Welcome to 2009! This year, for sure, someone other than George W Bush has become President of the United States. And who knows, maybe that someone will restore civil liberties. The new guy won't abduct people from a foreign country and lock them up on a US Naval Base in Cuba without due process, and then torture them.....("during wartime, the president's Commander-in-Chief power overrides the due process guarantee of the Fifth Amendment.")(My critique of the whole silly 2008 election cycle.)
"Read my lips. No new taxes." - then Vice President George H W Bush, 1988.
"Anyone making under $250,000 a year will pay zero new taxes." - then Senator Barack Obama, 2008.
I supported:
I supported:
Transcript of CNN interview of Barr
Yeah, I know, voting for Badnarik or Barr is "wasting my precious vote". But if voting was so important in USA presidential elections, Al Gore would have been elected President in 2000! (Al Gore got over 500,000 more of those "precious votes" than George W Bush did.)(Bush did get the only 5 votes that really counted, on the US Supreme Court.)(Ann Landers ran a column 11-4-96 urging everyone to vote because one vote can change history, and cited nine times that this has happened. They are all urban legends, however, see snopes.com 'One Vote' Fallacies.)
I have only voted ONCE in a governmental election since 11/72 , when I wrote in Dr. John Hospers for President/Tonie Nathan for VP . (They each got one electoral vote from a renegade Nixon elector.) The only time since then was when a friend was running for Kalamazoo City Commission in '83. There being virtually zero chance that my vote will effect the outcome of an election, I see no point in wasting my time. (Your chance of winning the Lottery is better than your chance of having any effect on the outcome of a US national election.)
In 2004, Badnarik got almost 390,000 votes and came in fourth after Nader,
who got about 407,000 votes.
(Results
from the Washington Post).
In 2008, Barr got almost 500,000 votes and also came in fourth after Nader, who
got about 668,000 votes. ( results from
Wikipedia)
My analysis of the 2004 election: I can usually predict election winners: I
didn't think GWB had a prayer! I thought he would be a one-termer like his
father was. I STILL cant believe that Kerry actually lost! The accepted wisdom,
that we are in a war and didn't want to change drivers, runs counter to the
1968
experiance, when Lyndon Johnson faced serious opposition in his own party
primaries over the Vietnam War, and withdrew.
1. What actually happened in 1968: Sen. Eugene McCarthy was a strong 2nd place
in the New Hampshire primary, LBJ withdrew, Sen. Robert Kennedy defeated
McCarthy in the CA primary and was immediately assassinated, Vice President
Hubert Humphrey was nominated amid the violence outside of the Chicago
Democratic National Convention, Nixon defeated Humphrey in the
election.....popular vote was Nixon 43.4%, Humphrey 42.7%, George Wallace 13.5%
2. What-If: If Robert Kennedy had not been killed: RFK probably would
have been nominated and probably would have defeated Nixon: Humphrey was
damaged by the rising antiwar sentiment and was seen as LBJ's man. With RFK as
President, the Republican Party would have been spared the Watergate disaster,
the Democratic Party would have been spared the 1972 McGovern disaster, and RFK
would have gotten us out of Vietnam with some semblance of honor!
Also: from TurnOffYourTV.com: Bush won, and Kerry lost, because the Bush campaign KNEW how to use TV!
Yes, she doesn't want it, but I would have loved to have seen the Republican Party nominate Dr. Condoleezza Rice for President in 2008. (Rice's bio @ Wikipedia .) She would be the first authentic genius in the White House!
To skip all this trivia and go right to the OS/2 and Linux installation story, click here.
For a picture of the most wonderful woman I have EVER met, click
here.
Me in 1966
Me in 1997
at Warpstock 2000
(clean-cut respectable look was returning Aug of 1999, but I thought better of
it!)
Me in 2006(This
picture appeared in the Las Vegas Sun 6/27/06, in an article about Mensa. I
suspect this is not the image Mensa wanted to project. A lot of pics were taken
of more "normal looking" members. I hadn't cut my beard since the
death of my housemate on 9/20/05. She would trim it when necessary.)
I was also at
,
but didn't get a photo!
Caution: my former brother-in-law, a journalism professor (with a PhD), says this page is "self-indulgent exhibitionism, which the Internet seems to inspire from certain personality types." I countered with the argument that most human behavior is a form of self-indulgence. Even "selfless" people are mostly doing what they like doing. Note: if you want to read a "serious" page, I've got one about HIV=not AIDS, another about censorware, one advocating the legalization of prostitution, and one about women! Further down, on this page, is my pro-choice for the pregnant woman, but pro-life for the child position on abortion, and a long section on religion, plus a new section on the assassination of President John Kennedy, and my take on the Scott Peterson murder trial. (Please note: I have always respected my ex-brother-in-law. He has a high level of intelligence; the two of us disagree on political idealogy; I'm a libertarian, he's a socialist. He is one of the few males in the world I wish I could call "friend".)
