t get off with out some kind of justice.
Former FBI guy, Mark Felt, revealed this week that he was “the man” who leaked all that information to Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post (henceforth WaPo.) Mr. Deep Throat came out of the closet. Great. Expessly for money. Even better.
Mark Felt was J. Edgar’s poodle at the FBI, groomed to take over when Hoover died. When that happened, Nixon passed him over for the top spot and soon after Mr. Felt was breaking every oath he had ever sworn to out him. Funny, to me it doesn’t look like heroism, just a big case of poopy pants. There were other, and legal, options. Today it’s easy to say it just would have been too hard to take that evidence to the Grand Jury, or to say that if he had, the information still would have been suppressed. The problem is that Mr. Felt didn’t even try to do things the right way and through proper channels. He had taken an oath not to reveal classified information. He broke that oath.
Bob Bradlee, editor of the WaPo, has some interesting ties to JFK, cover-ups and such, that in light of the evisceration of Nixon on his watch are rather hypocritical in nature. He too is looked as a hero, as are Woodward and Bernstein. Whatever.
The left has often pointed at Nixon as proof of the corruption on the right, and in a gesture of fairness, I’ll give them that Nixon was unprincipled and uncouth, actually, not even a nice guy. But now in that same gesture of fairness I’d like to point out that nearly every democratic president from FDR on has acted the criminal. FDR stacked the Supreme Court, Truman overlooked and condoned Soviet spies in our midst, even to the highest levels of government, JKF, a drug addict, used his fathers methods and brother RFK to get things done that shouldn’t have gotten done including murder, LBJ, well, ick, there’s just too much. Carter’s missteps have come from bullheadedness and a petulance not seen often this side of the woobie, but as far as I know he hasn’t been charged with anything. Okay, except a case of stunning and stellar blindness, like when he said that Venezuela’s recent election is more democratic than our own. (What planet is he on anyway?) WJC, well, it starts with sexual harassment, misappropriating FBI files, the rape of Juanita Broaderick and we can just keep going from there. Remember that he was disbarred, you know, lost his lawyers license because he broke the law and lied under oath. On the Republican side you have Ike, one of the most honest politicians ever to inhabit the White House, Reagan, say what you will of Iran-Contra, he ended the cold war, and 41, he got us into GW1, and got us out again, but he made that “read my lips” mistake. Say what you will of W, his tenure is unfinished, and we still have to see what the WMD thing was all about.
One thing has always baffled me, the left’s hatred of the Vietnam conflict. All the protests, all the anger, all the “hawks and doves” junk, and it always looked to me that the left forgot who started, promulgated and LOST that “police action”. It was the left, that was their baby, if you look closely at Somalia you will see Vietnam on a smaller and shorter scale. That same fight-but-don’t-fight thing. We were in Vietnam because of the policy of “containment”, a leftist idea and a poor idea at that. It took Reagan’s vision to stop that silliness and bring an end to the coldwar. I just never understood all the anger from the left at the right over Vietnam when it was the left’s doing. Why didn’t those radical kids all go Republican?
Okay, so, back to Mark Felt. Is he a hero? No. And just to clarify, I’m not saying that Nixon didn’t commit crimes and wasn’t a mediocre president. What I am saying is that selling out your boss because you didn’t get a promotion and then outing your self as the mole for profit doesn’t fit the definition of a hero. Like I said, poopy pants. If Mr. Felt was still on the playground he would have been roundly pounded.
A hero looks like the firefighters who run into burning buildings when every one else is running out. And like Abdul Amir, who gave his life to protect his fellow Iraqi citizens so that they might vote. And like Amy Carmichael, who bought children being sold into prostitution and raised them as her own. And like the Ten Boom family, who built a secret room in their home so they could hide Jews from the Nazi’s and get them to safety. And like the men and women in uniform fighting a world away to give a people not their own a chance at peace. All these people are just ordinary folks who act admirably and bravely to aid others at great personal and physical peril. That is the definition of a hero.
http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8254
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/kessler200506010934.asp
In 1900 four journalists in Denver sat down to figure out what kind of blockbuster story they could come up with, but it would be a hoax. The story that ran was about a local contractor winning the bid to tear down The Great Wall of China. This story was picked up by the international press. It was all fun and games until the story got to China. In a land already inflamed by fear of foreigners and a fastly imploding ruling class, that was the spark that set off a year of slaughter. The Boxer Rebellion left many innocent dead, including many Chinese.
