Category Archives: antiquated news stories

Abortion

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So I didn’t post anything yesterday, yet that shouldn’t have been much of a surprise since I barely banged one out on sunday, and even then forgot to change my side-bar posts. It is not as if there is any real good reason why I just suddenly skip them, just sometimes I do not feel like it. That is a liberty that I have since there is absolutely no reason for me to do this site. There is no monetary obligation, no moral consciousness that I am overlooking if I skip. This site is purely for my amusement. As evidenced by my readership being in the very low single digits.

That all could be content driven of course, but as I have no content how will I ever know?

I have been reading a lot of news over the last few days. I must be doing something while I am not actively typing this out, right? And porn does grow tiresome after about so long, how many naked people must one see before they begin to understand that the shape of the vagina is always gonna be pretty much the same? The answer, in my case, is 1,364,771,122.5 (one of the photos had both sets of genitals).

But, the news, yeah there has been a hell of a lot of the stuff in the news over the last couple of days. A couple of articles got my ears perked, but not to the point that I actually wanted to cut and paste anything to discuss it in much detail. However I did find it pretty disappointing that Dubya is standing firm on the position that stem cell research is wrong.

I understand that Dubya was brought up about as far right as you can get, but the thought that one of his mentors, Ronald Reagan, died from one of the very dieseases that they are trying to use the stem-cell research to find a cure for is just a bit odd to me. His quote that “Life is a creation of God, not a commodity to be exploited by man”, I found particularly disturbing. If he believes that whole-heartedly, doesn’t that mean that the very Vice-President that he chose should be dead? Were it not for a quadruple bypass in 1988 Cheney would be dead now. At what point, in the twisted little mind of Dubya, does medical science become playing God? It seems that he is fine with it as long as it is used for prolonging life, but what about basic things like vaccines?

I bring up the vaccine thing only because that is where it get really easy to start hammering at the very religious, right-wing folks. A vaccine is something that is used to stop the spread of a deadly virus, yet, by biblical definition, the virus was created by GOD, doesn’t that mean that using a vaccine is playing GOD? If you are so sure of your faith, why don’t you go ahead and let your children die from diseases that could easily be cured by vaccines? Or, perhaps GOD will intervene and save your child. The virus is every bit as much alive as a fetus in the womb of a human in early pregnancy. There is no thought only rapid growth. In the case of the virus it will continue to grow until something stops it or the host dies, where the pregnant woman could carry the embryo to term and be rid of it. Any person who tries to argue that abortion is wrong should have to sign papers that explicitly forbid them to have any medical treatment for any life-form that occurs inside them. Say the person happens to get a cut and the cut becomes infected, the infection will spread without the intervention of either 1) GOD, or 2) Simple rubbing alcohol, yet that person should be made to not use the alcohol and see which way it goes. I mean to use alcohol to kill the infection would be “playing GOD”.

The way science and religion mix with the very religious, though, makes this a tough point to argue. In the infinite wisdom of the church, they have decided that GOD somehow meant that humans were a lot more important than any other form of life when he “Created man in his own image”. I am not a bilical scholar, nor am I inclined to believe that if there were a GOD he would favor one particular species. If the biblical GOD does exist, shouldn’t that mean that all life is precious, and further that if you swat a fly you are breaking one of the commandments that Moses was all in a rant about?

I am not inclined to read any book that is two-thousand years old, which has been re-written as many times by scribes, and take it as factual evidence that someone actually created every living being. Nor am I likely to further believe that preferential treatment should fall on the ones that were made in his likeness. If there truly is a GOD (by the defintion Christians) then every living being will go to heaven or hell. Does that mean that humans are necessarily better than the ants that we step on while walking on the sidewalk? Does that mean that there will be good cockroaches in heaven, while the bad ones go to hell? Then what about the viruses that were created by GOD, but ultimately destroyed by mankind, do they go to heaven or hell? The virus simply feeds off of the land that it is given (a human body), and populates until it eventually over-populates and can no longer feed, then (on that body) the virus is extinct. Is that any different than what the humans are doing to the earth, or is it a microscopic view of what is to become of us?

I didn’t actually think that I was going to go into a ‘ripping on GOD’ mode today, but the other thing that I thougt I would mention was the Supreme Court’s ruling about the “Pledge of Allegiance”. Funny thing how time can change one’s perspective…

When this story broke, what a year and a half ago, I was thinking that yes, the separation of church and state should certainly make this one a slam-dunk. Everyone and their sister knows (at this point) that the words “under God” were added to the original pledge in the fifties. Should have been a simple victory to get the ‘under God’ words ruled as unconstitutional. (in any other administration, maybe)

What really steams me about the Supreme Court’s decision is that they threw out the case on a technicality. Every court that heard the case, prior to them, had made a ruling, thus it landed in the highest court in the country. The fact that the justices of the “Supreme Court” don’t have the cajones to handle this one really pisses me off. I honestly don’t care whether the words stay in the allegiance or not, I just wish that they would have stepped up to say that either yes or no it could be there. The result of their action is that we are going to be hearing/reading about this same damn thing in another few years when the actual custodial provider for the child gets before the “Supreme Court”, since there is no way that any State-Level judge is going to overturn the ruling.

Not that I particularly care for the particular line “Under God”, but I do feel that it was a pretty useful one. I suppose the other options would be, “one nation, under the statue of liberty, with liberty and justice for all.” See, that one seems redundant. How about this one, “one nation, under the sky, with liberty and justice for all.” Not much power to that one. How about, “one nation, under Oderus Urungas, with liberty and justice for all.” Probably not enough Gwar fans out there to appreciate that one…

Wait, I have it. To summarize the entire US population, while still being faithful to the original pledge, it must be, “One nation, under the golden arches, with liberty and McDonald’s for all”. Enough said.

