Category Archives: social

Government News

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My erratic posting schedule continues, and for no damn reason I might add. Consider it a respite from the mundane garbage that I throw up here, or not, it is all up to you.

• The Presidential election went horribly to shit, as we all know, and now we are starting to see a bit of the aftermath. This first item is just a bit depressing, but at the same time it is someone with the cajones to do what so many of us want to:

Ground Zero Suicide Driven by Election
NEW YORK – A 25-year-old man from Georgia who was apparently distraught over President Bush (news – web sites)’s re-election shot and killed himself at ground zero. Andrew Veal’s body was found Saturday morning inside the off-limits site, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. A shotgun was found nearby, but no suicide note was found, Coleman said.

…

“I’m absolutely sure it’s a protest,” Mary Anne Mauney, Veal’s supervisor at the lab, told The Daily News. “I don’t know what made him commit suicide, but where he did it was symbolic.”

Now that is just the type of ‘take action’ attitude we are looking for in this country, right? Of course it is difficult to try to blame an action as extreme as suicide on a political election, but haven’t most liberal people at least thought about it? Especially considering that:

Bush to Seek Gay-Marriage Ban in New Term -Aide
Rove said Bush would “absolutely” push the Republican-controlled Congress for a constitutional amendment, which he said was needed to avert the aims of “activist judges” who would permit gay marriages.

There is a lot more to that article than the little part that I slapped up here. The only reason that I chose that particular quote to slap up here is that it just seems so humorous to me, well it would be were it not an actual view that someone has…Especially when that someone is in charge of the country and likely capable of buying enough people off to suit his own agenda.

Honestly, aren’t the ‘activist judges’ trying to protect the rights of every man or woman when they make a ruling stating that same sex marriage is not against the law? I know that it really pisses off a lot of really homophobic people from the south, but that should not be the point. This country was (supposedly) built from the ‘melting pot’ of the entire world, yet, as little as twenty years ago marrying someone outside of your own race was still considered taboo (likely still is in some of the more Southern conservative states). That is pretty much how homosexuality is today.

Allowing homosexuals to marry is not going to hurt anyone. It is not going to make the ‘sanctity of marriage’ any less valuable. It is only going to allow a couple of people to have a piece of paper to prove their love for each other. It seems so simple a point that I get really irritated about it. How is it possible that the most powerful nation in the entire world can have such closed-minded beliefs? Oh, wait, that’s right, it is all about the bible (which, I assure you I have read cover to cover more than once. It is possibly the best pulp fiction of all time. Rife with incest, rape and murder just to name a few of its best qualities. If you have never read it, why not? Best novel ever!).

I don’t really know why I really start to rant when homosexuality is the issue, I think it might be because of the horrible hypocrisy of the church/state issue, i.e. Why is it that Priests can rape six year old boys and get little more than a slap on the wrist, while sex between two consenting adults, of the same sex, is considered a crime against God? What of the Priests who are not only gay, but gay pedophiles? They don’t love, or want to marry, any of the little six-year-olds that they molest and rape. Why aren’t there more of these priests being put on the stand to answer for their sins? Did the state and the church meld again?

Of course Bush was reelected based on his ‘war on terror’ schtick, and there is some pretty solid evidence of his sincerity right here:

Terror Financing Fines Fall After 9/11
The average penalty for a company doing business with Iran, Iraq (news – web sites), North Korea (news – web sites), Sudan or Libya dropped nearly threefold, from more than $50,000 in the five years before the 2001 attacks to about $18,700 afterward, according to a computer-assisted analysis of federal records.

Now that is the type of thing you would expect to see from a country dedicated to stopping the funding of terrorists, right? Hmm. I think there might have been at least a bit of misleading information being thrown about in the last election.

I have said it before and I will say it again, “Hell in a handbasket”.

• I am left to wonder one thing. Does the entire world only see the same headlines that I see? Being totally honest, I really hate the USA based on the headlines that I am seeing. Perhaps not as much as the rest of the world hates us, as I don’t have plans to kill innocent people based on it, but enough that I really wish that I was a citizen of some country that is not going to be the site of jihad for the forseeable future. And that is why I am a bad American, I like to look at things objectively and form my own opinion. Maybe I should just go watch Springer, intelligence and objectivity don’t seem to be as usefull as I thought they’d be.

Diablo and Republicans (you never see them in the same place at the same time)

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After my last post, Diablo happened. I got stuck, once again, in that neverending cycle of ‘just one more waypoint’, but then I have the area cleared so might as well do whatever act related quest is necessary, etc. That consumed most of my day on Monday. Tuesday brought about election day, and with that I found myself watching the news all night just waiting for them to say that they had grossly miscalculated the votes and that Bush was actually way behind in voting. Of course several hours of that didn’t yield any results, nor did it result in my typing anything here for you to read. Wednesday was just a late day at work, as that was the day of our bi-weekly grocery delivery. That leaves me here on Thursday wondering how it is that I have not updated this page since Sunday. Time sucks.

