Schiavo's Moment of Glory

Terry Schiavo finally passed away at 9:05am this morning, much to the relief of everyone who wants to hear about something else on the news for a change.

She did have a spectacular moment of glory last night, when her situation was parodied by the good folks who bring us South Park. Kenny, of course, did the Terry Schiavo role, with Eric Cartman as the legal guardian due to his BFF (Best Friends Forever) status with Kenny. LMAO

I'm sure the debate over when to end or not end a life will continue for months.

Great Idea

These people are on to something. They are offering, by membership, the chance to hunt and kill game animals remotely. They've put a web videocam, a movable rifle with telescopic sight, and a computer controlling the whole thing on a ranch. This ranch has been stocked with game animals. When you see one stroll by, you just control the rifle sight with your mouse and CLICK pull the trigger! Bye bye, Bambi! LOL

Of course, there's an uproar going on about how inhumane it all is, and where will it end, and all that. I swear, people have entirely too much leisure time these days, which allows them to champion every stupid cause they can find, from Terry Schiavo down to game animals.

My thought is, why stop at a ranch? Charge a bit more and put one of these setups in Downtown Baghdad.

Tubes

What a circus. The media and the politicians in this country will latch on to anything, much like bloodsucking leeches do, in order to further their agendas. Everyone's still playing Terry Schiavo like a pingpong ball. Looks like a court in Atlanta, of all places, has granted the parents yet another hearing. I can see them reinserting the tube at the 11th hour, when she's on the brink of death. They'll let her fatten up again, and then another court will uphold the husband's right to remove the tube, so it'll get taken out again, and the poor brainless lump of flesh will go through another 2 or 3 weeks of starvation and dehydration. Hell, they may repeat this whole thing a few times, in the ensuing years. All in the name of compassion, I guess. That same compassion fed the Spanish Inquisition; after all, the only thing Torquemada was interested in was saving people's souls, no?

And to top it off, I've been notified by my crack team of researchers and newspaper clippers that there's another case where they're keeping someone alive beyond their time and against their will. Where will it all end!?!?!?!? Please remove this tube, too!!!!

Baptism

An ungodly number of years ago, I faced off with a Man of God.

Today, I spoke to my aunt, a recovering Luddite. We were discussing a sibling of mine, and her baby child. My aunt said my sister was planning on baptizing the baby. I laughed and said I could not imagine my sister even contemplating that course of events. My aunt, the recovering Luddite, said that my sister probably wanted to have the baptism certificate, which was required for so many things. I laughed my ass off and asked her what century she was living in. There was a time when in certain countries, and even certain parishes in this country, you could not do many things, such as enroll in school, or get government issued ID, unless you had a baptism certificate, but that was a long time ago. I explained this to my aunt, but I don't think she totally believed me, there was doubt in her voice.

To further shock her, I told her my anecdote, when my eldest son's mother insisted on baptizing him. For the life of me, I could not find any reason to prevent him being sprinkled with common water, especially when the party afterwards was bound to have a lot of booze flowing freely. I agreed.

We went to the local church and spoke with the priest in charge. First thing he asked me was why I wasn't married to the boy's mother. I saw no reason not to answer, so I did. I told him because I didn't want to at that point in time (nor ever, to be honest). He then wanted the boy's mother and me to take a baptismal course. I grinned and explained to him that it was the child's mother who wanted him baptized, I could care less. But I was not taking any course or doing anything else unreasonable, and if that meant the kid couldn't be baptized, then so be it. The priest blanched and crossed himself, probably expecting me to go up in flames. When I didn't, he sighed and agreed to the ceremony. They charge for it, so I knew he wouldn't turn us away. I could probably have baptized a cat if I'd paid the fee.

I despise priests and always convey my feelings to them if they behave in anything less than an obsequious manner with me. I don't despise them for being priests per se, rather because they are parasites, living off society without giving anything of value in return.

I saw a bit that George Carlin does about religion, which is particularly apt. He says it's the greatest advertising scam ever, where a group of people are trying to get the rest to believe that there's an invisible man up in the sky, watching our every action. And furthermore, this invisible man has a list of 10 things that he doesn't want us to ever engage in, and if we actually do engage in one or more of them, then he'll send us to a special place where we will burn for all Eternity, until the end of time, in excruciating pain. But He loves us.

Carlin kills me...

Rain

It's been raining non-stop since this morning. I guess Spring is finally here. I miss the snow. We have firedrill in an hour or so. There's been plans of starting to train with a neighboring fire company that has better training facilities/plans than we do, but I don't think a lot of folks'll show up with the weather being what it is today. People are so soft nowadays. Last time there was nasty weather it was the Chief, the Assistant Chief, a couple of juniors and me. I hope the weather's good next time there's a fire, or I guess it'll be allowed to burn to the ground...