Reagan

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So the day of mourning for former president Reagan is upon us. I am trying to mourn, yet my mourning capacity is being overwhelmed by other, more important, things. For instance, our country (the U.S.) is currently engaged in a so-called war that less than half of our people are behind and judging by the support by other countries I would think that the “vast majority” of other countries are opposed to it as well.

Could there be any connection between the untimely death of former president Reagan, and the timely use of the death to show that our country can display National sympathy? Heck no, I mean that would be like using national power to try to shift the world view of our country, right? That would be dirty, under-handed and exactly what I think the current administration is trying to do.

Had it been George Bush Sr. that died there would have been a lot of sympathy for ‘dubya’ but there wouldn’t have been anything beyond the sympathy one would extend to anyone who had lost a family member. Had it been the death of say Clinton, that would have been quickly swept under the carpet. The fact that it was Reagan has somehow made it into world news, to the point that it is in top stories on international yahoo sites.

Why?

When it comes to the question of ‘why’, there are precious few undisputable facts. Reagan was a president of the U.S.A., that is an undisputable fact. Everything that happened while he was in office is certainly disputable, and there are various liberal sites that try to argue that to this day. Reagan is often attributed with the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall, whether he had anything to do with either result is not a fact so much as it is a faith.

The Socioeconomic climate under Reagan was far different than any of his predecessors. The U.S. had a booming economy (which Reagan can not be given credit for, as the economy usually runs a few years behind the legislature), Russia was fast running out of both money and support for communism, computer technology was approaching the absolute bubble that burst early in the new millenium, the time was simply right.

Now I am going to go into complete and total speculation. Would Communist Russia have ended without Reagan ever having served in the oval office? Yes. Would the Berlin Wall have ever fallen had he not been in office? Yes. It is no coincidence that the technology boom (which did start in the eighties) made people all over the world see that they, too, could have things…Be the lord of their own homes and the such. While I am sure that the U.S.S.R. never gave them that information, I am equally as sure that photos and stories got back to them.

Reagan was a president, also he was a recent president. I think that this quote, gleaned from the internet, is pretty accurate:

Many presidential scholars say presidents need to be out of office at least 30 years for historians to make an honest assessment of how their achievements hold up. Some glittering records tarnish, while other stained presidencies acquire luster.

That is about all I have in me as far as talking about Reagan, yet I have nothing else on my list for bitching today so I will end this.

Tomorrow will bring even less interesting reading.

washer & dryer; Reagan

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This week reverted back to the non-post on wednesday, I would have let the fact be known on Tuesday had I known it anytime before about 4p.m. on Wednesday. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I have recently realized that there are only two types of people in the U.S.. Yes, I have broken down every single race, denomination and class into exactly two groups. Those two groups are 1) People who own matched washer/dryer sets, and 2) People who do their laundry at a central facility in an apartment complex, or, worse yet, have to take their laundry to some laundromat in a really bad area of town where fear of life becomes more important than the quality of cleaning. Now, this second group of people (like me) are the ones that are happy to find a used washer or dryer at a favorable price, brand names be damned! Having your own machines makes it an experience that is not quite so intolerable, as the machine is just running in the background while you are doing your normal routine. No special trip to the laundromat, no changing in dollars for quarters, no having to question why the one guy has seven garbage bags filled with bloody towels, etc..

I do understand that in some apartment complexes, and particularly in condos, they really don’t want you to have the machines. That is likely the reason that most apartments/condos do not even provide a hook-up for the devices. I understand also that the space in an apartment is pretty cramped but they have full washer/dryer stack things that are made to fit in the space of a small closet and have all of the features of normal machines, though not the same capacity. Imagine that your options were to do a few small loads of laundry a week, or drag it all down to the public laundry at the end of the week, I know which option I would choose, but, as previously stated, many apartments/condos do not have proper ventilation for the dryer.

That little digression aside, I was meaning to explain why washers and dryers can start out as pairs yet end up as singles. The reason for that is pretty simple; the washer just lasts longer than the dryer in about 90% of the pairs. The simple reasoning behind that is that the washer is a big tub that spins with a direct drive, while the dryer is an enormous drum that is belt-driven and relies on little wheels to keep it on course. The wheels on the dryer are likely to give out under a large load, that is, the bearings will begin to disentegrate and the dryer will sound like it is spinning a piece of lumber in it. When that happens, the people who own the matched set of laundry appliances will likely call a repairman. The dryer can be fixed for about Eight dollars retail in parts, anything above that is them being screwed by the manufacturer.

The dryer is the first casualty in most every case. While the dryer could be repaired for less than a week’s worth of quarters at the laundromat, it is very rare that a ‘set owner’ would actually call the man to repair it (since that would cost more than the value of the dryer in many cases) and so another dryer ends up on the street, soon to be picked up by a local “re-seller” of such items. Said ‘re-seller’ will pay the eight bucks for parts, fix the dryer, and then sell it for fifty. Hefty chunk of change for such a quick/easy repair, and having picked the dryer up from the side of the road, he had no investment into the machine.

The fate of the washer then goes into a kind of limbo. Some may sell the washer, some may gift it to a friend or relative in need of that appliance, it is just a bit strange that the washer never seems to hit the side of the road.