A question that I asked my wife last night, that I am really curious to know the answer to, is “What point is there in having a democracy if the majority of the people vote for the wrong person?” I know that the question is based on some pretty faulty logic, but in reality I think that it is a lot more true than it appears. This year’s elections have made it so that all three branches of government are being ruled by Republicans. Not just any Republicans in many cases, but the evangelical, second-coming-of-Christ type Republicans. I am sure that I am being a bit cynical here, but, isn’t that sort of like having a dictatorship? Well, I guess it does differ from a dictatorship in the fact that 51% of the people voted for it. Why this happened truly escapes me, makes me sick to my stomach, and further pisses me off since I have been paying money into Social Security since I was 16. While I have only been paying it for fourteen years, I will still be pissed when Dubya gets something through congress to do away with it completely. I also know that they (Republicans) are not actually trying to do away with Social Security, only change the way it is managed (like a forced retirement plan for people who don’t ever save money).

Here it is in all its pixelated glory. My breakdown of why I really, really, really hate the Republican agenda. Really rich people pay more taxes than poor people, which makes sense if you do it all by percentages. Really poor people pay no taxes, then get government assistance programs to send a bit more money to them, since they are so poor that they can’t afford a house, car, food and other necessities. The very wealthy people feel that they are being taxed too much for the sake of supporting the poor. The poor think that they aren’t getting enough assistance since life didn’t give them a fair roll of the dice. The solution, in the Republican’s eyes, is to decrease taxes on the very rich, and decrease government assistance programs to the very poor. That is where the problems all start. The rich (current administration included) don’t want to give any money to the poor, don’t want to take back tax cuts made for the very rich, and don’t care to hear any proposal whereby the poor can make it up to, at least, poverty level. So taxes must be raised, but on whom? Well, the middle class of course. So it pushes on, the poor staying poor, the middle class getting closer and closer to poverty, while the upper class roll around in their collective piles of money.

This might have made me sound like a freak, might even have worked itself into a full blown Manifesto, were it not for the fact that the day Dubya cut taxes on the wealthy last year, my state and federal taxes went up. I am all for a smaller government, I mean, hell, if we were to take away the wages of all of the Senators and House Representitives we might be able to work things out. How many millions of dollars did each candidate spend on the campaign trail this year? Imagine if that money was just sent to underfunded projects across the country, we might have been able to do some good.

With luck, I might be back to normal form tomorrow (be it good or bad). That is all for today.

Osama Bin Laden

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I must admit that I was a little bit disappointed that the Republicans didn’t have Osama in a freezer somewhere, with hopes of thawing him out just in time for the election. Yet I still think that it is quite timely that he happens to turn up just now. It would be damn near ‘un-American’ to say that I was pretty sure that he would either be caught, or killed right about the same time as the elections in the U.S. Thankfully, I have been proven wrong. It will take weeks to seriously authenticate the source of the latest video, and by then the election will be over and done with. Does that mean that the administration knew it was going to happen (honestly now, every liberal in America was expecting something like this), or is it just another in a string of ‘strange coincidences’ since dubya stumbled into office?

The thing about this latest ‘Bin Laden’ video is that it is just so timely. I am a tad surprised that neither of our presidential candidates had a good speech prepared for this eventuality. Perhaps he (Osama) aired his video a day early? I certainly do love the message, though, which is; ‘We control your safety, not your president’. You really have to understand that that is true before you can try to make a war against Islamic Terrorists. They would just as soon kill the ideals of American Society, as well as the people that represent it, as look at it. Any ‘Scare’ that they can get out of us is a victory to them.

Whether the latest tape was staged, taken out of context, or filmed a couple of years ago really doesn’t matter. What matters is that we (the american people) get out and cast a vote. Regardless of who is in office at this time next year, the terrorists will roam free. Regardless of who happens to win the election, the same will be true. Isn’t it about time that we get someone into office that doesn’t think whoopy cushions are funny?

I do apologize, all that I have on my mind is political, and I don’t want to descend that slope. Perhaps the Megadeth concert tomorrow will put me back in my place. Dead End

Meta blogging, Homosexuality

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The last two missed posts were for the following reasons. Saturday I just never got around to it, I was watching some of the South Park marathon on Comedy Central. Sunday I decided that I needed to take care of some long overdue archiving around here, when I say long overdue, I mean like six months or more.

I managed to finish updating the April, May and June archives, which can be seen Here. I would like to say that I just finally decided to get off of my lazy ass and start catching up on things, but the truth is that some of the pages contained in those months didn’t upload completely, so I had a bunch of pages that had no links on the bottom. This only came to my attention as I was wondering why things that I had written about six months ago could not be found by search engines, even when I specified my own site and searched for a very particular string of words.

I would also like to say that the reason that I did it was so that someone searching for a particular topic through google would be able to happen across my site. That is at least partially true. The real reason is that I got tired of having to read through every post for the last six months when I was trying to link to something that I had said previously. Hopefully, I have at least fixed the problem with the partial pages, as this is the second time I have tried to remedy the problem and it is getting very frustrating.