I'm kidding. When there's a fire we always get a full turnout. They come out of the woodwork in order to play. That's been another topic of frequent complaints during meetings, that people only turn out for involved structures or the nastier highway accidents. Part of the new training plan will include some sort of attendance record, where if you don't meet certain guidelines you won't be allowed to go into a fire scene, period.

Less than a month till my Firefighter I certification practical test. We haven't practiced anything. I'll start with the stuff I can do on my own, like knots, as of Wed night. See if I can dedicate a couple of hours a day to practicing for that. It's supposed to be grueling, although we have been assured that the Board wants us to pass and will bend over a bit. I don't like to depend on other people's largesse, regardless.

Speaking of certifications, I crossed a milestone in my martial arts path. My black belt will be awarded in a ceremony in the near future, I've been told. I feel ambivalent about that. Now that I've reached this level, I don't much care about belts. The belt won't give me anything I don't already have. It's just one more status symbol, and day by day I'm less concerned about status, which I never was, too much, to begin with. Still, Sensei wants to grow the dojo, and he will need to have us flaunt a status symbol or two in order to attract beginners.

Improving the Flavor

Good Gods! I received a spam email offering to improve the flavor of my sperm! I had no idea it needed improvement. I've certainly never had any complaints. Now I'm going to be all self-conscious about it. I may need to perform one of those tests, like they used to do in the Coca-Cola commercials. Just go out to the mall and offer people a glass of my sperm, and then one of Pepsi, and see which they prefer. C'mon! Take the Jizm Challenge!

People are just too funny!

The fact that we now have access to events worldwide in almost instantaneous fashion has made idiots of us all. There's no sense of proportion anymore. We cheerfully make mountains out of molehills, and the opposite frequently happens, too. Sometimes there's a massive event going on which is downplayed by the media because it's not advantageous to the powers that be to air it. But I digress, as usual.

Today's idiocy is some moron, some media personality or politician, I didn't catch who it was, that compared Schiavo's husband to the Nazis. I guess when you're given airtime, you have to say outrageous things for shock value, or maybe they won't give you airtime again if you don't.

Please. When Michael Schiavo has a hand in wiping out a few million people, come see me and I'll approve the epithet, okay? In the meantime, depending on your opinion, he can be a) a caring husband who wants to avoid his wife further suffering, b) a callous son of a bitch who wants to off his old lady in order to make some money and marry his current common law significant other or c) all of the above. I lean towards c) myself, knowing full well that the twain aren't mutually exclusive. But certainly he's not a Nazi.

Spring is in the Air

Man, I love Spring. Not regular Spring, but certainly this kind of Spring. Six inches of snow have fallen today, so far, and it's still coming down heavy.

I'm heartened to see that all the efforts to prolong Schiavo's life are still failing. Looks like the one option left is the Supreme Court which has, rightfully, refused to hear the case several times already. Let's hope they continue showing such rare wisdom.

I am, as is usual for me this time of year, preparing a ritual spell for Friday. Have to take advantage of the symbolic death of the Christ that takes place then, and which makes certain types of magick exponentially stronger. The effect will wane, as it usually does, on Easter Sunday with the symbolic rebirth of the little critter, when he comes out of his cave. As we all know, if he sees his shadow, it'll be six more weeks of Winter or something like that.

Blessed Beast!

Denied!!!

Wow, an intelligent judge. Who'd have thunk it?

Sentenced to Life

They still don't get it. People act as if it's so horrid and uncivilized to sentence someone to death. In fact, it's the opposite that applies. Sentencing someone to life can frequently be a cruel and unusual punishment for the person being sentenced, or even for the rest of us.

Take Terry Schiavo. Brain dead and unable to keep on living without intensive care and invasive techniques. A family that wants to keep her in that state out of misguided good intentions, and a husband who to be honest probably wants her dead so he can get his hands on the settlement and move on with his life. Good intentions do not make an outcome automatically good, just as bad intentions automatically don't prevent a good outcome. An equally misguided government tries to do the right thing and condemns Schiavo, once again, to life. As I mentioned earlier, the only cruelty I saw in letting her die was that they intended to let her die of starvation/thirst. If you're going to kill someone, make it quick.