I have had to replace the wheels on a few dryers in my time, I don’t think I have ever had matching laundry appliances in that time either. Yet, when the washer starts to leak, I have no idea how to fix it. I am sure there is just a hose that is broken somewhere inside that porcelain machine, where it is I do not know. It is for exactly that reason that we will continue to use a Kenmore dryer once we get the Maytag washer. The old Gibson washer will be pushed to the curb, and likely someone will pick it up and throw a two dollar piece into it, then sell it along with a random dryer for 150 bucks for the set.

This one just goes to prove my point that while technology has advanced, if you do not know the exact type of technology necessary for said operation, you will pay whatever they ask.

• Random Thoughts on Reagan

I found out today that there is going to be a Federal Holiday (day of mourning) for the loss of ex-president Ronald Reagan, who passed away on Saturday. I was not old enough to understand a lot of the things that happened while he was president and I likely remember his successes more than his failures, even with that in mind, what did he really do?

The first thing, the one that comes immediately to my mind is the Iran Contra Scandal. Trading weapons for POW’s may seem like a good thing at the time, but in the end it is just wrong. Reagan introduced a tax cut that went across the board, low, medium, high class, the tax cut affected you immediately. Then he signed legislature to raise the same taxes many times over his presidency. It is not my intention to belittle him, but it is just so easy.

I am pretty liberal, very democratic, and I still think that Reagan was possibly the best negotiator that we have ever had when it comes to foreign policy. Some of his Kooky ideas, site “Star Wars” for example, were a bit over the edge, but he did preside at the time that communism was ending and for that I will respect him. Could the same thing have happened if there had been a different president at the time? I think the more relevant question is could it not have happened with another man in charge.

I suppose we will start calling this “Reagan Friday”. What is to stop the national rememberances from having a “Biggy Tuesday”? Biggy died for “gansta rap” and should be remembered…Where is his monument?

Richard Simmons arrested

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Once again I let Diablo consume a lot of my time yesterday. At least I got the update done before that happened. Today will likely end just the same as yesterday did. I am not really sure why but it seems that when I play diablo I will do it constant for a couple of weeks and then just give up on it for a while. Perhaps it is just playing a level act 1 start to act 5 end that sates my desire, then I can wait for a while before I am in its clutches again. Who knows.

• I absolutely love this story from Reuters. It is short so I will quote the whole thing.

Assault Case Against Fitness Guru Simmons Dropped
PHOENIX (Reuters) – A judge dismissed an assault charge against flamboyant fitness guru Richard Simmons after he and the man he was accused of slapping in the face reached a private settlement, lawyers said on Wednesday.

Terms of the settlement, reached last week between the celebrity trainer and motorcycle sales rep Chris Farney, 23, were not disclosed.

Simmons, 55, famed for his frizzy hair, glittery tank tops and exuberant demeanor, was cited for misdemeanor assault in March at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Police said the charge stemmed from an altercation that began when Farney, a fellow traveler at the airport, recognized Simmons as he was signing autographs and posing for pictures.

Farney, a burly Harley-Davidson motorcycle salesman who stands more than 6 feet tall and competes in the martial-arts sport of cage fighting, angered Simmons with a remark poking fun at Simmons’ exercise videos.

According to a police report on the incident, Simmons responded by telling Farney: “It’s not nice to make fun of people with issues,” then slapped him across the face.

A Phoenix municipal court judge dismissed the assault case during a pretrial conference last Friday between Simmons’ lawyer, prosecutors, Farney and his attorney, based on a signed statement from Farney that “full satisfaction has been received for the injury inflicted.” That document was filed on Wednesday.

Simmons’ lawyer, James Nesci, said Simmons was “certainly pleased with the outcome. All he really was looking for was a just conclusion. He believes he got it.”

AP Photo/Tina Fineberg

As you can see, this “burly Harley-Davidson motorcycle salesman who stands more than 6 feet tall and competes in the martial-arts sport of cage fighting,” bit off more than he could chew when he pissed off Richard Simmons. Just look at that photo, does that say ‘vicious killer’ or what? We all know that the only reason Simmons is still alive after slapping the guy is that the guy knew that if he didn’t hit back there would be a monetary resolution. That is a sad statement about humanity today but one that is undeniably true. We will do whatever it takes to piss off anyone who is in the public eye and in posession of a decent amount of cash, then cry like a baby when they react. In this case, I am not sure if they would have found Simmons guilty of an assault anyway. He slapped a man twice his size across the face for poking fun at him. That is not really an assault, it is a suicide. The only way a jury would have convicted him would be if the jury had consisted of a bunch of burly homophobes.

The sad truth is that so many of the cases involving celebrities are utter bull-shit that it is hard to pick through them and find the one in a hundred that is real. Take the trial of Kobe Bryant for instance. Did he have sex with that girl, yes. Was it consentual sex? There are only two people in the entire world that know the truth. I personally believe that it was consentual when it happened, then the girl realized that if it was not consentual she would be able to file a civil suit against him and get a boat- load of money. I feel a little bit more strongly about this case (though I am not actively following it) than I do about others because the woman in question turned in the panties that she had been wearing that night, and they had sperm from three separate persons in them. I am not sure if that was allowed to be entered into evidence in the case, also I guess it would be possible to rape a slut, but that really seems to take away from the credibility when she is screaming rape.

Totally on the other side of the spectrum, Mike Tyson was convicted of rape. I am pretty sure that he did it. Beyond that, I am pretty sure that he probably has done it a lot more than just once and has kept the other women quiet through intimidation.

There really has got to be some middle ground. The fact that I truly believe that one of these athletes did actually commit a rape while I believe that the other didn’t makes me believe that everyone else has already formed an opinion also. When the person is accused of the crime it is on the news 24/7 for days or even weeks before the person is actually indicted. By that point nearly everyone has decided whether they think he/she is guilty or innocent. The news usually also releases a bunch of information about both the accused and the victim that is often not admissable in court. With that kind of coverage in the news there is no way that anyone in the public eye could ever get a fair trial. Unless the trial were held in another country.