Now if any of this sounds eerily familiar, you may have heard about the the riots, the calls for jihad and the 17 deaths that have resulted from the fictious bit piece in Newsweek’s Periscope regarding the supposed desecration of the Koran in GITMO. Now, however much Newsweek apologizes for their error in reporting an unsubstatiated rumor, they can’t fix the havoc wreaked by this rumor taken as truth. It was absolutely irresponsible of them to print it, especially with out fully vetting it. Good luck trying to get the truth out there, Muslims won’t believe it, neither will the progressives. Both love conspiracies too much to hear the truth.
Lately, freedom of the presses is translating into slander, rumor-mongering and libel, and it begins to look more like abuse of liberty than freedom of the presses. CBS, The New York Times and Newsweek have all been guilty of making up stories to suit their political ends. But now it’s begun to cost the lives of innocents a world away. Just like it did in China a century ago.
Liberty and freedom are costly things, they come with a hefty price tag. One of the costs of liberty is the responsibility to use it wisely. Freedom of the presses means only that the government can not tell you what you can and can not print. It does not mean that you can print just anything. It means that with careful research, vetting and honor, you can choose to run stories that will matter, make a difference and inform. You also have a responsibility to weigh the outcomes of printing a story. It’s called self-editing.
Hmm - Part 1
So let’s say that your daughter steals some money from you then goes on a bike ride with her best friend when she’s supposed to be home grounded, what do you do? Probably stabbing the girls a total of 30 times and beating the heck out of them and leaving them to die in the park wouldn’t be high on a rational parent’s mind. But to Jerry Hobbs it made sense. He says he was mad that she was out WITH her mother’s permission ON Mother’s day, and that her friend pulled the knife on him. Yeah, right. Dude just got out of prison, I’m totally sure he could have disarmed a 9 year old little girl with out beating the crap out of her then turning the knife on her. Sheesh, he could have run back to her mother and told on her.
Hmm - Part 2
It’s 2005, right? If you live in the Washington DC/New York, NY area, which includes Pennsylvania, and you were able to vote in 2001 you remember life before the terrorist attacks and you can now tell the difference. One thing would be the extra security around buildings, much of which was actually put in place after the Oklahoma City bombing. Another change would be the much expanded no-fly zone around Washington’s power center. Now if you are a pilot, even of a small Buddy-Holly-Lawn-Dart Cessna, you would be aware of the extensive no fly zone AND of the stated intentions of the US Military to shoot down any aircraft straying into that no fly zone and failing to respond.
Now read this wee little paragraph:
“The Cessna pilot appeared confused by the aircraft escort and did not respond to repeated signals ordering the plane to turn away. The F-16s fired four warning flares before the Cessna finally veered west and away from the secure zone.” (from My Way News, story linked below)
Some student pilot and his teacher from Pennsylvania wandered into the no fly zone and were seconds away from being shot and killed AND THEY DIDN’T RESPOND? Why? Maybe they turned their radio off or just didn’t like the “tone” of the F-16 pilots and ground control. What ever, they are obviously too stupid to be allowed to fly, maybe even drive. I’m not sure what’s really confusing about an F-16 wagging it’s wings at you and acting threateningly, they are fighting aircraft build for war after all.
Also, I’d like to point out that Washington DC has a VERY distinctive aerial look. It’s not really like you can miss either the Appalachians on one side, the Potomac in the middle and the Chesapeake on the other side, or DC itself.
Now, I know I spent some time just a couple of weeks ago defending life. And I still do. Really. However, there is a difference between ridding yourself of an unwanted baby, wife, pope, by murdering them and administering the proper punishment for a crime committed. At least I hope you see a difference.