A rather unexpected upside to being so lazy is that I didn’t have the slightest idea what I wrote all those months back. I remember having written some of the personal anecdotes from my youth, but as for the off the cuff, day to day bitching I just had no idea. It was as if I was reading something that someone else wrote for the most part, which was quite odd since I was able to find tons of grammatical errors that I never saw when I originally wrote it. Of course I have the grammar prowess of your average third-grader so I guess that is to be expected.

Most of the posts I just skimmed over to get a basic idea for a brief description, while there were a few that I read completely. The most amazing thing was that there were a couple of times that I actually laughed at something that I had written, the amazing part is that it was obviously meant as a joke.

• It turns out that my mother gave the URL of this site to the partner of my eldest brother (the homosexual one). I am not the type of person to hold back thoughts or words, even when I know that if I ever decide to go into politics they will sting me in the ass. The thing that I find very strange/amusing/comforting, is that the guy went ahead and read that particular post, which was on October 14. In that post I make a very feeble defense for homosexuality, why my brother’s partner found it to be good escapes me. Yet, then I realize that damn near half of the world, and probably 80% of the U.S. is against them, I can kind of understand why any endorsement of homosexuality is a good thing.

I think that what pisses me off the most about America is that we are so fucking stupid (as a whole). Men having sex with other men has been the norm since at least the time of the Greeks. All through history there has been homosexuality. Do you honestly believe that the men who came across the Atlantic Ocean to discover America kept it in their pants for four months? Do you really believe that men in prison simply abstain? If your plain crashed on the top of the mountain, no food, no water, would you start to look at the dead people as nourishment? While the last example is something that you certainly would do in the interest of self-preservation, the other two are stone cold facts.

• If it is my fault that everyone in the world except for me really hates homosexuals, all I can say is that I am sorry. If it is the fault of everyone in the U.S. for being intolerant…That sounds about right.

Homosexuality

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So, you know how I Often say that I don’t really have anything to talk about? That is certainly not true today. Whether I run out of steam before I get to the bulk of the bitching, though, remains to be seen.

• On the work front, I agreed to leave work an hour earlier than usual to go pick up a part for the bosses van, a part which I am sure they will ask me to install tomorrow. The unfortunate part of this transaction was that I said I would do it just for the money I paid for the gas to get there. Due to some unfortunate planning, I was driving directly into the setting sun, with a dirty windshield and the nearest ‘squeegie’ far enough behind me that I didn’t want to go back to wash the damn window. I did spray the window with the cleaner that is in your little ‘window squirter thing’ and turn on the wipers, only to find that one of the wipers had crumbled to dust, and the other one was only barely alive. I eventually had to pull over and use a rag from the trunk to try to clean the window enough that I could see at all. Even with the outside of the window cleaned up, I was still driving almost half blind, since the inside of the windshield has had a weird film over it ever since the car over-heated a couple of years ago (which made me run the heater to try to circulate whatever water was in the car). I guess what I really need to do is hit the damn thing with a bit of windex before I go volunteering for jobs that require me to drive into the sun. Perhaps I will do that this weekend.

• The real story today is going to be all about homosexuality.

I happen to have a brother that is gay. He is not being gay as a way to get back at his parents, he is not looking for attention, he is just plain gay. I, more than most, have developed a sort of tolerance towards homosexuality because of it. I mean it is pretty difficult to go out ‘gay bashing’ when you know that you have a family member who is just the same.

I have often thought that his being homosexual was a choice, but my wife emailed me This article from CNN that is making me finally think a little bit differently. Of course you could find a study somewhere to back up literally anything, but the odds that CNN is going to be posting incorrect information, on purpose, is pretty laughable.

One study does not a fact make, I understand that. What I do understand is that I have a brother that happens to be homosexual. That brother is still my brother. This same brother is trying to marry his partner, yet it is not allowed under state and federal laws. They are not trying to marry as a mockery of the “man/woman” union, they are trying to marry so that one spouse can be included on the other spouse’s health insurance. Why is it that that is not possible?

I understand that there are staunch beliefs, on both sides of the coin, about this type of marriage, but, who does it really hurt?

If two gay men do marry, there is no way that they can ever procreate. Convoluted laws will make it damn near impossible for them to ever adopt a child, they will be just “life partners”. Isn’t that the whole point of marriage? You pick the one person that you want to spend the rest of your life with? Why is it so wrong that one of the partners can’t pump out children?

I find it humorous to hear anyone talking about homosexuals trying to ‘bastardize’ the ‘sacred union’ of marriage. I bet, if you actually run the statistics on that, there will be very few homosexuals that ever divorce. Why? The homosexual people seem to be looking for the right person as opposed to settling for the person that is ‘close enough’.

A lot of hetrosexuals make tons of mistakes along the way (while looking for their perfect mate), that is because they are doing their best to just snatch up someone, anyone, before they are too old and no one wants them anymore. I think that the homosexuals kind of have it better in that respect. They have been looking their entire lives, have been shunned by society, and just want to find that one person that makes them happy.