I suppose the easiest way for athletes/celebrities to avoid this type of situation would be to quit fucking strangers. Of course we all know that is something that will Never happen. So the next logical step would be to assure the silence of anyone you did have sex with; offer them some cash to keep quiet. Yet, that could result in a scandal like Michael Jordan faced, where the woman that he had been paying to silence suddenly upped the amount of money she wanted to maintain silence. Then Jordan had to sue her for extortion and had to drag his own image through the mud. Maybe, then, the answer would be to kill anyone that you have sex with, as a precaution. That seems to be a pretty brutal way to deal with it, but it would solve the problem.

Thank the random fluctuations of time and space that I am not in the public eye, and, therefore, not rich, which leads directly to my ability to keep it in my pants.

ICQ; Abu Ghraib

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I didn’t have to work late today so there will be an update! Rejoice or find medication depending on how you feel about my little update things.

I spoke yesterday about the local election. Well the election had the highest turn out that we have had in my memory, with over a thousand votes cast. The person that I (and my wife) voted for lost by thirteen votes. Keep that in mind when you are talking about your vote not counting. I bet we could just walk around town and find thirteen people that would have voted for our guy had they known it was going to be that close. I am sure that the same could be said for the other guy as well, though the last position that he ran for was city council and he won that by a lot. It was my thinking that a lot of the people who didn’t show up to vote were going to vote for the guy who lost, but didn’t vote because the guy who won had won his last post in a landslide. I suppose it is like being really drunk and hooking up with a transvestite hooker at last call, you only regret it the next day, and for the rest of your life, or so I’ve heard. Yes, I do believe that was the worst analogy of all time! Daddy always told me if I was going to write really bad analogies I had to be the best.

I had not used ICQ for several years, now I find that it is on this new machine. I am not sure why I quit using it, wait, oh, yes, okay, one day it just quit working and they wanted me to download a newer version of it and I just really didn’t want to. All the people that were on my list were people that had found my number through my old website or the Megadeth chat. Not really the type of individuals that I really would like to currently try to hold a conversation with. Unless of course we were trying to recreate the famous Budweiser commercial. To my surprise, my old ICQ number still worked after all of these years. The number is 14479550. If you wonder why I remember that, go ahead and ask why I know that the license plate on my boss’s truck is af410p, or why I know that the van is ‘510lzn’, or why I know the corvette that my dad drove had the plate ‘jng457’ (he died 14 years ago, btw). My first motorcycle had the plate ‘m413432’, which I remember mostly because it was quite similar to my dad’s driver’s license which was ‘1343132’. I don’t know why but I just genarally remember trivial numbers after a single glance. I haven’t yet figured out how to use all the credit card numbers that I have memorized for evil, but when I do, boy god there are going to be a lot of pizzas going to a couple of people that I strongly dislike.

• I checked out the Political Animal website again today and it turns out that there are a lot of stories breaking about the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison and the possibility that someone other than the few people who were photographed may have been involved…DUH!…If you are doing something that you know is wrong you are not going to pose for photos. If, however, your head of command comes in and says, “I wonder what they would look like in a naked pyramid.” That might make you want to 1) force them to get into a naked pyramid and 2) not be afraid to be photographed while doing it.

I don’t see any other way this could have happened. Of course there is all the requisite double-talk and blatant untruthful information coming from people the higher up you get in the chain of command, but it is all a load of steamy, smelly crap.

I just tried to google up a story about the guy in the fifties (I think) that used a little box to study how far a person would go when being commanded. I was not able to find the story that I was looking for, but it broke down thusly. Someone would apply for and get a job to test a new machine that was meant to cause harm to another human. An anonymous person in a lab coat would tell him to intensify the pain at regular intervals. No one was being hurt, there was just a tape playing of someone screaming in different degrees of pain as the dial got turned ever higher (yet the subject person on the dial did not know that). Most of the people would turn the dial past the point where it said certain injury or death. As I said, I was not able to find an actual article about the machine or the tests that they did, but I think that is quite relevant for the situation in Abu Ghraib. Hell, I think just the fact that I can now spell that without having to go to google must prove something…

I really think that the people who were in charge at that prison knew exactly what was going on, hell, they were probably the photographers. No one would have ever said a word about it had the U.S. media not got a hold of it and started to strangle it. Whether this is good or bad is something that is quite subjective. Does humiliating foriegn soldiers actually make them give up information? Does treating the same soldiers humanely make them less likely to divulge information? The truth about all that happened at Abu Ghraib will never be known, or if it is ever known it will be fifty years from now when the history channel can interview some of those that were involved while they are on their death beds.

I really believe that what we are seeing here is just a microcosm of the totally inept and monumentally fucked-up approach that Dubya adopted when he decided to attack IRAQ. It is like he thought that since his daddy was able to just walk right through Kuwait, he would do the same in IRAQ. The one thing that he totally forgot to factor in was that his daddy really did liberate Kuwait from the evil IRAQ, while he was trying liberate the evil IRAQ from a single guy. Iraq didn’t want to be ‘populated’ by our military, they wanted Saddam and his regime gone and then they would figure something out. Had we left Iraq very shortly after Saddam and his cohorts fled the country, and left Iraq to liberate themselves, we would be in far better shape than wer are now. After all, a forced democrocy is little more than a tyranny with a different name.

Once again this has gone political, I must end this now. I will leave you with a final thought, “Vote Quimby”.