A Rational Response to 9/11/01
Why We Fight | An Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto, by open source guru Eric S Raymond. This is by far the most rational response I have ever read to the overall problem of terrorism. This thinker, known as ESR in the Linux/hacker/open source communities has lots of really interesting stuff to say! His collection of online writings, Eric's Random Writings, makes more sense to me than 99% of the stuff on the Web. My personal favorites: The Myth of Man the Killer, argues that most violent death results not from man's innate depravity, but from man's obediance to government; Why I Am An Anarchist is especially relavent given the decline of civil liberty since 9/11, and it was written before 9/11, and before the coronation of King George II. My favorite Internet Columnist, Rick Bayan, has an interesting look at 9/11.
Serious questions about 9/11: Reopen 9/11!
Another hypothesis about 9/11: According to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, God allowed 9/11 to happen, full story here. Falwell: "I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen."
Another way to deal with Arab Islamic terrorism: John Ross's America, Islam, and Those Prison Photos, relates, in part, the Islamic abhorance of pork, and relates an apocryphal story about the suppression of Islamic terrorism in the Phillipines by executing Islamic terrorists with pork coated bullets. (They cant go to Heaven then, they think.) John Ross also has lots of interesting stuff to say (pre-2007 archives); in particular he has advice for men about understanding women, about getting married, and planning for divorce, plus comments about the superiority of patriarchy over matriarchy. (And he DOES have advice for women about understanding men, and about when to have kids if you want both kids and a career.)
www.dontmarry.com;
this is must reading for young men contemplating marriage! (Us older guys who
have spent a lot of years divorced/single have been screwed over by women*
often enough we dont need to be warned.) Ross+ is right; see above link to
"understanding women"; there are significant differences in the way
(most N. American) men think and the way (most N. American) women think. No,
its not genetic, its not "hard-wired" in the brain: IMHO, its
cultural (learned behavior.)(This
article argues that women are conditioned from an early age to think that
their role is housewife/mother, NOT engineers or scientists or business
executives.)
+I found out about dontmarry.com in Ross's
planning
for divorce page. Ross also mentioned nomarriage.com, which he didn't like very
much, but which I thought was hilarious. There is a lot of content at
nomarriage.com about having children, something I (thank goodness!) never did.
(Another good page about planning for divorce:
fireyourwife.com)
*Let me make it VERY CLEAR here that my ex-wife did NOT screw me over
financially in the divorce! (I was very lucky not to be married in a state like
CA where
all assets are "joint property", and very lucky my ex was not the
vengeful type, plus I was very lucky to be divorced well before my prime
earning years.)
(Unless you count the $1,000 I "loaned" her after she left me, but I
blame myself for that: obviously, a woman who doesn't keep her *solemn* wedding
vows (promises) probably isnt going to keep a promise to repay a
"loan" from her ex.)(She also "borrowed" $500 from my
parents: didn't pay them back, either. Isnt divorce fun?)"We
can't just confess the sin of breaking a promise and think we can go our merry
way thinking that we no longer are accountable. As long as you are still able
to fulfill your word (even if it's uncomfortable and you don't want to) you
need to go to that person, repent of your sin and make amends by keeping your
promise. Can you really come into the presence of God knowing that you refuse
to keep your word? What kind of relationship can you have with the Lord if your
are able to keep your word and don't?"
I wish she hadn't divorced me, but that's another matter. My mistake was in
thinking that her (perceived at the time) honesty and decency was TYPICAL of
women I would meet in the future. I was wrong.
Policeware
Here's a fun new idea: mandatory hardware installed in your computer to report anything you do with it not approved by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America); doing anything that might violate a copyright lands you in prison for up to five years. Remove the hardware, same penalty.
Text of the proposed "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act".
A very personal rant-skip this if you find disease and death depressing
Alzheimer's
Disease sucks! My mother had it, her only sister had it; their father had
it. My ex-mother-in law had it, my ex-sister-in-law had it. Two of the most
depressing things in my life were: seeing my aunt with it at my parents' 50th
anniversary party in 1996, and seeing my mother with it in 1999. Today's
(1-11-05) news brings word that a possible treatment/prevention MAY have been
found at a hospital in India. It seems that in India lots of Curry sauce is
eaten, and there is a low rate of Alzheimer's. UCLA researchers think that
curcumin, the yellow
pigment in curry spice, might be the "magic bullet"(also known as
Turmeric).
Story
here.
(Personal note: Every woman I knew who got Alzheimer's had spent years as a
SAHM, a Stay At Home Mom. I don't know for sure about the others, but my own
Mom continued to stay at home even after her youngest child was in school; she
was a college graduate and had been a teacher before getting married. She made
a (brief) return to teaching only when the family needed more money to send me
to college. I understand that mental inactivity is a risk factor for
Alzheimer's.)
SPAM
SPAM sucks! (Why SPAM sucks). I promise to never, EVER, buy anything as a result of receiving an Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE, better known as SPAM.) I fully support WPOISON, an effort to hopelessly pollute spammer's mailing lists by fooling their email harvesting bots into adding fictitious email addresses. (Unfortunately, WPOISON went offline after a DDOS attack.) I have taken the Boulder Pledge.
Here's another suggestion to solving the SPAM problem: Shine a Light on Spammers.