Homosexuality is not a crime, it is not even a ‘condition’, it is what that person is. Loving another person of the same sex should not carry the taboo that it currently does, there are homosexuals that are brave enough to admit it everywhere, even children of those in the oval office.

Here I must actually site a particular quote from Dick Cheney, while being questioned about the homosexuality of his own daughter:

Cheneys Criticize Kerry’s Remarks on Daughter
“You saw a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected,” Mr. Cheney said. “And I am not speaking just as a father here, though I am a pretty angry father, but as a citizen.” The vice president went on to describe the Massachusetts senator as too vacillating to be commander in chief and unwilling to support American troops at war.

You see how he just avoided the question, then made it a question of homeland security? That worked for the first four years, not gonna work for the next four, at least I hope.

Why using the absolute, stone-solid FACT that the Cheney’s daughter is gay is ‘doing anything to get elected’ really escapes me. I think the fact that you do your best to hide it really says more about personal character…

It really must suck for Cheney, to be so opposed to homosexuals, having one as a child, then to find out that you aren’t even gonna be the veep any more. I bet we will see his ‘true colors’ shining through pretty soon…Mark my words…

Commercials; Government; Writing

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Today’s post brings good and bad news. The good news is that I don’t have any desire to talk about John Saul, or books at all for that matter, today. The bad news is that I did yesterday, and while I completely forgot to post it, I am just gonna throw it on the bottom of this page since I have all but run out of issues to tackle.

Let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about starting your own website, especially if you are palanning to try to put up news with your own opinion or snark, don’t start in an election year! For the first six or eight months that I was doing this site I could easily find some news item to go off about, yet now it is all politics. Actually it really isn’t so much about politics as it is about which candidate says what about the other, and which one made the most weird faces in the last debate. Is that what politics has come to?

I was watching some show on TVLand the other day, possibly MacGyver, and they showed an old commercial (That is one of the things that TvLand is famous for, they air old commercials for lots of products, I can remember seeing a Parkay margarine commercial from the ’70s and a Shake-n-Bake commercial from around the same era. They are really pretty nostalgic to look back at.), when an old, black and white commercial came on the screen. The only thing in the entire commercial was a picture of rain falling on a random street, with a voice-over saying something like, “It may rain this November Eleventh. If it rains, get wet. It is that important.” (again that is not actually a quote but the best I can recall and I can’t find that commercial anywhere on their website, or anywhere else on the internet for that matter). The screen then flashed up a ‘Vote for ___’ logo. I don’t remember the exact candidate, nor do I know the year the commercial was released, so it is difficult for me to try to find the damn thing. At any rate, I think you will see the point here. Political advertising used to be about spreading the name of the political candidate, now it seems to be about conveying the worst ‘half-truths’ about the opponent.

I am certainly not a political pundit, but I do know a bit or two about us grunts that actually work for a living. Not a damn one of ‘us grunts’ really care what the presidential candidates were doing in the early ’70s. ‘Us grunts’ would like to see the war in Iraq ended with the fewest possible casualties on all sides, but that is not all that we think about. ‘Us grunts’ are also a bit concerned about a couple of policies. You see, most of ‘us grunts’ weren’t born horribly rich (George W.), most of ‘us grunts’ didn’t marry horribly rich (John Kerry), most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes for the richest 1% of the population, hell most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes on the top 20% of the population. ‘Us grunts’ are looking for a bit of substance in the presidential claims about policies that actually involve ‘us grunts’.

Health Care is a really big ‘for instance’. ‘Us grunts’ don’t really have a lot of options; Making too much money to get free health care, yet not making quite enough money to actually afford the care that we do have. Despite that, laws are being passed to keep us from trying to obtain medicine at lower prices, ‘us grunts’ don’t care for that at all.

Another thing that ‘us grunts’ just can’t seem to understand is why buying a huge, gas-guzzling SUV can get you a tax break. It seems like the price of gas has been going up awfully fast lately, ‘us grunts’ are looking for the most fuel effecient automobile that our meager income can buy. Of course ‘us grunts’ might be able to afford those huge, gas-guzzling SUV’s were it not for the fact that minimum wage is at its lowest point in thirty years (adjusted for inflation), yet I doubt that ‘us grunts’ would buy them anyway… Why waste a precious resource that is already nearly drained?

I would really, really like to care about which candidate has better hair, which candidate did what in the ’70s, which candidate’s daughters have been arrested on the most drug charges, but I just can’t. There is more at stake here than just a figure-head for our country. There are lobbyists, albeit on both sides of the coin, that are willing to give millions or billions of dollars to whoever comes out of this thing as the leader. I have had almost four years to watch what one of them did with that power, now I would like to see anyone else in his position, to see what that power might bring. Damn me for being partisan.

PostScript: I know that the term ‘us grunts’ is not grammatically correct, but nothing else I ever write is either. I used the term ‘us grunts’ only because it starts with two letters that are important to me.