Testing viruses; Bullshit news story

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Not a lot to talk about today. It was local election day. Yet they held an entire election for thse single purpose of electing a new mayor. That seemed like a monumental waste of taxpayer money to me. Sure all of the people that they staff during the voting are volunteers, but to print out all of the ballots and to rent (I assume) all of the equipment that they use for the vote is really just depressing. If they were only going to have a single thing on the ballot, couldn’t they have instead just got us all in an auditorium for two minutes and then just done a quick show of hands? It certainly would have been infinitely easier, but that would have made the ballot pretty public as opposed to ‘secret’. Why can’t they work out an internet voting thing that runs by your social security number? You log in with the number and some personal information, make a quick vote and log out. Faster, easier better all around. If you are concerned about the possibility of cheating, keep in mind that the person who gave me a ballot didn’t even check my ID, and I didn’t give her my full name, I just said ‘B,U,R’ to get her to the correct page, after that I could have picked from quite a few different names. At least with the internet idea I would have to know someones social, as well as having other information about them. Pointless speculating though.

• This is just something that I have been a tad curios about for the last few days. Let’s say that you are a budding programmer, you aren’t able to get the job that you really want and so you decide to go ahead and code a malicious virus. How do you test that? Sure you have now written the ultimate malicious program and all, but if there were typos it wouldn’t work, right? Do you have to run the thing on your own machine first to make sure that it infects the boot sector just how you had planned? How about one of the viruses that spreads through email, do you just go ahead and send it to your friends and family and make sure that it goes to their friends? Just a curious thought.

• Now for possibly the least believable news story of all time! That is of course not counting all of the stuff that you see in things like the ‘Enquirer’ and ‘Sun’. This one, I think, is trying to be serious and quite matter-of-fact. It is also complete and total bullshit.

Graphic, Violent Images Can Curb Kids’ Aggression. Now that is a hell of a headline. That is also a headline that is going to take a hell of a convincing argument to back up. I must mention that the headline itself seems out of context considering what the story talks about but still it is a damn bold headline. For the sake of brevity I will just quote a single paragraph from the story, then add my spin.

After looking at those pictures, participants showed signs that they would be “less likely to solve interpersonal conflict in a violent way,” study author Dr. Edward E. Cornwell, III told Reuters Health.

That quote was in referrence to having 9-17 year olds look at images of people in the emergency room after having been shot, stabbed or otherwise mutilated. It is much like when I had to watch all of the videos in driver’s education about people getting in horrible car crashes and then going to the emergency room. Sure I drove better for about a day, then it was back to the insane way that a teenager will drive. Perhaps that few seconds of clarity can change a life or two, but when the majority of them are going to go back home and play some game like ‘Hitman’ or ‘Grand theft auto’, where there appear to be no consequences for violence, I find it difficult to believe that they will actually change their tendencies based on a photo. For the most part when teens reach their mid-twenties they begin to understand that they are adults and that is when they decide to start being actual citizens. It doesn’t require any horrible images, it just requires one too many times of waking up in a pool of your own vomit in the back of your neighbor’s station wagon. This is, of course, my opinion on the matter and without any substantial proof to back it up. Does that differ in some way from the article I am talking about? I don’t think so.

To put a different light on the same idea, let us say that we start showing horny teen-aged boys porno videos. Sure they are going to be less likely to have sex in the very immediate future (like the next ten minutes), but then they will begin to crave it. I suppose that it is a little bit different but I can’t really see how. Show them people being killed and they won’t kill, show them people having sex and they won’t have sex. I don’t think either of those ideas are sound enough to even try to do a comprehensive study on.

Perhaps if there were more shows that showed the actual results from your decision to kill, like the shows on A&E that show the one time killer spending his life in prison for a few furious seconds that he would really like to have back. That would probably be a better premise to use than showing horrible photos. Or how about having the parents of the person that he killed being let alone with him in a room, with a board, with a nail in it, while he is tied up, and they have an hour of ‘No questions asked’ interrogation. The parents would not be prosecuted if he somehow died. That might slow it down.

I don’t like where I am going with this and I have even deleted a few parapraphs that I thought were a bit too harsh. I hope you were able to see my actual point, whether you saw the point or not, my email address is below and I welcome your comments.

Collection agency; News; Gay marriage

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I was thinking that when I got home from work today I would go ahead and finish off cleaning up the chaos that is the ‘computer room’. Instead, I got a letter in the mail from a collection agency regarding a long distance company that I have not had for several months. I did a quick check of my banking register to find that yes the amount in question was 103.53, and the check for it had been written and mailed forever and a day ago. I don’t keep my bank statements anymore so I had to get online to find the particular check (706 in this case) to make sure that it had been cashed. The company had cashed the check a couple of weeks ago, then turned me over to a collection agency without even sending me one of those demanding ‘final notice’ type letters. So, I called the collection agency to give them the information about the check, the date it was cashed and an offer to get a copy of the check emailed to them. She asked me to hold for a moment, I assume she was calling the referring company at that point, then came back on and said that the processing time for payments can sometimes be longer than expected, but noted that if I call her back in a week we can see if the problem has resolved itself.

I know that companies make this type of error frequently, I do not really hate them for it as it is just a clerical error that is usually quite easy to fix. What can their defense possibly be when you produce a copy of the check that they cashed? The thing that I find irritating is that she would not say that, yes, the company had cashed the check weeks ago and it was an error on their part to turn the bill over to collection. So will my credit report now show that I left the bill unpaid long enough for it to be turned over to a collection agency, while the reality is that the bill had long been paid? If that turns out to be the case I will likely be more than irritated, hostile perhaps. And honestly if they thought that I had not paid them, why not one of those lame courtesy calls that could have cleared it all up when I explained to them that they had cashed the check? I am not entirely sure if companies moving their call centers to foriegn countries is really working out all that well in that respect.

