Random Ideas

This week has been one of historic moments. Different people have had different reactions.

Some people have paraded through the streets and cheered with joy about the death of a truly evil man being gunned down. They cheer for justice with a blood lust that would impress my Viking ancestors. They shout with glee that Bin Laden was shot twice in his home. They scream that this is what he gets for messing with us. I can understand this reaction. I live in New York. I saw the towers fall. I used to work in Tower Two.

Others weep and say that any death is a failure and that even the life of such a man is valued and must be preserved. “Why not imprison him and put him on trial?” they say. I can see their point. We are a nation of laws and have all been raised with at least some respect for human life.

I say that both are wrong.

To take joy in the ending of any human life, we diminish our own humanity. This is a loss that is hard to reverse. Taking a human life is not a thing to celebrate or brag about. It is sad. He was the son of a father and mother who had to have loved him. He had children who loved him. They will hurt for years to come at the loss of this man.

However, this man was a cancer on the body of humanity. His evil spread wide and is still destroying the healthy lives of many who live on. He convinced many people to do evil and help the disease of his hatred spread. Innocent lives were snuffed out by the cruel and inhumane actions of him and his followers. How many fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, children and siblings have lost loved ones forever because his ideology said they must die a horrible death to make his point?

No, we should not kill a demented and diseased animal out of hate. Putting down such a creature is sad. It is a mercy to kill it and remove it from the world. We should only see it as a required action to preserve the safety of innocents. Do we taunt a tumor as we kill it with radiation? Or do we focus on helping the healthy flesh that remains to survive and heal? Do we yell abuse and the diseased limb that has had to be amputated? Or do we try to find ways to help the body recover the function that disease took from it?

Yes, he had to die. No, we don’t have to be transformed into his messengers by our removal of the diseased offal that was Osama. He is gone. It is sad that a man could be twisted into such a monster. But do not become a monster because of it.

Some of you may have recently heard about an overweight Australian kid. He took as much from a bully as he could, and then he stood up for himself. The bully was beaten.

In the simplest of terms, a filthy rodent of a boy was torturing a boy who is less mentally disgusting than himself and got shown that this was a bad idea. Battle happened and, just like in the movies, the good guy won. The end, right?

Not quite. The same school administrator who FAILED to deal with an aggressive and violently abusive boy in his school had the moral outrage to punish the VICTIM and the bully equally. For standing up for himself, this boy was suspended. If there had not been VIDEO placed on the internet of the bully assaulting his victim physically, the principal probably would have ignored the violence.

But wait, the wisdom of the muddle headed and deeply moronic masses voted in an online poll… The overwhelming majority chose to think that the victim had no right to fight back. They think that he should have fled from the bully. Utter stupidity. If you back down from a bully, you paste a target on yourself. Bullies are not about respect, or “being the bigger man”. Bullies are about dominating another human being. Backing down just tells them that they are now able to dominate you. This means they own you and can treat you like dirt for the rest of your life. How many of our recent “Cyber bully” related suicides were of the “walk away” school? I think an in-depth study would reveal that it is %100. I have dealt with bullies all of my life. They do not respect you or get tired of bothering you because you retreat.

Retreat from a deranged individual does not work. Who out there can tell me of ONE instance where walking away helped with a bully? I am not including times when you moved away so he/she could not find you. Most bullies have mental and emotional issues. It is sad, but true, that there are few, if any ways that such a demented creature can be helped by their peers. Many are abused as children and seek violence as a way to salve their own sense of self worth. Some have issues such as fetal alcohol syndrome. The syndrome cases have no impulse control and a highly violent nature that does not just “change” because their chosen victim will not fight back. Fighting back is the only way, in many cases, for the victim to end the abuse.

If the administrator had been any good at their job to begin with, they would have spotted this situation and done something to keep it from reaching a point where a boy was assaulted and had to defend himself. Adults should have defused this. To ask a person to be beaten upon with fists and back down is silly. My guess is that the principal’s sympathies are not with the victim. My feeling is that he identifies more with the bully himself. Why else would he punish the victim for refusing to remain a victim? Especially in light of video evidence of the bully actually hitting him without provocation.

In short, if you think a boy should not fight back against a bully, then it is YOUR JOB as adults to make it so he does not have to.

If your child is the victim, grow a pair and get the authorities to do their jobs and end the problem.

If your kid is the bully, lay down the law about stopping the behavior. Get the kid into some treatment for his obvious mental problems. If your bully kid is your pride and joy, and you think he/she should be able to bully freely… Email me and I will introduce my daughters. They are tournament trained martial artists in a combination of traditions and they just can not stand bullies… You are welcome to send your thugs over and we will even help you get them to the hospital afterward.