A revealing quote from a SPAM I just got: "If email advertising won't sell your product then nothing will." The spammer offers to email "from 250,000 to 55 million people" (On Special: $499 for 250,000 to $3,499 for 10 million)!
Spammers try to sell anything, even SPAM blockers and invitations to set you
up to send your own SPAM. I've got to wonder: if they were actually selling a
valuable product, wouldn't they just use regular advertising to show off the
product's merits instead of resorting to unwelcome mass e-mailings to get a few
buyers who will buy anything?
Idiot spammers: I don't want a bigger penis (OMG, the volume of
"bigger penis spam" and "ED pills spam" has greatly
increased in 2008; there must be a LOT of insecure guys out there)(also greatly
increased is "camgirls spam"), I don't want generic Viagr@(Sildenafil
Citrate) or Cialis(Tadalafil) or Regalis(generic Cialis) or Levitra or
Vardenafil(generic Levitra) or IGF2 or Vildenafil XP or Virility Patch RX or
VPXL; Paracodin, HGH, Vicodin, Prozac, Valium, Meridia, Soma, Xanax,
Hydrocodone(generic Vicodin), Ambien, Paxil,
Vioxx, also weight loss stuff
Phentermine, Xenical, Hoodia, Anatrim, etc., etc., etc., I don't want to find a
hot woman who lives near me, I'm not interested in "camgirls"[that
includes "Julie", the megaspammer "high school senior" with
a "free" webcam (yeah, sure, but read the fine print BEFORE you give
"Julie" your credit card info!)("Julie" will ask for your
credit card info to prove you are over 18, but if you dont cancel after your
"free" time is up, "Julie" starts charging you)] or
"cheating housewives", I don't want a PhD based on my "life
experiance", I don't want to copy DVD's, I dont want an illegal device to
watch "pay per view" TV free, I dont want "cheap softwares"
(spelling provided by non English speaking spammers!)(opps, sorry, spammers
just seem illiterate because they make up fake words that will get past
word-based SPAM blockers), I dont want the so-called "underground CD"
or "banned CD", I dont want a "genuine replica" or
"True Reproductions" or "Genuine Reproductions" or
"premium replica" or "real replications" or "Authentic
Reproductions" or "Royal Replica" or "Actual Replica"
or "Veritable Replications" or "Veritable Reproductions" or
"famous replicas" ROLEX ///atch, I dont want to buy "penny
stocks"(penny stocks are the new SPAM SCAM! The idea is for the
scammer to buy a bunch of nearly worthless stock at about 3 cents a share and
send out a blizzard of (SPAM) phony endorsements* of the nearly bankrupt
company, hoping to increase demand for the stock and raise its price, then dump
the shares at 6 cents or so, doubling the scammer's money. When the company
files bankruptcy, all the new "investors" lose everything they
"invested". (The scammers use junk email to convince people to buy
junk stock. )
*sample quotes: "Watch the stock go crazy! Get on board NOW! Its going to
EXPLODE!"
"Stock is going to explode in next 5 days - Watch it SOAR"
"Current Price: $0.06
Will it Continue Higher?
Watch This One Thursday as We Know Many of You Like Momentum."
--------
They have an "unsubscribe" address, but of course it
(stox0012@yahoo.com) is fake, too. This whole scheme is only borderline legal,
it is a Pump and Dump
Scheme; to avoid legal problems/jail time they stay as anonymous as
possible. (SEC page on Pump
and Dump Schemes.)
--------
I dont want a new mortgage from some moron who tells me he has approved my
nonexistent application.* What I want is for your phony "unsubscribe"
links to actually work! (I never "subscribed" to receive all this
crap mail in the first place.)
*I can understand why spammers think they can sell CDs and medications, but are
there really people who are ignorant enough to get into a $300,000 mortgage
from a spammer?? Is there really
"one born every day",
as PT Barnum said regarding "suckers"?
--------------
USA Lenders Network
Box 40937
Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada, B4A 3Z2
-------------
The so-called "USA Lenders Network" is so phony they even use other
people's e-mail addresses as their "return address"; they used one of
MINE and I got their undeliverable SPAM returned to ME! (Watch Replica spammers
have done this, too.)
EVERY DAY I get new mortgage SPAM which says
"here are the deals we have TODAY (hurry, these offers will expire
TONIGHT)"
I also promise never to buy anything from a telemarketer, and support anti-SPAM legislation similar to that passed requiring telemarketers to pay to call you if you have asked not to be called.
!!! You can now add your phone number to the national telemarketing do-not-call list at www.donotcall.gov. (A similar do-not-spam list *should* be in the works!)(Here is a list of proposed but unpassed federal antispam laws). The organization hosting this site also offers a "National Opt-out Directory" for $9.95/year; they say they can get you off most spammer's mailing lists.
This image supplied
by the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial
Email (CAUCE).
Hurray! In 12/03 Congress passed, and the President signed, the CAN SPAM Act of 2003. It will result in the creation of a federal do-not-spam list, with monetary penalties for persistent spammers! The FTC is (slowly!) working on setting up a Do Not E-mail Registry. Unfortunately, the FTC reports here that such a registry would not be effective at this time; spammers would access the list and use it to send SPAM to!