Hopefully this situation will not escalate to the point where I have to get the Attorney General involved. That may seem far fetched, but my wife had to do exactly that to get her cell phone company to finally admit that they had cashed her check. We still don’t know whose account they posted that payment to, but it certainly wasn’t hers and it took government intervention to get the matter cleared up. Now That is customer service.

• I haven’t posted many news items here lately since the only thing there seems to be to post is about prison abuse. Today, however, I found a few things that I am going to comment on, not because they are newsworthy but because they are humorous, except one.

I usually just read the headlines from Yahoo News, and the little story that they have there, if the story interests me I will go to a major news site and search for the subject. This has worked pretty well for me in the past, it seems that I may have been getting a lot of bogus information though.

The first instance can be found Here. It is in regards to drugs being used by participants in the Olympics. But read this quote:

Greene said Monday he stands behind the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency rule that can bar an athlete from competing in the Athens Olympics without a positive drug test. On Sunday, Jones said she would go to court if USADA held her out because of the rule.

I read that paragraph several times to make sure that I was seeing it as it appeared and not omitting any words. You see the thing is that most athletes get banned from the sport because they test positive for drugs. So is that saying that we actually require our Olympians to use drugs? If that is the case then perhaps the athletes in question should just smoke a joint and get re-tested.

This one is pretty good also. It is an article about states that are run by republicans raising taxes. And at quite an alarming rate:

Ohi o. Spending in the Buckeye state has risen 71% during the past decade, when Republicans have controlled both the governor’s office and the legislature. To fund this spending, Republican Gov. Bob Taft, backed by the GOP legislature, has increased the sales tax by 20%, upped the gasoline tax by two cents a gallon and increased numerous small business fees.

Wow. The sales tax here just went up by 2/10ths of a percent (city tax) and I found that a bit irritating. Imagine if someone suddenly upped your sales tax by 20%! That would likely be the start of a revolt. I think that what they mean is that if the tax there was 10% previously it is now 12%, yet since the tax itself is measured in percentage it makes it look like it would have gone from 10% to 30%. Perhaps they could have elaborated on that just a bit to let you know exactly what they were trying to say?

I have said it since day one, I don’t proofread. It may be a fault but it is all mine. I really think that a site as popular as Yahoo News should go ahead and do a bit of proofreading.

• Here is a news item that is just plain depressing. Dubya has decided to start attacking gay marriage again. Could there be a worse time for him to do it? Actually I guess the question should be could there be a better time for him to do it. A quote from the article:

Noting that he had called on Congress some time ago to pass a constitutional amendment banning such marriages, Bush said “the need for that amendment is still urgent, and I renew that call today.”

Hmmm. Makes me wonder why this is suddenly ‘urgent’. Maybe he actually has advisors that read the latest popularity surveys for him and let him know that he doesn’t have much time left in office? Imagine if they do get that legislation pushed through. In they eyes of all but the most hardcore right-wing supporters, the legacy of Dubya will be failing to finish the job that his daddy started and pushing western society back a few decades by making homosexuality illegal. How can anyone have a set of beliefs that are just so idiotic and be in control of the most powerful country on earth?

Well I guess that is about enough for today. Check back tomorrow for more of my cheery, happy writing.

Oral sex as birth control

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I got off of work late today and had every intention of not doing a post. Then I happened upon an article that just has so many tangents that one could write about that I simply can not resist putting in my two cents. This may not be the best subject for me to tackle but I am going to give it a go anyway.

The article in question is Oral sex lessons to cut rates of teenage pregnancy . It is a very short read, but such a fascinating subject. There are many other positives to teens engaging in oral sex, yet saving their ‘virginity’ for their life partner. It slows or stops the spread of AIDS (in their demographic) for instance. I can always trust that Flux over at BlackChampagne will have written something whenever I try to get into any sex discussion, and you will see that again, I was not disappointed I always enjoy reading the stuff that he writes regarding sex, as he has a way of making it more humorous than it should ever be, take the first line from his bit about the subject for instance, he says, “A study of the infection rates of swallowing fellatio-ers shows that none of them have reported HIV from their tasty non-dairy treat indulgence.”

At any rate, The original article (which, I must note, is a British article) goes on to say,

Encouraging schoolchildren to experiment with oral sex could prove the most effective way of curbing teenage pregnancy rates, a government study has found. Pupils under 16 who were taught to consider other forms of ‘intimacy’ such as oral sex were significantly less likely to engage in full intercourse, it was revealed.

I really think this is quite a wonderful approach to solving an age old problem, though the diseases and teen pregnancy are not really an ‘age old problem’, which is where the U.S. just totally loses touch with reality.

Times have changed a bit since the time when the white-haired guys who are now running the country were in their teens. The old-school idea of preaching abstinence is just not getting us anywhere. The fact that the Republican White House is also trying to keep from offering birth control to teens is worsening the problem. In the minds of the people who are trying to make the abstinence/no birth control thing work we are still in like 1950. Whether the times were really that different when they were in their teens, or whether a simple ‘hand-job’ was what worked to sate their desires is something that that we will never know. What we do know is that teen pregnancy is exploding all over the country, as are the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

Why is the U.S. the country that still clings to such old taboos about sex? Britain has seen that their teen pregnancy rate has skyrocketed, and are now planning to inform (not teach) children about other means of sexual gratification in order to slow it down. The U.S. is standing pat with the ‘if we keep telling them not to have sex, eventually they will listen’ approach. I don’t know, I think Britain has better odds at success. Perhaps a plan such as theirs could also mean that a girl could lose her virginity when she was really ready to, as opposed to the basic ‘date-rape’ situation that has probably claimed the virginity of more than half of all women.