First off, and much to the great relief of everyone here I’m sure, I am not written off of the christmas card list of the friend who sent me the John Saul novel that I have been bitching about so much. In fact, said friend also has his own copy of the novel and was not able to make it through the first few chapters before he realized that he had basically read it in other Saul books. That means, at the very least, that anyone who reads and is also capable of retaining knowledge will know that Saul just keeps recycling the same story. The only explanation for this (why people still buy the books I mean) is that I think a lot of the readers are adolescent and just looking for a quick read with an easy to follow story.

My mother also read this book, my copy in fact, while my wife and I were on vacation, and she thought that it was pretty good, yet, it also seemed oddly familiar. I am now beginning to think that the way Saul is able to have continued success (31 novels worth) is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about anything he has written. You certainly can’t walk away from the book with a fear of any one person or thing, within a couple of days you wouldn’t be able to name any of the main characters even if threatened with torture. I guess I should just call his work ‘disposable fiction’. Then again, all of the Saul that I personally own is in hardcover, and while I never paid cover price for any of it it is still far too expensive to simply throw away, yet that is what your mind tries to do with it.

If anyone other than John Saul were to send a John Saul novel to a publisher in the hopes of getting it printed they would likely be laughed right out the door. Mind you, that could be said for a lot of authors today. In fact if you start looking at the novels that are called ‘classic’, there are very few authors that have more than one in that category.

Interesting thought, that. Perhaps all of the authors that we consider great today only ever had one good novel, while the rest was mindless dribble, or at least very derivitive of their initial work. That is an unimaginable idea however, since most of the great authors of the past never made a single cent off of their work. I suppose that it would be really great to know that your story has outlasted you, but they never knew; It takes a century or so to see if the story can transcend to that status.

I seem to remember that Edgar Allan Poe (take this test, its fun) died penniless, in a gutter, none of his work ever made him a penny. Yet, some of Poe’s stories are required reading a hundred and fifty years later. On that same note, I somehow doubt that any John Saul will be ‘required reading’ in the year 2154, I could be wrong. (if you happen to be in the year 2154, and are reading this, and John Saul is required reading, please shoot me an email so that I will know that I was in error.)

When I was in my teens, even into my early twenties, I thought that my writing was going to change the world. Of course I have since sobered to the reality that I am likely never going to get a single word put to print before I die. I am not capable of writing with correct grammar, nor do my ideas do more than stem off of the fiction that I have read. The few, truly original, ideas that I have had work well in my head but do not seem to do well when put to paper (computer screen in this case). I do enjoy writing, my friends and family enjoy reading what I have written, yet I don’t seem to have that ‘it’ that is going to make me rise above every other guy in the world who tries to write anything. My ‘fan base’ could be counted on one hand, my grammar is horrible, at this point I am just hoping that someone within the family tries to get the hundreds of short stories in my file cabinet put onto paper someday. The one thing that I do have is really screwed up dreams, that is where the short stories come from. I never have a dream long enough to work itself into a novel though, and that means that what I write is just as forgettable as every other book you have read in the last few years.

As if that is not enough, I just went to the bathroom to find out that I have been wearing my underwear inside-out all day! Life Sucks!

Christmas lights; John Kerry, Concert tickets

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Yes, as the date clearly states, we are now officially in October. All site-related musings aside, time still seems to be moving at rather a rapid pace. The decorative Christmas lights that I put up on the house last year, and have been thinking of taking down every weekend, now seem to be less of a nuisance, as it now seems that I am just horribly well prepared, as opposed to horribly lazy, as they seemed just yesterday. The local radio stations are already talking about ‘shopping days before Christmas’, completely disreagarding the fact that it is still so unbearably hot that no one really ever leaves the house, unless forced. Of course that is sort of a trade off that one must make to live where I do; We have unusually warm winters, extremely hot summers, and the other two seasons seem to last about three days each. That is not an exaggeration either, last year there was one day that we were running the cooler (in the store) and the next morning it was the heater. So I am going to go ahead and blame the rapid passage of time on having only two seasons, regardless of the fact that winter goes about two months, while summer lasts the other ten.

Attempting to use the weather where you live as an excuse (like I just did) is a pretty poor argument. Everyone, everywhere, has different atmospheric conditions that they have to tolerate. While I really wish I would have made it to take care of the weeds in front of the house (and I mean once and for all, as opposed to using a weedeater every third weekend), at least I have the house, with the weeds in front of it, to bitch about. Practically half of the state of Florida is in ruins, and I am bitching about it being to hot to shoot a bit of RoundUp on them. I suppose that is why there are benfits and drawbacks to living in any environment. And those weeds had better watch out, I may just get off my lazy duff and take care of them next year!

• Now that the small talk about the weather is out of the way… I want to mention briefly that I may have completely underestimated John Kerry’s performance in the first presidential debate. All of the surveys that have been released so far show Kerry winning the debate handily. I would agree with that point, Kerry did win the thing, hands down, in my eyes, but I was actually disappointed in both his, and President Bush’s, handling of the questions. The entire debate seemed to be more of a press conference, each man responded to the question that they were given, but neither were ever allowed to actually ask direct questions of the other.