Sigh! CAN-SPAM isn't working, as anyone with an emailbox can see; the volume of UCE has gone up since 12/03! CAUCE explains why.
The Direct Marketing Association has it's (suprisingly negative) attitude toward SPAM looked at here
SPAM FAQ from abuse.net
The Federal Trade Commission SPAM site.
The Federal Communications Commission telemarketing site.
An organization I support 99% of the time, the ACLU, argues here that honest UCE is constitutionally protected speech. CAUCE disagrees here, arguing that the right to speak freely does not compel an audience to listen. ISPs like AOL have the right to intercept SPAM before the sheer volume brings their mail servers down.
(On Oct 4, 2004, the US Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that the do not call list does not violate telemarketer's free speech rights. First telemarketers, hopefully spammers, too!)
My award for worst spammer: the people who send out porn info with a note saying that it is a "friendly bonus" from (some random female name). The "unsubscribe" email address is one of at least ten 100% fake addresses @online.com.ua (Ukraine), a former part of the former USSR.
Frankly, the old-fashioned porn spammers are not nearly as persistent and obnoxious as the new mortgage spammers, who simply will not take "unsubscribe" for an answer!
Remember when it used to be fun to get email? Now 50% to 99% of your incoming email is from people with fake names at fake addresses trying to sell you stuff you don't want.
Speaking generally, of course, I find most product advertising to be silly. At best, advertising can convince you to buy something ONCE. Obvious exception: ads for addictive substances/activities. Cigarette ads do not exist to convince people to start smoking, but are targeted at already existing addicts to get them to try a different brand.
SIGH! Even legitimate businesses, like Carnival Cruise Line and Christian
Book Distributers, are now using "e-mail marketing". But the bad
drives out the good. SPAM is used to sell worthless junk and is used for scams.
(I especially like the "I'm a pretty Russian girl.....I will come to
visit/date/marry you in the USA, but I need you to send me money first."
scam. Send enough of these, and a few suckers will bite! Its not a plausable
scam, because a single, unemployed, Russian girl whose entire family lives in
Russia, is not going to get a visa to enter the USA, period.*
*the only way she will get into the USA is if YOU go to Russia, marry her
there, and bring her back with you.
It's easy for your money to EXIT the USA, which is what the scam is all about!
I hear that a lot of these "girls" are actually men: your
"lover" may really be a
"hairy man named
Boris".) People like me heartlessly delete all "e-mail
marketing", before proceding to e-mail we WANT to read. Spam is so unread
that I doubt if even the "King of Spam",
Spamford Wallace,
can make money sending it.
Yes, I will admit it, I utterly loathe junk advertising. Junk snail
mail(addressed to "resident", "to our friends at") goes
directly into the trashcan unopened and unread. Junk email is VERY easy to
recognize and is deleted unopened and unread. I did get one junk snail mail I
did open. It was sent by
Saint
Matthew's Churches in Dallas, TX (mailing
address in Tulsa, OK), and was sent in accordance with instructions from
"God's Holy Spirit", which told them that "someone at this
address needs a blessing". They sent a (paper) "prayer
handkerchief". All I had to do was write my needs on the handkerchief,
send it back, and they would pray for my needs. Send money (a "biblical
seed offering"), too, of course.
Wow! Junk mail sent under instructions from God Himself!
Please note: Although
Saint
Matthew's Churches denies that they are a mail fraud or a mail scam
operation , there is a whole page about them:
Rip Off
Report: Saint Matthew's Churches aka Prayer By Letters rip off scam con artists
in the name of God Tulsa Oklahoma
Note: I personally do not think this is a mail fraud or mail scam: although
they cite examples of people whose prayers were answered, they do not promise
that yours will be answered.
5-17-08: Although I failed to return the prayer handkerchief and send money,
they didnt give up on me! They sent me a (paper) "Church prayer rug",
which I am supposed to kneel on to pray, and then return so they can send it to
"another dear friend of ours who also needs a blessing". And send a
"seed gift for God's work." They even sent a "business reply
mail" envelope so I wouldnt have to buy a stamp to send them money. Plus
they now have a website where I can read "testimonies of answered
prayers". How reassureing! I still dont think this really qualifies as a
mail fraud or mail scam: they are not really offering anything in return
for the money that they can deliver. (After all, its God who decides whether or
not to answer prayer, right?)
Mr. Advertiser: Has it ever occured to you that how you advertise is
as important as what you advertise? How many sales are you losing,
sometimes permanently, when you choose to advertise with annoying SPAM or
pop-up ads? (pop-up ads suck, too. When I get a pop-up in my face, that
advertiser goes into the "never do business with"
category......classmates.com has the most annoying ads that pop-under; I will
NEVER again use classmates.com!)(for a marketer to think he can sell something
with a pop-up ad is roughly equivilant to thinking he could sell something by
spray painting an ad on my car.)
