Abortion

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.

Router issues; Awana=White supremacy?

First of all, on the work front my bosses just left town for a few days. This leaves me with a monumentally fucked up schedule until at least Monday. To the extent that I will be working eleven hour days until Sunday. Not like I am scheduled to work them, but that when I am at home for a break of any sort it is rarely more than for ten minutes before I get a call to go back in and deal with a vendor, customer, horrific fire, I never know what they are going to do in the few minutes I am gone. What this means to you is that I may not be able to post anything here during those days, of course it could also lead to me having a bunch of idiot stories that I really want to talk about. Which will be the case? Stay tuned.

• On the home front, I have written several times previously about getting a new computer, but keeping my old one. My plan has worked pretty well, as my wife has rediscovered the game “Age of Empires”. She really seems to enjoy playing that as I am happily typing away or reading news/blogs. It has worked out much as I had hoped. I am still thinking pretty strongly about trying to connect the two PCs through a LAN, as the new pc already has that capability, and a card for the old pc can be acquired for less than twenty bucks. The thing that I am not really sure about is the implementation.

If you are reading this, and you happen to know exactly how to implement such a situation, please Shoot me an email. I understand that there is a device called a “router” that must be used to achieve this, but beyond that I know nothing. I would assume that it would not be that difficult to do, but as I will be trying to make one machine with WIN98 work with one that has WINxp I am sure that it is not going to be a plug-and-play situation. I am equally as sure that I could figure it out with the old ‘guess and check’ method, but as I grow older I find that it save a hell of a lot of time and frustration if you gather some information so that you know what to expect going in.

Having just gone to check on eBay, I realize now that I wouldn’t have any idea what type of router I would need to buy anyway. There are some of them that are eight dollars and some that are a hell of a lot more. I certainly don’t need anything that is wireless, as the two machines are only a couple of feet apart. I also don’t have a cable or DSL connection, so the point of having one that either has or requires that capability is totally out the window. Both of the PCs have working modems and I do have two phone lines, so they can be online at the same time that way. I can not think of any reason why I would try to do anything with a Network card other than just playing a local game or possibly trying to swap some files. Perhaps in the year 2018, when they finally get a reasonably priced alternative to dial-up where I live I will think differently…Ask me in a decade and I will let you know…

• I mentioned, in a post that I can not find, that my parents had us enrolled in this group called AWANA, this was brought about after my Mother told me of finding the old uniform for the club. The group is basically like the Boy Scouts, only instead of teaching you stuff that you can use in real life, you get merits for learning bible verses and songs. I do remember loving it as a child, but my childhood memories are all a bit skewed by the fact that I don’t remember most of it.

I bring this up only because I recently remembered a little song that we used to sing at Vacation Bible School. The song went, and I will quote, “I’m no kin to the Monkey, the monkey’s no kin to me, I don’t know much about my ancestors, but mine didn’t swing from a tree.” I think I may have mentioned that particular song at some point also, supposing that I was being brain-washed against the theory of evolution. Every time I pen/type the lines to it I think that more and more. Yet the last time I thought about that song I was a bit troubled by the last line. The part where it says, “mine didn’t swing from a tree.” I had always envisioned monkeys swinging through the trees, yet as I think about it this time, I am wondering if there could be more devious reasons for the whole song.

Could it be about White Supremacy?

I was thinking about that song today, and thinking about how all of the elderly people that I knew in my youth would casually refer to black people as “porch monkeys” -something that I certainly do NOT do- when I realized that the song in question could have a completely different intent. Could it be that they were making little four-six year old children sing a song about hating black people? I would hope not, but then the line about “swinging from a tree” came into my mind. There were a lot of worthless idiots in the south, and they lynched a lot of decent people based on the color of their skin. The result of that would be someone “swinging from a tree”.

Now I am not sure if that song was trying to teach me that evolution was crap, or if it was trying to teach me to hate people based on the color of their skin. Whichever one is the truth, I hate them for it. The single reason that ethnic biases exist is that the parents and teachers perpetuate it in children. It is a really sick way to try to mold the mind of a child.

I am certainly not a racist, but I do admit that I get a bit nervous when I see anyone of a color other than mine dressed in ‘gangsta gear’. I am pretty sure that is just a conditioned response, as I can hold a conversation with the same person without apprehension after a simple hello and hand-shake. The mere fact that I am nervous for the first few seconds just goes to prove that the brain-washing worked, at least a little bit.

Why, then, do schools have mandates about what they teach, while ‘bible schools’ are able to teach bigotry and hatred? What country is this again?