I may not be much of a pundit on politics, but I do know how to debate. When you do not allow the persons in the debate to ask each other specific questions related to the subject, the persons are not debating -they are ranting- much as I am now. The key to finding out someone’s stance on anything is to not listen to the stuff that they have prepared and memorized over time, you need to see what they say when they don’t have any more notes. While neither candidiate came in with notes, they surely knew the points that they wanted to make, and had likely practiced saying them in front of a mirror. I am not even sure that what I witnessed last night could be called a debate, at least not in the literal term of the word. Bush did his best to spin everything into his (obviously pre-rehearsed) ‘War on Terror’ shtick, while Kerry did his best to have good hair and answer questions that were never asked.

Am I the only person in the whole of the ‘United States of America’ that wants to see what the actual people, the ones that we are actually going to vote for on the second of November, actually think? I sure hope that there are a lot more people like me, people who are disappointed by the fact that the debate was no more than a staged media circus. Even though I really want Kerry to win this election (or even Nader, hell anyone but Bush) I still think that the people are getting the short end of the stick when the debate is all but staged. What the American people need is factual information, not rhetoric. Yet, It seems that facts are no longer the driving factor when we are letting the ‘Leader of the free world’ send our children to war.

• Now to really make you all drool.

It is hard to have a bad day, even though mine was horrible, when you come home to find the following email:

If I bought tickets to this would you be able to work early on Saturday or get the day off so you could go??

The link is now dead, but the concert in question is Megadeth at the Dodge Theatre (in the Phoenix area). If you know anything about me at all, hell, even you know nothing about me at all, you should know that I kind of Worship Megadeth. There is no force in the world strong enough to keep me from making it to see a new Megadeth show, well, I guess death would qualify, but I don’t think that death is really a force. You should all now just bow before me and hope/pray that your wife will ever be so cool as to offer you treats to such an event. Of course not all wives are built the same, so when I am watching Megadeth, you might be trimming hedges…which I would do, that is I would do it if I actually had a hedge to trim.
Not all wives are built the same, choose accordingly.

Meta Blogging; Politics

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Strange how time seems to move so quickly isn’t it? I just updated the dead link at the bottom of this page (you know the one; it entices you to click on the next update, regardless of the fact that I have yet to write it), I have thought to change that link so that is just text, but then I would not have all of the personal satisfaction of knowing that someone, somewhere, is actually trying to click on it. At any rate, It was during this little process that I realized that it is going to be October pretty soon, within a few hours in fact. Seems like it was only last week that I was thinking I needed to get the damn archives around here up to date, of course that was while I was on vacation in July, so you should see what I am getting at with the movement of time.

The real problem with updating the archives isn’t about actually spending the time to do it, since it honestly only takes me a few seconds to scan each update, write a very brief description and slap it on the page. No, no, the real problem with it is that it requires me to read all the dribble that I write. Did you think that the lack of proofreading was due to my integrity? No, nothing like that at all. People say that you are always more critical of your own work, but come on, some of this garbage is just, well, garbage.

When I initially set up this site it was due to a free site having deleted my page and all of its content. Paying a few bucks a month to keep the content online didn’t seem like a bad idea, so that is what I did. I am not sure if I ever had the intention of setting up a daily journal/blog -type thing, but that is what happened. While I do enjoy writing all of the stuff that I post here, I don’t really enjoy reading it all that much. The writing of it is quite theraputic, while the reading of it is boring to me, and hopefully no one else.

It is with those beautiful, self-deprecating thoughts that I go into todays post..Be Warned..

• I, and I alone, have taken it upon myself to declare today “National Stand Out On Your Lawn Holding A Large Metal Pole While Praying For Ligntning Day”. Possibly not the whole day, but certainly for the two hours that the presidential candidates are going to be on television. I am not one to be cynical, oh wait I guess I am, but the simple fact that the online games I like to play have flooded over with players since the start of the ‘debate’ just makes me think that no one really cares which party has the better control of their puppet.

I am actually going to go watch the debate to see if I can be so ‘Un-American’ as to try to form my own opinions based on what the candidates say. Of course the debate is all but scripted, so good luck to me.

I hope to pick this up after Survivor is over, but no gurantees.

The debate was all that I expected: Bush said the phrase “war on terror” at least a thousand times (and I only watched half of it), while Kerry did his best to bring the facts into view; The fact that Iraq was less of a threat than at least four other countries (as far as ‘weapons of mass destruction’), the fact that we invaded Iraq on our own (no help from the UN on that one), the fact that the deaths in Iraq have been steadily going up since the war was ‘over’ (deaths being both the U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians). For some reason you can’t seem to hammer a fact into the head of George W. Bush…No, seriously, I bet if you had a fact that you wanted him to hear, then listened to how the ‘key part of the war on terror’ that fact was, then you became agitated and grabbed a hammer….You know where this is going.

The really unfortunate thing is that I don’t think that Kerry really did all that well at the debate. I could be wrong, or cynical, but it seemed that Bush was able to make his little eyes very steely when he looked into the camera and said “terror” or “war on terror”. I think Kerry had a lot more facts than Bush, possibly a better way to achieve the goals (though that would require looking at each candidates website to find out), I just think that Kerry might have been able to sell himself a bit better.