Now take Couey, who confessed to raping and killing that 9-year old girl in Florida. He is a convicted sex offender with, according to the article I linked to, a long criminal history. In other words, he, too, was sentenced to life. Why does modern society insist on putting these people back on the streets? For most of them, it's not even a matter of choosing what's right and what's wrong. They aren't intentionally evil. They have a problem coughMichael Jacksoncough, mental or otherwise, that forces them to act the way they do. You take a loaded gun and drop it in a school playground, and some kid's going to get shot. Not the gun's fault. It's the fault of whomever left it there to begin with. Many sex offenders are repeat offenders, in and out of the jail system until they finally do something that forces a mandatory life without parole sentence, or the death penalty itself. Why not be kind to them and society in general and take them off the streets early in their career, as opposed to later? I'm sure some of them would be grateful, and I'm certain the little dead girl and her family would have been, too.

It is unfortunate that it takes something like this to convince people that a death penalty can be a good thing, and worse yet, it only convinces, for the most, those directly impacted by the crime. The rest of the zoo will continue chanting silly mantras in favor of leniency everytime they have a place available to hold a rally in. I'm assuming, which I hate to do, but odds are that the young girl's father who so emotively asked for the death penalty in a recent press conference, would have been against it before this whole thing happened. By the time people come around to reality, it's too late.

People want to feel good about themselves and at the same time make sure that they are safe. Safety has a cost, and someone has to pay for it. It's incredible that otherwise intelligent people can't wrap their minds around this concept. Same way they can't wrap their minds around the concept that death is a preferable alternative to life as a turnip.

Legal Briefs

Schiavo's tube will finally be pulled. Guess you can't force a man to be married to a vegetable in Florida. I can understand the parents' horror at having their daughter condemned to death by starvation/dehydration; and I can understand the husband's desire to either move on and be rid of her, or see her out of a suffering she'll never recover from, take your pick. The real culprit is today's weak mentality. They should kill her by a humanitarian overdose of some drug or other, instead of forcing her to waste away over a period of days upon not receiving any more food or water. Morons.

Baretta has been declared not guilty. This one has me laughing my ass off. Not only did he get the pleasure of offing his trashy, gold digging, skanky, whorish wife, but he's gotten away with it cleanly. Keep your ey-ey-ey-ey-eye on the sparroooooooow... When the go-o-o-o-o-ing gets narroooooow.... He should write a How To book. Some people could use it, which brings me to my next subject...

Scott Peterson has been sentenced to death. This is a weird one, on the one hand, I find his late wife to be very attractive and cannot possibly understand how he could have killed her. On the other hand, he doesn't seem like a stupid guy and if he did do it, then he went and made sure he'd get caught, too, which just doesn't add up. A good buddy of mine called me a couple of days ago, and we discussed the case. He said that he was definitely guilty since when his wife initially disappeared he kept on with the facade of being a globetrotting jetsetter, or whatever it was he was telling the ugly Frey chick he was boinking on the side. My friend insists that someone who continues having a good time while his wife's gone missing has to have had a hand in the disappearance. I begged to differ. I remember the Witch, my ex from a few years ago. I told my buddy that if she had ever disappeared, or better yet, turned up horribly dead somewhere, my first reaction would have been to throw a party. That wouldn't mean I'd had a hand in it, just that I was happy she was gone for good. Hell, I'd probably still hold a party today if they called me with the good news, even though I haven't seen her in years.

And our last legal brief is regarding Michael Jackson. I hold him blameless. The guy's an idiot, and completely cut off from reality, aside from having a problem called pedophilia. But all that is known, it's no secret. If parents insist on taking their children over for them to get molested and buggered, it should be the parents going to jail. They should just lock Michael up in his ranch and let him live out his days in whatever fantasy world he inhabits. Any parents taking children in to see him should be shot dead by snipers posted by the Court right outside his ranch.

Oh, and it's been a busy week, been all over the place, which is why I haven't updated this since, um, Monday, I think. Sorry about that.

Wrong?

Someone died horribly, while at the same time destroying a great looking Harley-Davidson. I felt really sad for the Harley. Was that wrong of me? If so, why? Discuss.

Archetypes

Archetypes will always be with us, and will pop up uncalled for wherever a group of humans comes together. Do we dream our archetypes, or do they dream us?

It's About Time!

I was expecting this to happen decades ago. Californians have been behaving like extraterrestrials for more than a century, completely divorced from reality, and from the rest of America. My insurance provider, whose website I just accessed in order to submit an online application for a new benefit offered by my company, had the following as instructions for the first dropdown, where I had to input my state of residence:

You are about to enter the Me****e ****-**** **** Insurance plan website. To ensure that we give you personalized, relevant information, please select your state of residence* from the pull-down menu.