In a truly silly turn of events, a politician is questioning somebody else’s ethics! I speak of the Republican idiot who took it upon himself to call Natalie Portman a bad role model. Let’s see, she is in a long term commited relationship and engaged to be married to the father of the child she is expecting. She is employed. She has never had any issues of substance abuse or addiction to anything. She is well respected among her peers…

To be fair, let’s look at someone who Huckabee did NOT remark on. Charlie Sheen has been prancing about like a lunatic for the last month showing his ass. He has been caught numerous times and even admitted to hiring hookers and strippers. His drug addictions and chemically altered binges are truly legendary. He exposed his twin sons to an environment filled with hookers and drugs. Sheen is even being accused of threatening to decapitate his estranged wife!

Does his silence mean that Huckabee thinks Sheen is a better role model than Portman?!?!? That would sound like the ethical point of view of a politician. They are just not known for being so open about it. Then again, a conservative Republican might have singled Portman out for other criteria that separate her from Sheen…

Now, he takes some of it back… He even says he does not “criticize the hardworking single mothers in our country.” Then, maybe he should tell us exactly why he thinks Ms. Portman is a worse example than Mr. Sheen.

The reality is, she is showing the young women out there, who may not choose to marry before having a child, that there is a right way to do it. Be employed. Be a good and healthy person. Do not jump into it before you know you can provide a good home for your child.

The last politician who made this kind of public statement about a famous star was Dan Quayle… Maybe Huchabee could use a better “role model” himself?

Here I was, reading about an injustice, and up comes a popup. This is odd for the news site I was at. I calmly close the window and go back to my reading. IT POPS UP AGAIN!!! I have nothing particular against Campbell’s Healthy Request, but popups are sleazy and should NEVER come back up when closed. They seem to have contracted some pile of filth at “promotion.familytime.com” to perform a form of spam. I don’t know about you, but I will not be buying any form of Campbell’s product for my family. I am going to look at the label of every product I consider buying. If it’s connected to Campbell’s, it will be a product I doubt I will buy.

Who would have predicted to return of Reagan’s economic idiocy? Republicans in New York and other financial centers are once again touting the theory that if we charge less tax to corporations and rich people, the money will “Trickle Down” to the rest of the economy. I was born at night, but not LAST NIGHT! Corporations have already shown what they will do with the money. AIG partied like maniacs with bailout money. Other companies who have gotten give-backs from unions and lower level employees have ELIMINATED jobs and tried to bring in cheaper workers from other countries. They have taken assets offshore to avoid taxes and generally flaunted the fact that when they do wrong, they are largely untouchable.

On the other hand, New York City has become a dictatorship run by an attempted “Mayor For Life”. Bloomberg has hampered efforts to control the rougue agency known as the MTA. When they see advantage to it, they act as a private company. When cornered about breaches of ethics and laws governing corporations, they are suddenly a city agency. A city agency that is in no way officially answerable to anyone. They raise the rates and leach off taxpayers at will. People working for minimum wage are paying full time salaries to fat managers who outnumber actual workers by a ridiculous margin and paying for them to have a free car and fuel to run it on. When there is a public outcry, the gluttonous management point to a select few who “double dip” the pension system and scam the overtime system. When they run out of people who played the system at the lower levels, they vilify the union in general as the true cause of the public’s woes, while cutting services and raising rates. All supported by the mayor and other key people in government. This makes people feel insecure enough to think they need a “money man” in the mayor’s office. So the City council gets pressured until the term limit laws are set aside, without any attempt to give the people of the city any choice in the matter. Now, it already looks like he will try it again! Term limits were put in place democratically, they should not be removed in any other way.

The wonderful land of the Scotts has now been revealed to either be run by morons, or run by BP sell-outs. The “terminally ill” murderer of Lockerbie has now been revealed to be in wonderful health. How could the Dr. make such a mistake? Maybe his equipment malfunctioned? Could the samples been mixed up? No. He was simply paid off by a Lyban sympathetic BP. WHy would BP work with a country with such a history of evil and pay for the release of a man who is evil incarnate? Oil. Plain and simple. It’s the same thing that has lead Sarah Palin to sell out the great state of Alaska. It’s the money gotten from oil that has lead the Republicans and some Democrats to accuse our government of being too hard on the company that has, trough penny pinching and other unethical measures, destroyed a huge part of our ecosystem. The same company who created the worst oil disaster in history… Wouldn’t it be scary if they were the same ones who bought the freedom of a mass murderer in Scotland… Oh, wait, IT IS! I am finding it hard to think of a more evil company outside of the tobacco industry.

If these acts of evil bother you, act on it. No, do not throw mud. Do not throw anything or break anything. Simply pull across the street and buy gas at another place. The consumer has the power to kill a company by choking off their income. Vote with dead presidents.