One thing, in the debate, that I found to be a bit surprising was that Kerry actually brought up the subject of ‘stem cell research’, and Bush’s policy against it. It was a bit of manuevering that Bush had to do to get that subject changed back to the ‘war on terror’, but he did it. He never once mentioned his staunch opposition of it. I tell you, if Bush is not re-elected he could certainly make a good spin doctor for someone else, someone else who likes to not hide facts, but change subjects, that is.

This year’s presidential debates are going to fall into the next trivial pursuit game, I am afraid. The only people that are watching them are steadfast supporters of one or the other of the candidates. The ‘undecided’ people are all playing on-line games, much like I should be, but my ‘journalistic integrity'(hehe) keeps me from doing so.

Here’s to hoping that the presidential candidates sober up…

Friend dies in car accident

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Well I actually did put pen to paper (actually finger to keyboard) yesterday to write something. What happened is that I got a little bit of the subject that I was typing about and decided that it was a bit to personal to put in such a (potentially) public venue. It was nothing horrible or all that secret, just something that I decided, after I wrote it, that the general public would be better off without that particular knowledge. One thing that was in that post is something that I want to bring up today, as I have always been quite curious about it…Yet not so curious as to actually ask anyone.

Rather than actually going into a whole lot of detail about that subject today, I will just ask the question (for the sake of my own sanity), that has peaked my curiosity. That question is: While you are dreaming, does your mind ever realize that you are in a dream? If so, are you actually able to take over the actions of your ‘dream self’ and manipulate him/her as if it was in real life? I don’t want to go into any more detail than just that, mostly because I am hoping that someone will email me a response. This is a subject that I am very curious about. If you have ever had a dream, your input would be greatly appreciated.

• In other news, a friend of my wife’s has recently died in a car accident. I knew the man as well and he was likely the only person that my wife has ever had as a co-worker that I actually got along with. Of course, to be fair, the wife has had tons of co-workers through the years, some I can relate to, some I can’t. Were I given a few hours alone with each of them I would be able to form a more solid decision about like/dislike, but that just never happens…Well, there was the one time where we all went to a baseball game, we being myself, my wife, and two couples of which the women were her friends. I made a judgement about one of the men on that day, which was reinforced when we had them all over to a barbecue one day (a year or two ago).

The man in question, though, was named Brad. He and my wife had worked together for a couple of years before he transferred to Texas. He was a heavy drinker (possibly as bad as me), but it seems that, on the night he died, he did not know his limits. It is a difficult thing to do; to picture someone in your mind that you know is now dead, regardless of the circumstances. I certainly feel for Brad, his mother and his relatives. He was far too young to die…Younger than me, in fact.

Men, in particular, seem to think that they are ‘bullet-proof’ until they hit the age of 30 (some men hold the belief a bit longer), Hell, I know I did. I can think of at least enough situtions where I ‘should have’ died to make you extend all of your fingers in counting. The simple fact that any man makes it through the ‘Machismo’ part of life should go to prove that there is someone, somewhere, that really doesn’t want them to die.

I try to tell myself that I have ‘Guardian Angels’ watching over me, but at the same time I am not gonna get really wasted and drive a car (anymore). My ‘Guardian Angels’ could all be out on vacation that day, then what?

Perhaps I am just turning into a rambling old coot before my time. First I bitch about how music was better when I was youg (ala old Metallica) then I start to bitch about kids with the waistband of their pants around their knees (pants were skin tight when I was a youngun!). Maybe then I can go into some sort of a ‘Public Service Message’ about the values you learn when you fight with your own fists (as opposed to guns and knives).

Were I 15 years younger, or if I cared, I would try to make it so that this ‘angry music’ wouldn’t claim the lives of any more innocent children. That is, of course, what my father said fifteen years ago. Funny how the generation, the styles, hell everything can change, yet, the adults always seem to never know what the kids are going through. If it was possible to avoid the damn circle that this leads to I would be all over it.

One thing that was in the 5th ‘Harry Potter’ book was that ‘Dumbledore’ said that it is impossible for a child to know what it is like to be old, while every person that is old has been young. That seems to be almost a satisfying resolution for that discussion. Parents do understand what their children are going through, yet, the parents can not get inolved. Getting the parent’s involved would be the sign of a sissy, no one wants to be a sissy. All that the parent can do is be supportive, any other involvement would be just as bad as the ridicule on the playground.

Thank God that I don’t have children. If I ever start thinking that I want a son, I can just borrow my Nephew for a day, then I never want ANYONE to have children ever again.

On Religion

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First and foremost, I want to assure you that I am not going to dedicate this whole page to talking about the new shoes (though I am in some sort of a Nirvana-like shoe state ever since the purchase of those little suckers), so you can read on with confidence, in what I got no idea.