Another consideration which I had not thought about until just now is that, in the teens, traditional intercourse would not benefit the girl in any way. Leave her scarred for life, sure, but satisfied?? Big NO on that front. Your average male at that age could probably have an orgasm if a pretty girl was walking down the aisle on the school bus. I have never been female and at that age, but I am thinking that it takes a bit more than a second-and-a-half of phallus insertion to reach the ‘pleasure level’.

If informing (not teaching) students about oral sex could slow down the teen pregnancy rate, and thus cut down on our taxes, as there are less bastard children to raise, why not give it the thumbs up? Honestly, even if the thought of ‘oral sex’ sickens you (male or female), would it be worse to mother/father a child that is born with AIDS, or to take the initiative and make sure that there would be no child, if even just to grow up a bit yourself?

I have long been saying that I would rather pay for teen birth control than to pay for the bastard child that will likely be on government assistance until the day he/she dies. The ‘oral sex ed.’ thing seems to be working in Britain, as it has lowered teen prenancy by 20% in test schools. Those are numbers that I can get behind. But then I was a teen-aged boy at one point, and I would have ‘gotten behind’ damn near anything that wiggled.

Meta blogging; Abu Ghraib

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I spent a bit of time on Wednesday, and an hour and a half today, getting finished with the March 2004 archive page . That, of course, required reading through my posts from the month of March which, while time-consuming, was a lot less depressing than I thought it might be. It turns out that it really is better to let what you have written sit there for at least a month before you try to read it and do a short description, as it seems that you are looking at it with fresh eyes. There were a couple of essay type things that I wrote during the month of March that I think were really quite good. There may be some point later when I pick a couple of them out and post a section of ‘stuff I wrote that doesn’t totally suck’ on here, but that would make people quit reading my daily update, which usually does suck, and then just go to the link for the stuff that doesn’t suck. The inherent problem is that I do not know if what I am writing sucks until I read it a lot later than when I write it. In my mind everything I write sucks, only time can clear my mind enough to look at what I have written with a clear perspective and that does not lend itself to making sure that every word I put down is worth the paper keyboard it is written on.

The other thing that I noticed as I was reading through the old posts is that I seem to be getting progressively better at getting my idea down as time goes on. It seems that with each new post I get just a bit better at keeping all of the ideas in my head long enough to put each one down and move on, while in the earliest posts I was trying to type all of them at once and often lost most of them in the process. The result of that was that each paragraph that I had written would look like it was four paragraphs that I had taken a sentence or two from and tried to make into a single, flowing concept. It was shit, honestly. Though I am always my worst critic, I am sure that anyone reading this would really have to agree that my writing in this form has gotten better from when I started. That being said, I still have a long way to go to make entire posts that will hold a reader’s attention and not make me look like the ass that I am. But isn’t that what I signed up for when I started this whole page in the first place?

• I haven’t posted any news here for a while, not for lack of trying. I was hoping to get a bit or two up here today, but it seems that all there is to talk about anymore is the damn Abu Ghraib garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I think that what our people did to those prisoners was inhumane. From the pictures that I have seen, though, it did not seem as there was any physical abuse to the men. It was sick and wrong for anyone to even stage the events for such photos, but it happened, and we (the U.S.) did it to prisoners of war (well I guess there is a loophole so they aren’t actually POW’s, still it was inhumane). If we (the U.S.) can’t understand that the entire world has a microscope on the way we are handling ourselves in the so-called ‘War on Terror’ this is going to get infinitely worse for our brave men and women who are there actually fighting it.

Whether those photos were staged by the U.S. troops who posed in them as ‘trophies’ to take home with them, or if that is the way we treat prisoners on a daily basis seems to be a dead discussion in every nation except ours. Less than half of our country is behind the war in Iraq at this point and I don’t think we have any allies left that would actually send more troops over to help us if it came to that. That whole war has gone completely to hell. I am pretty sure that Dubya doesn’t mind, since it has driven oil prices over forty dollars a barrel, and that is extra profit for him, but now it appears that he is ready to bail out. Just makes me wonder what his reason for bailing out is, the fact that he has a financial windfall with oil prices skyrocketting, or the fact that an american civilian got his head cut off.

That is exactly why I don’t like to talk politics. I have some pretty strong views, and Dubya is such an easy target. I sure wish I hadn’t voted for him, but I did. So, please, to help clear my conscience, do not vote for him next election. We have seen the FUBAR that the country can become when being backed only by ‘big oil’, and that somehow drives the prices up. I am so sickened by the situation that I am honestly thinking about putting down ‘Reagan’ on my vote, as a write-in.

• Guild Wars

Today is the last day of the E3 trial of the aforementioned game. I played it a bit each day that it was online and it seemed pretty cool. The one thing that I question is whether the local PC crashes that I experienced were based on it downloading ever more data, or if my system just can not run the game. I am leaning towards the game downloading as you play, I have all of the minimums beat by a lot but still get weird freezes when trying to play it. I hope that they get that all worked out when they go to Beta testing, which I am sure they will, and the game could be really cool. Also, having the game already installed on your machine, as opposed to having to download each zone that you enter, would likely make it much easier to play. I am not going to throw out an opinion based on my experience as it would be quite negative, if they do have a beta test for it, though, I am going to jump all over that. It would be extremely cool to see such a game in its infancy working towards a world-wide release. I do suppose they would likely be looking for players who had cable or dsl connections though, yet, at the same time they must be trying to sell it to normal people like me who have neither., My hope is not dead yet…

Dogs in the news

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Yesterday’s update was by far the largest one I have done to date. I didn’t think that was going to be the case, as I had no idea what to write about when I began it, that was why I just left the four paragraphs from the previous day on there. As it turns out I had a lot to write about, so much in fact that it bored my wife. I think it was probably because of the subject matter. Also I made reference to airplane parts without really describing what they were, but I figured if you had never built or flown an r.c. plane you likely were going to skip that section anyway.