(update: now, in 2008, the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com, is plastering
their site with pop-up ads for classmates.com UGH! I am sick of
classmates.com: there must be another movie site on the net.)(imdb.com just
lost a user.)
Internet Movie Database SUCKS! Big time! Its nothing but a crappy
advertising farm. YUCK. Take those stupid ads for for that silly
classmates.com and do something productive with your lives.
IMDB popups can be eliminated by installing a browser with a popup blocker. I
just happened to install Netscape 7.2 on my laptop, and discovered that it has
a popup blocker, so now I can actually use the great content on IMDB!
(adware sucks, too. Lots of seemingly useful "free" software, like
ICQ and AIM has degenerated into being basically adware, with some actual
functionality to con the user into downloading it. I used to use ICQ a lot, but
those incessant flashing ads, no, thanks. AIM is better: at least the ads are
(mostly) static; I wonder if the marketing gurus who design these ads have
researched the "flashing ad" question deeper than "does it get
the viewer's attention?"...... and if it does, "is the viewer more or
less inclined to buy what is being advertised?")
Silliest product advertised endlessly online and on AIM: Callwave: you
get to pay them so that calls received while you are online (with a dial up
connection) are forwarded to their 800 # answering machine; you also have to
pay the phone company for call forwarding when busy. BUT, nowdays almost
everyone has a cell phone, just set up call forwarding when busy to forward to
your cell phone. You will never miss a call, and you wont have to pay Callwave
for a useless "service"!
But beware! Although the only user of Callwave at my residence has been dead
for over three years; didnt really use it while alive, and cancelled it before
she died, the morons at Callwave STILL charge me for their totally useless
service. What a scam!
And the king of the junk snail mailers is:
Cox Communications! If you get Cox Cablevision, they will STUFF your mailbox
with ads for all the other services they offer. Save a tree, Cox! You are just
communicating with my garbage can. Instead of burdening the Postal Service with
all this junk, why not just deliver it directly to the county landfill?
(The silliest aspect: If you have Cox Cablevision, you already know about Cox's
other services, as they advertise them *endlessly* on your TV!)(Cox also has
the silliest ads on TV; a group of short spacemen and a living pile of cash;
the living cash pile hangs around to remind you how much money you are saving
with Cox phone service.)
My former wife has indicated that "the hippy look completely turns me
off". Although I am still *very* fond of her, and still think it would
be wonderful to get her back, I remember her as a person able to look
beyond physical appearance to see the real person inside. In addition, in the
25+ years that have passed, she has become "very conservative", and a
serious (Protestant) Christian, which suggests "incompatible!" I am a
believer in the concept, "love conquers all", and I always have been,
however naive that might sound. My own observation is that people more
radically different than myself and my ex-wife have found happiness together.
Having long hair is not so much a personal preference with me as it is a
function of my inability to find a suitable barber. Having a beard is a
personal preference because I absolutely abhor shaving every morning!
Questions for my ex-wife, the serious Christian:
Didn't the Jesus you believe in say that if you divorced your faithful
spouse and remarried, that you commit adultery?
Jesus said, " And if the wife shall put away her husband, and be married
to another, she committeth adultery" (Mark 10:12, KJV)
Jesus also said. "Whosoever putteth away his wife and marrieth another,
committeth adultery." (Luke 16:18, KJV)
Although the accounts of Mark and Luke are pretty definate about divorce and
remarriage being adultery, Matthew records one exception:
Jesus said, "But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife,
saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and
whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery." (Matt 5:32 , KJV)
Jesus also said, "And I say unto you, whosoever shall put away his wife,
except if for her fornication. and shall marry another, commiteth adultery, and
whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery. (Matt 19:9, KJV)
(This may not be an exception.....it is argued in
Marriage and
Divorce that adultery only allows the "innocent party" to
divorce the aldulterer/adulteress; the "innocent party" still
cannot remarry until the "guilty party" dies.)
Moses said, speaking for God, "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
(Exodus 20:24, KJV)(This is
The Sixth
Commandment.)
The Apostle Paul said, "And unto the married I command, yet not I,
but the Lord, Let not the wife depart from her husband: But if she
depart, let her remain unmarried, or be reconciled to her husband: and
let not the husband put away his wife. (1 Corinthians 7:10-11, KJV )
Paul also said: "Thus a married woman is bound by law to her husband as
long as he lives. . . . Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she
lives with another man while her husband is alive" (Rom. 7:2-3, KJV).
"To refuse to take the Bible literally leaves every man with his own
interpretation. If the Bible does not mean what it says, who is to say what it
means?" -David W Cloud
Thomas Aquinas, the great (perhaps greatest) Christian philosopher, argued,
after divorce, they
(marriage partners) must remain unmarried(until their ex-spouse dies).
If I were a good Christian, I would much prefer the Roman Catholic (Catholic Encyclopedia:
Divorce (In Moral Theology);
Catholic Answers:
Divorce and Remarriage) position to the modern liberal Protestant [anything
goes, morality is not established by God, forget what Jesus (God in human form)
or Paul (inspired by God) said] position.