*If you are applying for coverage outside of the United States and its territories, please select California from the pulldown menu.

Too funny!

A Good Liberal Flip Flop

It seems there's hope for humanity yet. That paragon of liberal media, TIME Magazine, is starting to print articles not only sympathetic to the President, but also unequivocally, if still with chagrin, admitting the naysayers, war-haters, America-bashers and other Kerry-like phenomena were quite possibly wrong all along.

In this week's issue, Charles Krauthammer has a piece that begins with the following paragraph:

Jon Stewart, the sage of Comedy Central, is one of the few to be honest about it. "What if Bush ... has been right about this all along? I feel like my world view will not sustain itself and I may ... implode." Daniel Schorr, another critic of the Bush foreign policy, ventured, a bit more grudgingly, that Bush "may have had it right."

I never thought I'd see the day! He goes on in his article to point out that even Arab critics are saying that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent free elections held there recently have been a turning point in the region. Since those elections we've gone on to see, as also highlighted in the article, elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the ousting of a Syrian puppet government in Lebanon, Syria making conciliatory noises, and a more peaceful regime in Palestine.

It's heartening to see that a lot of Americans, unwittingly misled by an elite whose interests no longer lie with our country's, are starting to see the truth. I knew that so many of my countrymen couldn't be that clueless.

Lincoln said it best, "You may deceive all the people part of the time, and part of the people all the time, but not all the people all the time."

And, yes, we've still got a tough job ahead of us, and there'll be naysayers verging on treason here, and false friends within the international community eager to see us falter, but it was still the right thing to do, and now's not the time to leave a job half done. Lincoln also said, "The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."

Good man, that Lincoln. Shame that there aren't more of him around these days.

Of St. Paddy, and Kendo, and other things

St. Patrick's Day is coming up this weekend, and predictably enough, Irish themes are creeping into everything. I caught the last hour of a show on a local public station last night, where they were soliciting money to keep the station operational, and broadcasting a concert titled Celtic Woman in between their pleas for money. I've always been drawn towards Celtic music, for whatever reason, and this array of chicks rocked. 4 singers and a violinist, all superb. I'm going to have to hunt down the DVD so I can watch it again at my leisure. Particularly haunting was a rendition of Orinoco Flow performed by the lot of them (most of the concert they took turns), but it was all fantastic. It was a shame the station wanted $120 or something like that in order to get the DVD as a perk for your donation, otherwise I'd have considered it.

I also visited a Iai/Kendo dojo in my area, just to compare what they do with what we do. The sensei was very kind, and allowed me to sit in as an observer through a full class. Lots of stomping and other weirdness. My classes have ruined all this for me. I'd have once considered what they were doing as very cool, now I can pick up the flaws. I can't help but thinking that there, but for the grace of Cthulhu, go I. Make no mistake, they looked to be a fine, sincere bunch, and the sensei looked to be as dedicated to his art as you'd want, but there was no 'reality' in what they were doing, it was just choreography.

Then I rushed to Fire Drill, which we have every Monday. We ended up carrying a ton of disassembled cubicles someone donated to us from a trailer outside to where the Chief wanted them dumped in our Firehouse for later assembly. Goddamned crap weighed a ton, good thing there were a lot of us. I'm sure most of it will be junked. There's far more cubicle makings than we have space to build, and we only need a few to make offices for our officers to keep their paperwork in, maybe 3, tops.

Sheer boredom led me to check out a couple of graphic novels from the library this past weekend. Most of the times I do that, it's barely readable drivel, with nasty artwork. A very few times, though, I luck out on a masterpiece and I then hunt down the originals and buy them. I should have realized that Alan Moore wouldn't disappoint. The man is a frigging genius. If you're into good comics, especially with Occult themes, do yourself a favor and pick up one or all of the Promethea books. The individual comics were collected into 4 volumes, although I think the final one hasn't been published yet, Amazon says April:

Promethea (Book 1)
Promethea (Book 2)
Promethea (Book 3)
Promethea (Book 4)

I'm hunting down the original 32 issue comic run.

I apologize for updates being skimpy here of late. I've been thinking a lot lately, especially because this month last year was a particularly bad one. In March '04 I lost a very good friend, I lost a fellow firefighter and I lost a neighbor who was about the only woman in the whole block that wasn't totally useless. All dead from one thing or another in untimely manner. So I've been introspective of late, and thinking of the departed a lot. First anniversary's always poignant.

Disturbance

I felt really crappy all day, yesterday. I think I even ran a fever at some point. It felt just like some great disturbance in the Force, which is curious, seeing as I don't even like Star Wars.