Abortion; Columbine

I had every intention of doing an update yesterday (perhaps I should start calling it a blog?), and had found a few little news things to bitch at, and had even written them up. Then Survivor came on television, and I never got back to it. The thing about the ‘so-called’ reality shows like that is that you feel like you have to watch every minute or you will miss something, which may or may not be true, but they certainly do sucker us in. Why this kind of stuff is being called reality t.v. is still a mystery to me, I mean in reality no one really gets stuck on an island with a bunch of strangers who then have to do immunity and reward challenges. I mean reality t.v. would be like a half an hour of a couple folding clothes in a laundromat wouldn’t it?

As for the idea of doing news, when I began this site I really didn’t think I wanted to do anything like that as it has been done to death on lots of sites. But, those sites do add their own unique spin to the stories that make it a more enjoyable read (in my opinion), and while I am not a pundit on any matter, I do have some pretty strong opinions. Also, this has given me a reason to read a lot of news articles that I likely would not have read otherwise. I am still going to try to shy away from doing much as far as political type news, as I just do not have enough information about the majority of the issues to give myself a sturdy soapbox from which to bitch. If I do start any political bitching it will likely be about issues that every person in the U.S. likely has an opinion on, just to get my opinion out there.

Take this story for instance.

The two sides also argued over language in the bill that defines “unborn child” as “a member of the species homo sapiens, at any stage of development, who is carried in the womb.”
Critics said that under this definition even a fertilized egg would have the same rights as the born, setting the stage for future challenges to abortion rights.

I think that argument is all about semantics, so I don’t really see why there is such fuss over it. But, I am also the type of person to think that logic will always prevail, which is one of my greatest downfalls. Over the course of human history it seems that logic is more likely to be persecuted than to prevail…Ask Galileo about that one…

But those behind the bill noted that identical language was used in a 2000 bill that barred the execution of pregnant women. That bill passed the House 417-0 but didn’t move in the Senate.
The House has also twice before, in 1999 and 2001, passed unborn victims bills, but in both those cases as well the Senate, where abortion rights lawmakers hold greater sway, did not take up the legislation.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has pledged to bring up the bill soon, but it’s uncertain whether he has the votes to pass it.

Okay, so what I really want to know is how it is possible that any bill can make it through the house unanimously, and not go anywhere in the senate. I understand that in our democratic society we have a series of checks and measures to ensure that any legislation that becomes a law has been scrutinized by the house, senate and oval office. It went through the house unanimously! Why should there be a question on the mind of anyone in the senate whether there would be enough votes to pas it? These are our elected senators, aren’t they like sworn to hear the voice of the people that they represent or something?

The bill also states that an offense does not require proof that the assailant had knowledge that the victim was pregnant. Hart noted that murder is a leading cause of death among pregnant women and in many cases the attack is made with the intention to kill the unborn child.

I actually strongly agree with this part of the article. Being that I am pro-choice I believe that if a woman is carrying the child that she has made the decision to give birth to it. If that unborn child was killed in a purse-snatching I think whoever did it should be put to death. Not that I believe that believe that a fetus is an actual child, but I do believe that once a mother has made a decision to carry the child to term it should be considered much differently than the mother who chooses to abort a fetus. The emotional affect on the mother who was planning to give birth to a child is likely going to be exactly the same as if someone killed her newborn, in that way I think that the puishment should fit the crime.

A story about the massacre at Columbine that I am putting here only because I was so right about it.

In all, Salazar said, the sheriff’s office had at least 15 contacts with the two teens — from dispatch reports to official investigative reports — stemming from six separate incidents. But it made no conclusions about what investigators could have done differently.
The collection of evidence unveiled Thursday included 10,418 separate items — from the murder weapons and the black trenchcoats worn by the killers to bullet fragments and the chairs and tables where people died. A message board put up in a school window the day of the attack still says, in blue Magic Marker: “1 bleeding to death.” There were 13 body bags.

Authorities released two videos, one of the anxious scene in a park near the school the day of the shooting, the other the Harris and Klebold video.

“I don’t care what you say; if you ever touch him again, I will fricking kill you,” a wild-eyed Harris screams on the tape.

Some relatives say such videos were seen by school officials and that nothing was done.

“This raises more questions than it answers,” said Dawn Anna, whose daughter, Lauren Townsend, died at Columbine. “I would disagree that there was no negligence.”

Brooks Brown said he wanted to know what sheriff’s officials did with multiple warnings from his parents about Harris. He was stunned by the failure to execute the search warrant at the Harris home a year before the slayings.

“That’s basically telling me my friends died because of a clerical error,” he said.

I had posted a message on my angelfire web site the day after the Columbine Massacre (which they quickly deleted) that stated that I was pretty damn sure these kids would have been into petty crimes, and been making pipe bombs, possibly even torturing animals for years before this event. I made that statement based solely on my own adolescence and the fact that I had done all of those things. While I never brought myself to the point where I actually murdered anyone, I probably came a lot closer than I like to admit.

The things that I thought would be true about these two teens did turn out to be true. I am sure that anyone who happens upon this site will not really care that I was right about something, nor is that really the reason that I am posting about this particular story. Look at the eyes in that photo. There is something about those eyes, not the expression or anything, just the eyes, that just seems to be not quite human..

A very amusing story that I read after the previous articles. It is quite short, so I will simply quote the whole thing.

BERLIN (Reuters) – A German woman took her male neighbor to court for noise pollution after he repeatedly kept her awake through half the night and had at least one four-hour sex session, a court spokeswoman said Friday.
“Four hours of sex noises. What was I supposed to think? It was nothing but groaning and banging,” the woman told the judge, a Bild newspaper report said.

The woman told Berlin magistrates that her 25-year old neighbor Andreas G. was disturbing the peace by keeping her awake early in the morning.

Andreas said his 26-year old neighbor had complained in the past, calling at five in the afternoon, but that he had not felt obliged to respond. “I can have as much sex as loud as I want then,” he said.

The judge dropped the case on learning that the man had since moved out of the apartment.

I am not entirely sure just what the problem there is. If that man could actually have sex for four hours straight, I would think that his single neighbors would be knocking on his door looking for a little ‘Love you long time’ action. Perhaps the woman was mad after being turned down?


Bitching about the news items has turned out to be a lot more fun than I had ever thought it could be. Sure it takes away from me doing something more productive, but it is likely that if I ever develop a readership they will be more likely to send me an email about something that agree/disagree with. If I don’t have any of that sort of thing on here (the type of thing that one could agree or disagree with) I don’t have much hope of ever getting any feedback.

It occurs to me that this may be the reason why your average ‘blog’ is almost a cookie-cutter type now. People -like me- start with one intention, then in the interest of getting a few people to read the site things start to change. After a while the initial intent of the site must just get lost to the pursuit of readers. Whether or not that is true is yet to be seen (on my site anyway). I will get back to you when I have some evidence one way or the other.

For now I am going to play a bit more on the ClockTower 3 game.

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