See, a convicted sex offender is likely to offend again, child sex offenders even more so. Terri Schaivo was never likely to do anything other than draw breath in and then press it out of her lungs for who knows how long and not much more, perhaps not to your standard of living, but she would not be perpetrating any crimes. Your average baby will also not be committing crimes, at least not until it reached 12. Sex offenders, i.e. rapists, pederasts, pedophiles, molesters, are guilty of criminal activity. Criminal activity as defined by all religions and nearly all cultures. Usually they are also guilty of crimes of violence as well, certainly when perpetrating against children.
In case you missed it, the autopsy for Jessica Lunsford and a bit of the transcript of Mr. Couey’s confession were released earlier this month. That poor little girl died a horrific death, she was raped and then bound, then buried alive within shouting distance of her grandparents and father as they searched for her. The villain who did so was committing several crimes at the time he committed that crime. He had not re-registered with the local police. That may or may not have made a difference whether little Jessica lived or died, but just maybe it might have. There is suspicion that she was alive when police first approached that house to canvas for the missing child, hopefully had they know of the prior proclivities of one resident of that house they would have searched it until they found her, BEFORE she died. One might be brought to wonder if Mr. Couey would have allowed himself to entertain the thoughts that led to the actions that led to Jessica’s death. The point is that the consequenses for not registering weren’t enough to make him register. Why do we expect that the law will be abided by a committed law breaker? (His other crime was that he was abusing an illicit substance when the rape and murder took place.)
In the weeks after Jessica’s body was found there have been multiple stories of other children stolen, raped and murdered in other places. Before this happened there were too many stories of missing and dead children preyed upon by a twisted and peculiarly unredeemable group of criminals, the sex offender that perpetrates against children. It will happen again. And we allow it to happen again because we continue to try to stop the unstoppable with ineffective means. These criminals have to be contained and restrained by other methods. The only effective ones that come to mind are life in prison or death. I prefer life sentences for those offenders who don’t kill and death for those that do. Period. First offense against a child under 12, you are in prison for life or you are dead. No appeals for parole, no second chances. They can reform all they like while in prison, but they can never again be confronted with access to the object of their twisted and evil desires.
Today in Florida a woman lays dying, murdered actually, it’s just not finished yet.
Over the course of the last two weeks the MSM has pontificated, postured and blathered all about the right to die. Once again they’ve got it all wrong, the story of Terri Schaivo is really about the right to kill those we find inconvenient, costly and ugly.
Surveys have asked over and over “Would you want to live like this?” NO! is the resounding American answer. Ask the question another way, “If you had an accident or injury that left you significantly disabled would you prefer to have all the rehabilitative might that modern medicine offers and all the tests administered to properly diagnose you or would you prefer to languish in a twilight place until they came to pull your feeding tube out so that you slowly starved and dehydrated to death, this death taking up to two weeks or more?” Um, tests and rehabilitation please.
That question “Would you want to live like this?” could get a “No” answer to dozens of situations and circumstances. For example: I don’t want to live with acne, back pain, headaches, old soccer injuries, in Denver, as an amputee, without wealth, without comfort and without my cup of coffee in the morning. Are we so selfish and vain that life actually loses all of its value simply because our circumstances change? I’m not saying that there isn’t heartache and pain involved, or that life is easy for Terri or her family. What I am saying is that life itself is precious, and must be held onto tightly at all times.
What I see at work here is misplaced and wrongheaded selfishness disguised as sympathy. Simply because you would prefer to not live in a specific circumstance does in no way mean that it is acceptable to put someone else to death because they are living in that specific circumstance. It looks like sympathy, but really is an aberrant form of selfishness.
Considering that life is the one absolute irreplaceable in our time here on earth, the one thing we can’t do without, should we really be quantifying it’s value with what we used to be like, what we prefer and how we would LIKE to live? If you follow that logic, then why do we intervene in places like Darfur, after all who wants to live like a third world refugee? Just let them die. That of course is hideous thinking, of course we intervene, life is valuable. Sometimes.