The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia has a long article about
adultery, which concludes with "Jesus tells us that divorce never received
divine sanction, and that it is, therefore, an evil. This lays upon adultery
the weight of divine abhorrence and displeasure."(ISBE, revised
©1979, G W Bromiley, ed., Volume 1, pg 59) See also ISBE online(original
1915 edition, J Orr, ed.):
Divorce
in the New Testament (In this article it says that Jesus's teachings on
adultery and divorce are "very simple" and are recorded at
Matt 19:3-12, see the
Geneva Study
Bible - Commentary on Matthew 19, or
John Darby's
Synopsis of Matthew 19.)
(This ISBE link is so good, and so important, that in case it goes bad,
"Divorce in the New Testament" can also be found
here.)
The (United Methodist) minister at our wedding said, "What God has joined
together, let no man put asunder." (He was quoting Jesus at
Matt 19:6 and
Mark 10:9.) We made a
number of promises to each other, including the operative one here, "for
better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love
and to cherish, till death do us part."
Apparently,
1. promises made in the presence of the God you believe in are for show, good
only until you want out.
2. The concept of love is highly conditional, it only lasts if your loved one
lives for you and meets your needs, or until someone else comes along who meets
your needs better.
3. Once your real Mr Right appears, then you hire a lawyer and get a judge to
undo what your God did. Did you make the same promises the next time you got
married?
The United Methodist Church, at its website,
specifically here, says,
"Where marriage partners, even after thoughtful consideration and counsel,
are estranged beyond reconciliation, we recognize divorce as
regrettable......". But we had no thoughtful consideration nor counsel,
nor were we estranged beyond reconciliation. (I didn't even know WHY she was
divorcing me until many years later, when a friend challenged the reason I had
been giving out for over 20 years; so I finally asked my ex; and then
was told the real reason. Obviously our pre-divorce communication was
negligible.)
The early Christians
did not agree with the modern United Methodists: "A husband may be an
adulterer or a sodomite, he may be stained with every crime and may have been
left by his wife because of his sins; yet he is still her husband, and, so long
as he lives, she may not marry another."
- Jerome, Letter LV,
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Vol. 6, pg. 110).
"Just as a woman is an adulteress, even though she seems to be married
to a man, while a former husband yet lives, so also the man who seems to marry
her [and] who has been divorced does not marry her, but, according to the
declaration of our Savior, he commits adultery with her."
-Origen, Commentaries on
Matthew 14:24 [A.D. 248]).
Finally! Here is a sermon by a United Methodist Pastor that gets at what the Holy Bible is all about regarding divorce: "The Bible and Divorce".
What the Bible Says about Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage
But nobody has to take my word for it: Nave's Topical Bible is now public domain and online; here is everything the Bible has to say about Divorce.
Please note: Although I obviously think that divorce sucks, it is certainly in order for people needing to escape from an abusive spouse; according to Divorce and Christianity such a divorce is Biblically Correct.
And finally, here is a remarkably thoughtful, biblically sound analysis:Christian Divorce and Remarriage, by a Pentecostal Pastor.
Organized religion:
The above is SO TYPICAL of those who participate in organized religion. Many
people really believe in a God, and in the words printed in a Holy Book, but
conviently put aside their "beliefs" when their beliefs interfere
with their desires. (Or they manipulate their belief system to make divorce
seem acceptable: How do people justify
divorce today?) (I read somewhere: don't remember where*, or I would cite*
it, that the "fundamentalist"
Southern Baptist Convention has a higher divorce rate than the more liberal
United Methodist Church.) Organized religion is riddled with hypocrisy; I have
never been a willing participant. Sure, I went to church when my parents
required it, but upon leaving home for college I abandoned it. It was only when
it was not required that I read a lot about it.....the philosophy behind
religion is quite interesting!
*here's the cite: US
Divorce Rates, shows the highest divorce rates among conservative and
"born -again" Christians; the lowest divorce rates among Roman
Catholics, Lutherans, agnostics, and atheists!
I'm really curious!
Is it possible to be all of these:
A. A Christian who believes the Holy Bible is the
inspired,
inerrant,
Word of God.
B. A Christian who believes that one should live by the precepts of the Holy
Bible.
C. Married, then initiated a divorce of a non-adulterer, non-abusive spouse.
D. Remarried.
E. A non-hypocrite.
The concept of the "second hander"
He is what Ayn Rand calls a "second-hander:" He surrenders his capacity for judgment to other people, and therefore, he focuses not on what he thinks, but on what others think. A "second hander" is a person who regards other people's opinions as automatically more worthwhile than one's own. The classic "second hander" will define herself as ugly or fat or stupid because other people say (or think)so, and will usually lower their own self concept accordingly. I was married to one of these once; I hope she has seen the logical flaw by now! (The logical flaw: traits like "ugly" and "stupid" are hopelessly subjective, as are their opposites; the individual is better placed than others to evaluate these attributes. Other traits like "fat", especially, also "short", are NOT inherently negative: two of the most brilliant people I have ever known were objectively "fat", but Id much rather know them than a beautiful moron.)
I was first exposed to this concept in the novel The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. This concept explains a depressingly large amount of human irrationality.