As many of you may have seen, there is a great deal of posturing and name calling about immigration lately. For the record, I was always told that breaking a law was a criminal act and made one a criminal in the eyes of society. So, if a person enters the United States in a way that breaks the law, that person is a CRIMINAL. Not an “undocumented worker”. Somehow people have fallen for a line of faulty logic that says that these people, many of whom commit even more crimes while in this country, are being persecuted. That is a BAD spelling error. It’s not that they are “persecuted”, it’s that they need to be PROSECUTED! Now there is a group that is pushing for a moratorium on deportations. They are clearly insane.

Who do you think is really victimized when a person enters our country illegally? Big business could not be less interested in stopping it. They save untold millions a year by using workers that can be paid illegal slave wages and treated worse than livestock. Is it the middle class? Those folks who get unionized and non-unionized jobs in jobs for big corporations at various levels of the businesses? They rarely see anything but cheaper products at big chain stores and cheap day labor for landscaping around the house as the effects. Maybe it’s the people who worked for years to gain LEGAL access to this country, looked for jobs, and found that most of them involved working under the table and living in conditions no other American would willingly endure… Maybe it’s the poor guy who goes looking for an honest job in the city, only to find that most of the employers will not hire him because they have to pay him a fair wage. Maybe it’s the grandmother who is killed one night by a person who broke into her home to get the money to pay for fake documents. Maybe it’s the college student suddenly denied financial aid and put into massive debt because their identity has been stolen and used by 15 different people to get valid jobs, and then run up bills that will never be paid.

Arizona may have been ham handed when they started making new laws to handle illegal immigrants. Still, just by being in the country, these people are criminals. Try sneaking into any other country. You will find that you are not “given amnesty” or treated as a hero trying to seek asylum. You will be deported and treated like the criminal you are. I dare you to break into Russia, Japan, China, or Germany without a passport and visa. Unless you have more money than a major industry CEO, you will NOT like how you are treated.

Maybe we need to remember that our laws should be respected, especially by people who wish to live here!

So, I open my email yesterday. What do I see nestled in my inbox? The most transparent spam I ever saw. Being the person I am, I HAD to mess with this filthy creature. Here is the original spam. I will follow it with the messages that were exchanged…

2010/2/12 Jon wells <test@raytrade.nl>

As someone who knows people in crisis with their health, and as a person working in a major medical institution, I am shocked. Republicans are the ones I expect to screw the little guy, not Democrats… Now, it’s hard to tell them apart. I know a family with four kids, one part time income, and the father (the only one working) is a type 1 diabetic. They have no supplies for him right now and no cash. They are waiting for paperwork to go through for medicare. Make no mistake, a type 1 diabetic without his insulin is a walking dead man. Right now, the only thing keeping him alive is a family friend who gave him some of their insulin. This is not an isolated thing. Many people in our country have to choose between feeding their families and having the life saving medication they need. I know a type 2 diabetic who is having to not buy medicine so she can avoid losing her home and becoming homeless. She’s not able to get medicare until next fall.

It makes me ill to realize that we, the richest country in the world, can not care for our sick. We send millions of dollars in aid to other countries in both government and private money, but we fail the people who live on our own streets. Evil corporations move every job they can to India, Mexico, and China to avoid paying enough for people to live on. Other companies hire people who have entered the country so that they can work them like animals and treat them like slaves. Just the money that legal employees would feed into our system by paying taxes would pay for a large portion of any “public option”.

All the people who have no insurance become a burden on our emergency care systems and clinics as well. ER’s can’t turn you away for be uninsured… If the type 1 diabetic I mentioned dies, the government will foot the bill not only for his burial, but also for the continued care and feeding of the family he leaves behind. Over the next 17+ years that will add up…

I say we all watch for who votes down the “public Option” and we make sure NOT to vote for them when they run again. Remember, in the end, WE are the bosses. WE should fire politicians who are not doing the best job for us.

You know, it’s funny. Fundamentalist groups are always protesting movies over odd little details in movies. They even raised a stink about the mannish ugly step sister in Shrek because they chose to see her as a transvestite. Watching a children’s movie with my daughter, I realized that the holy rollers had missed a big one. After all, bees don’t have males who travel outside of the hive. That would mean that the bee character in the move was in fact female. Shouldn’t they be protesting and raising a stink about a lesbian couple in a child’s movie? This just goes to show, these people are very uneven in the application of their rules. What about the gay penguins? Not a word from the fundies on that one. Of course, one of them went straight… Maybe that’s why they were not bothered. Bisexual penguins and gay bees, maybe the fundamentalists are calming down. Maybe, in a few years and with enough alternative lifestyle animals, they will join in on a gay/lesbian parade…