In reading the opinions of the bioethecists weighing in on Terri Schaivo’s case I am more and more frightened of the future. These “ethicists” actually argue that because Mrs. Schaivo’s diminished brain function has reduced her hopes for her life, and even her ability to know that she has a life that her life is therefore less valuable and so she can be terminated like we would kill a cow for dinner. She is unaware that she is a person and therefore her right to protection as a person is forfeit. They argue the same for embryos, fetuses, infants and alzheimers patients. We should be harvesting these “Non-person people” for what they have that we lack. How on earth did these people come up with these sick, twisted and demonic ideas? Well, it starts with abortion, that leads to euthanasia, that leads to eugenics, that leads to a slaughter we can’t even imagine.
No, you say. Really? Wake up and smell the coffin. In Europe they kill babies and children because they don’t measure up, through the age of 12. In this country we allow a woman to kill her fetus right up to the moments before birth, we allow physician assisted suicide. In China they harvest organs from political prisoners in the hours before they are executed. AND WE ALLOW ALL OF THIS. Why?
Because we have consistently and willfully turned away from God, from the knowledge that He gave us this life, life for a purpose. Jesus came that we might have life, and that abundantly. So that we could walk in His ways and glorify Him. In seeking after Satan’s folly, pride and power in ourselves and our abilities, forsaking the One who gave us ourselves and our abilities, we have set up new gods in the temples of our minds. Youth, health, bodily perfection, fill-in-the-blank. These gods rule us with heavy hands, influencing everything they touch. Just look around, you can see them everywhere in everything. Most terrifyingly of all, these gods have taken up residence in the halls of medicine.
So, would I want to live like Terri Schaivo? Not with Michael Schaivo as my husband, because I wouldn’t live, I would die.
Striking Parents
“Cat and Harlan Barnard have pitched a tent in the front drive of their Florida* home and erected signs, one of which says: “Parents on Strike!”.
They say they will stay there until Benjamin, 17, and Kit, 12, start to do their share of the household chores.” (From BBC Online)
This is terribly embarrassing. Reading this nonsense on a foreign country’s news site is mortifying and distressing. How on earth can grown ups be this misguidedly stupid? Apparently their children are already quite comfortable with a high level of chaotic filth, this won’t change much. What needed to change was their parenting techniques long ago.
*Floridians and Californians make higher than average appearances in prominent news magazines like The Weekly World News and The Star, usually for raising a 40 pound gerbil, finding Elvis in the mold growing in their shower, confessing to secretly marrying an alien. Normal stuff.
Barbara Walter’s List of the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2004
It included Paris Hilton.
And she ranked above The Google guys and Mel Gibson. Paris did, um, NOTHING noteworthy. She did some things for sure, but none of it was worthy of repeating and will be forgotten in just a few seconds. Fascinating wasn’t what I would call what she did this last year. Unless of course children were listening, then it would be used euphemistically only.
Remember that the Google Guys went public on the stock market and rocked Wall Street with the stregnth of it’s worth. These guys have a fantastic product and are now worth buckets of money.
Remember that Mel Gibson made a very controversial movie, all with his own money, and that he rocked Hollywood with its success.
Cloned Cats:
A woman in Texas recently spent $50,000 on a clone of her favorite cat.
I’ll repeat that, just in case you missed it.
A woman in Texas recently spent $50,000 on a clone of her favorite cat.
I love my kitten, to be sure. She’s snuggly and fun and a fantastic kitten. I see no need however to spend $50,000 on her clone. I see the need to perhaps adopt a kitten from the ASPCA and then, if I had it to spare, give the money to charities that actually help people suffering in the wars that ravage much of our world. When my cat dies, as she must, I will get another different cat and delight in the cat-ness of my next cat while enjoying the differences between them. I don’t have any idea what else this woman spends her money on, I don’t even know her name. But I can ascertain something of her priorities and character from this one decision. Silly woman, she is guilty of a grotesque missuse of a wealth that has been entrusted to her.
We are meant to use our gifts and talents for good, not evil, for righteousness and not for selfish gain. There are millions of kittens in shelters who will of necessity be put to death because there are no homes for them. Even more importantly, millions of children are at risk of death through war, starvation, cold and disease. $50,000 is no mere drop in the bucket.
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