Memorandum to my ex-wife 1.0:
Note: this is no longer current (1/08). There is a
*highly* revised
version 3.0; the URL of 2.0 is listed on my "Index to my web
writings" page.
On 9-26-04, I watched Sleepless
in Seattle. A few days prior I watched
When Harry Met Sally. Both of
these movies deal with the question of "the one"*, as in the
one right person. Prior to these movies, I had scoffed at the idea of "the
one". But now I am convinced that my ex was "the one" for
me. We met in college when your sorority and my fraternity held a "sex
forum". I noticed you the same way that the main characters notice each
other in "Sleepless". Even 25+ years of seperation have not
changed my view.
(I was not
"the
one" for you. I was not "Mr Right". I was "Mr. Right
Now": a temporary sperm donor that would enable you to fulfill your real
agenda......BAYBEES!(pweshus
widdle baybees!)(To your credit, as I say elsewhere on this page, at least
you didn't oops me.)(To be
100% honest here, I should add that she didnt
successfullyopps
me. She did admit once that she flushed ONE birth control
pill; luckily for me she didnt know she would have needed to flush many in a
row to trigger ovulation. It still wasn't a nice thing to do, although if she
had been a real deceptive spouse type she would have read up on human
reproduction before implementing her scheme. I'd guess the flush was done in an
angry moment.)
So why didn't you divorce me earlier, and marry some guy who would give you the
baybees you wanted? Oh yeah, you needed some guy with a reliable paycheck so
you could stay home with your hypothetical brood, and you didn't have spouse #2
lined up yet, right?
Hope to see you again someday, but I
Won't
Get Fooled Again (That's how I feel after 30 years of single/divorced
status, but sometimes I still feel like
this.)(how I felt on my
wedding day 6-28-68)(how I felt when you
dumped me in 6/76(and told me you wanted to move out on July 4 to celebrate
Independence Day!)(How I feel in
2007. In our generation, post WW2 Baby Boomers, wedding "vows" do
not mean what they meant to our parents.)
*Nora Ephron has "written
by" type credits for both movies, plus she directed "Sleepless".
The female lead in both movies is the same actress, but the characters are
quite different. Nora Ephron also wrote, and directed
You've Got Mail, which also
had the same female lead actress, and also dealt with "the one". I
saw this movie in 1/06, and loved it.
"It must have
been love, but it's over now,
It must have been good, but I lost it somehow."
You once said:
"I, (wife), take thee, John,
to be my wedded husband,
to have and to hold,
from this day forward,
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death do us part,
according to God's holy ordinance,
and thereto I pledge thee my faith."
"Or just realize that when your bride vows "'To love and to cherish 'til death do us part," she'll only honor the words until she decides not to. Don't be too surprised if that moment comes a lot sooner than you expected." -John Ross, in this article.
"Its life's illusions I recall,
I really don't know life,
at all." -from "Both Sides Now".
Followup: This year, 2006, it will be 30 years since you ditched me
for Mr. Wonderful. You say it would not be "appropriate" for me to
buy you a birthday present. See here, Mrs. Wonderful:
1. I havent the slightest interest in causing problems between you and Mr.
Wonderful. (I agree with this: "When a man steals your wife there is no
better revenge than to let him keep her." -Sacha Guitry) I have stated
explicitely that if you divorce Mr. Wonderful, I will have nothing to do with
you.
2. Its been 30 years since I have even seen you. Would Mr. Wonderful feel
threatened if a long ago former spouse who lives a very long way away buys you
a $10 book about Christian Apologetics?
3. Tonight, 1/28/06, I saw The
Shop Around the Corner, which You've Got Mail was a remake of. I
really am a hopeless romantic: I really believed all that beautiful stuff in
our wedding vows, and yes, I really do still love you even after 30
years.
4. I'm a fan of "Somewhere in Time", both the
movie, and the
song
by Michael Crawford in EFX(Note: you can hear the melody from the song in
the movie). A hopeless romantic, I even belong to
INSITE, the
International Network of Somewhere in Time Enthusiasts. The INSITE site refers
to this movie as "The Most Romantic Love Story Ever Filmed".
5. I really like "love movies": I especially like two I have
recently(early 2006) been made aware of:
The Lake House, and
The Love Letter, both of which
have lovers seperated by Time, like in "Somewhere in Time".
I find "The Lake House" very compelling; definately my favorite.
"The Love Letter" is based on this
short
story by Jack Finney, which includes the movie's most touching line,
"I never forgot".
Note: of these three movies mentioned, only one has a (truely) happy ending.
(Ok well, that is one out of three. Of myself, my siblings, my ex-wife, and my
ex-wife's siblings, only one person out of six remained married to his/her
original spouse. Neither my nor my ex-wife's parents were ever divorced; maybe
its a generational thing. Divorce is a (terribly) sad ending. I will not be
getting divorced again.)(Divorce sucks so badly I would only recommend it to
someone needing to escape from a true "abusive spouse" situation.)
Note: this page's title, heading, and general concept were all swiped from AppleKay's Movie Cafe; she also made this graphic
in support of my
favorite (now extinct) online service (see below).