I fear this update may go even longer since I really don’t have anything to write about today. Nothing in the news is worth posting about, well unless I really wanted to beat the dead horse that is the situation in Iraq and I am so not going there. If you want to know the truth about what the world thinks about the situation in Iraq (as opposed to the US Media blowing sunshine up your ass) just read a paper or website based anywhere except the US. We are pretty much universally hated at this point. Because I like to speculate, and love to look for worst case scenarios, imagine this; The US administration continues to fight in Iraq, despite the whole UN asking us to stand down. The US then invades North Korea, even as the UN advises against it. The UN then eliminates our position in the UN entirely. With us no longer having a say, the rest of the countries decide that we are a major threat and must be eliminated. The UN makes a unanimous decision to invade the US to free the rest of the world from the threat. The majority of our army is still deployed in north Korea and Iraq, so it is no problem for the world’s combined military to land in Canada and begin their attack from there, being as the US/Canadian border is the largest unprotected border in the world. Think about it, what country out there doesn’t have a bone to pick with the US? Our demise would be pretty swift. Hopefully, though, that will be the next video game coming to a store near you and not the truth about what could happen if we continue the path we are on.

• I got an email a few days ago regarding my dogs. I sent an email back in response but, just for fun I am going to post his email here. Unfortunately my exact response to his email is on my old computer and I have no intention of taking the time to plug it back in to quote myself. I remember what I was getting at, so I will write a new response, which may vary vastly from the one I sent him.

No offense intended, but out of curiosity, how do you read this type of article, or the dozens of others like it every year about the latest pit bull mauling/murder, and feel safe with your pets? Blog topic for a pit bull owner, eh?
http://www.thelouisvillechannel.com/news/3243296/detail.html

I mean sure, no one thinks their dogs will ever do that. But then again, that’s what the parents of that little girl thought too, until earlier this week. I’m never relaxed around any dog large enough to possibly do me severe physical harm, and that’s all dogs, not just the types that have been bred for hundreds of generations to be vicious, deadly fighting machines.

I will address his last point first. I know that dogs are basically wolves that have been tamed, and as such they already have it in their genes to kill. When dogs were domesticated, some of them were domesticated a bit less than others, like pit bulls. The thing is that your genes don’t necessarily mean that you are going to be like your ancestors. You are a product of your upbringing, just as a dog is a product of theirs. If you get a puppy and truly love and nurture the dog from birth I bet it is a lot less likely to be vicious than a dog that you buy as a puppy then stick on a ten foot chain in the yard and forget about until the day it either dies or kills.

As far as dogs in general, I am afraid of them also. I am deathly afraid of dogs like rottweilers. Unlike the mixed breed pit-bulls that I own, I have never seen a friendly rottweiler. Those dogs look like killers and are killers. They probably don’t get nearly as much publicity about killing children since any sensible parent would not own one of those dogs if they had children, or vice-versa.

The other thing about pit-bulls is that I think they get a really bum wrap. Both of our dogs are identified as ‘pit-bull mix’ which I think is code for ‘we got no idea’ at the local animal shelter. That way when the dog decides to eat your family they can say, “well we did tell you that it was a pit-bull”. That being whether the dog had any pit-bull in it or not. I say this based on the fact that I was trying to find a picture of a ‘pure bred’ pit-bull while trying to see if that was what our new puppy was, that was when I discovered that the pit-bull can look like a labrador, or a dalmation, or a greyhound, while it is in fact a ‘Bull Terrier’, I am not joking on this. The breed ‘pit bull’ is actually a ‘Bull Terrier”. I have found many images that closely resemble both of my mild-manored dogs.

I actually read a lot more about the “Pit Bull” than I had ever known, while I was at that site. It seems that the Pit Bull is getting even worse publicity than what I was thinking, as evidenced by This Report, which I will quote a bit of:

The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 600,000 in the USA. Comparatively speaking you are 6 times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be killed by a dog of any breed. When you further break down the odds of being attacked and killed by a Pit Bull the odds are in your favor -approximately 1 in 145,000,000. That’s million folks. In contrast, you are 4 times more likely to be killed by a cow in the USA than any breed of dog, much less a Pit Bull.
So why do some dogs attack?

The answer is quite simple really.

• Irresponsible pet owners.

• Irresponsible parents.

• Instigation by the “so called” victims themselves.

Although there are some bad dogs out there these are in the minority and the tendency is to blame the dogs and / or their owners without just cause.

Now, I am not necessarily trying to defend the pit bull, but after educating myslef on the subject I think that it is far more likely that the dogs involved in the vicious, mutilating attacks are of the rottweiler or doberman breed and mixed with the vicious ‘Bull Terrier’ (as a matter of fact, I can not find a single story at the AKC.org where a registered ‘Bull Terrier’ has ever killed anyone.). At the same time I do read/hear the news, and as such I doubt that I would ever have both a baby and a ‘pit bull’ in the house at the same time. I certainly love my dogs, but if there did happen to be an infant in my home the rules may have to change at least long enough to let the infant develop the ability to walk/run in case it did all go bad.