• Flux, over there at BlackChampagne had a bit of an email tiff with the guy who does the movie reviews over at The CAP Alert website (Christian Movie Reviews…That is, reviews of new movies from a strictly biblical point of view; What sins are committed and the such). For my purposes here, I will say that the email exchange was often humorous (as it was displayed right in the blog on Flux’s site for all the world to see), mostly so when viewed from a distance, as a sort of study into the mind of the extremely zealous, religious nut-case (not Flux, but the Cap Alert guy).

Something about what the religious nut-case said in one (well all) of the emails prompted me to email Flux with my two cents. It turns out that there were a couple of people other than me that were also following the saga, probably in almost stupified confusion (I know I was) at what the Cap guy was saying. Flux actually set up a separate page just to host the email conversation with the guy and the resulting feedback. That page can be seen Here.

One of the feedbacks was talking about something called “cognitive dissonance”, a term that I had never heard of. I don’t truly understand that term, or the implications of it, well enough to argue about it. Just a quick break down of how I see it:

1) You have a very strong belief in something, could be anything.
2) You are offered undeniable proof that your belief is wrong.
3) You believe even more in that something, laying all facts aside.

Now, it seems to me that this is exactly what religion has been doing for thousands of years. I remember a story in the bible where a bunch of people were trying to build a staircase to God (which I think is the bible trying to explain away things like the pyramids and any other large structure that pre-dates christianity). God then made it so that all of the workers spoke different languages so that they couldn’t communicate. God didn’t want mortals to be able to reach the heavens (best described in the bible as clouds). Fast-forward that story a couple of thousand years, then note that we have space travel. Now, Heaven is no longer in the clouds, or in space, maybe mortals can’t even see it when they go by, I dunno. If it was true that you could build something tall enough to reach Heaven, wouldn’t that mean that Heaven was a tangible place? The bible said it was, oh, but, wait, there is that “cognitive dissonance”.

Religion, in and of itself, doesn’t make any sense at all. There have been hundreds of ‘known religions’, likely thousands that were practiced but not known to us today. Once no one really practices them any more they turn into Mythology. I just wonder why we wait until there are no more practioners of said religion before calling it a myth. Doesn’t crap equal crap regardless of the defenders of the one pile?

You may have noticed that I am a bit bitter towards religion. I think that is a pretty justified position to take, given my upbringing. My parents were not all that religious (technically, the only time I ever heard the word GOD when I was young was when dad was yelling at whatever he was trying to fix; It was generally followed by either ‘Damn’ or a string of obscenities that I am not going to list here). While my parents were not religious, I (and my brothers) were forced to go to church every Sunday. As a grown man, I think that maybe they were looking for a bit of time alone, but who knows. I did my best to listen to the guy yelling all of the bible verses, I did sing when necessary, I put a quarter in the collection dish every Sunday(I was like 6), I did the religion thing.

I went to ‘Vacation Bible School’, I went to a Wednesday Night program (called AWANA), I did all that I could to excel at this endeavor. My second year at “Vacation Bible School” was the first time that i actually walked down between the pews, kneeled down, and asked God to save my soul. I was in tears as I did that, I am still not sure if they were tears of joy or tears of fear or pain, I just know that I did it. I really, truly, wanted to be the best little christian that I could be…

Shortly after my parents divorced, at which point I was either 7 or 8, I was given a bible, from a woman, at a church that my mother was taking us to. I think that this was the first bible that was ever truly mine. It was a pretty bible too, it was white on the outside and put a lot of the verses in red on the inside. When I asked the woman who had given it to me why some of the verses were in red, she said that they were many of the verses that are cited during your average Sermon. That, of course, intrigued me.

I began to read the book just wondering why the passages that they ( the preachers ) quoted were so few and far between. Within about an hour I knew exactly why there were only a few of the passages in red; There are only a few passages that the Preacher ever wants you to see. It took me a couple of weeks, and I didn’t understand some of it, but, I read the bible, cover to cover. The Bible (at least the King James version of it) is rife with adultery, murder & incest. Were it not for the fact that religions are basing their lives on the damn thing, it might be on the best-seller list as just one hell of a novel.

Even after that epiphany, it took me almost four years before I just gave up and said that all religion is bullshit. I can not cite a single incident that led to this, there had been overwhelming scientific evidence for years, I had avoided it. There was some point where I just thought, okay, enough. It is all crap, life is not being governed by some higher power. If it is, I am certainly gonna be screwed for putting the fingers to the keyboard to write this.

The issue of “cognitive dissonance”, it seems, really does exist. It kept me from giving up on religion for a very long time. Now that I am free of the religious pull, I wonder how I ever got suckered into that garbage. Of course I was a child of parents who were sending me to church so that they could have some nooky time. Had my parent’s actually been religious, I might be writing this from the other side of the fence.

• The strange thing is that I do believe in Karma (to an extent). If you wrong someone, that wrong will come back to you. I don’t think that that implies a religion though. That is something that I keep in mind when I deal with people who are really irritating me (though they may not know it). If you treat your peers the way that you would want them to treat you, this would not be an issue. Unfortunately, the christian community is too involved in what everyone else is doing wrong to find fault in their own actions. Oh, to be so blissfull and naive…

Wrongs have a way of Righting themselves.