I was a 52 year old(now 61) student at UNLV, majoring in computer science. (The y2k
problem example: lots of computers only used two digits for year, and programed
in '19' as the first two digits. Even as recent a system as Windows95 had to be
patched
to make it work correctly on Jan. 1, 2000.)(Although the MS patch works to fix
Win95, I used Norton 2000 on my computer before 1-1-2000, which somehow
adjusted my BIOS so that I can reinstall Win95 or any other non-y2k compliant
software without patching! Using Norton Utilities, especially the "Rescue
Disk" part, has saved me more than once from Windoze unreliability. I had
also bought an "AMS scan ISA BIOS/CMOS Millennium Board", which would
have been as good, but as of 11/2003 I haven't even had to install it.)(I will,
there are still a few hardcoded y2k errors in old software that a hardware
solution might solve.)(Another plug for Norton: I have become an
"expert" at reinstalling Windows, something nobody should have to
become an expert at! My current Windows installation has lasted a LONG time for
Windows; I attribute this to Norton SystemWorks WinDoctor, part of which fixes
errors in the Windows registry.)
At UNLV, I failed to master C++ twice and thought it best to move on. I plan to
enroll in the Liberty University School
of LifeLong Learning, and finish a degree I have already started in Biblical
History.
Way back in 1970 I got a BBA in (ugh!) accounting at
Western Michigan University.
An interesting article
about the validity of the double entry system used by accountants today. (I
thought of switching majors, but my then-wife protested, "I thought we had
it all planned!"**)(No hard feelings there! See
bottom of this page; I still love her
and would take her
back in a heartbeat if she were not remarried.,
Divorce sucks; I would never
be the cause of one.) I worked for WMU for
24 years,
during which time my boss, now the VP for Business and Finance, computerized
the accounting department and exposed me to computers, which I found infinitely
preferable to accounting.
**So why do we all go to college, anyway?
Going to college was the default for my generation: post WW2 Baby Boomers.
We (males) went to college so we could get married and have a good job to
support the ensuing kids and the (all to frequently) non working wife. Females
went to college to meet marriagable men. Luckily, there are exceptions: the
most highly placed woman that I know in my field is an Assoc. VP for Business
and Finance, but of course she still had a baybee on her way up the ladder. My
ex-wife has a Bachelors in Speech Pathology and Audiology, a Masters in
Education, and was invited to enter the Doctoral program in Education, but is
working as an *Accountant* after taking the Intro to Accounting class so that
she would know what I was doing while she was teaching! (What an underuse of
such a fine mind.)
(All she wanted in life was baybees and famblee.)
I copied this quote from the comments on
this page:
"for as education moves its focus toward job preparation and away from the
arts, history, culture, philosophy and other areas that promote critical
thinking, society will be generating human robots, not thinkers."
- "Gail" March 25th, 2007 11:40 am
NOTE: The above link is about the difference between Sunni Muslims and
Shia(Shiite) Muslims, who are currently (2007) keeping the USA tied down in
Iraq as referees to their civil war. Its well worth reading if you want to know
why they are killing each other.
If I had it to do over, I would have majored in Philosophy (1st choice, but not
sure how to support myself as one), or History (2nd choice, also not sure how
to support myself; I do not have the temperment to be a teacher), or Chemistry,
or Computer Science.
(Background: In High School I needed a filler class once, and for some reason
took Bookkeeping, which I found to be very easy. When I got to college
and had to declare a Major, I went for Accounting, which was indeed easy,
although Accounting majors do have to take courses like Economics, which are
not easy, and business courses like Marketing, which are dull.
Also in High School, I took Chemistry, and was utterly fascinated by the
PERIODIC CHART OF THE
ELEMENTS. I still am. (Here is a better
"Periodic Chart" ......all the elements are clickable, revealing
lots of info about the element.) My "Big Brother" in my college
fraternity was a Chemistry Major; I should have talked to him some more instead
of going the easy route. In the late 60s, when I was in college, Computer
Science was still Mainframe Computers and languages like Fortran....the
IBM PC was
still more than a decade away. I did take Intro to Computers and wrote Fortran
programs, but I didnt think I wanted to spend my working life doing that.
Although I live in Las Vegas, I regard gambling at a casino to be
highly irrational and don't. (The house is in business to make a profit;
ie. the house is NOT gambling: in order for there to be a few big winners whose
pictures are displayed at the casinos, there have to be a lot of losers.) I
know personally a few people who are compulsive gamblers, who say
"gambling is FUN", which I suppose it is if you think that losing
money is fun. I even used to
live with
one; help for them is available through
Gamblers
Anonymous in Southern Nevada; some compulsive gamblers deny the possibility
of treatment, see:Treatment. Those in
Treatment-Denial can find a National Council on Problem Gambling certified
counselor in their area by going
here. If you are
unsure as to whether you are a compulsive gambler, try reading GA's
20 questions!
If you are a compulsive gambler, here is GA's
12 step recovery
program. I personally am an advocate of reason, and find it very
frustrating that compulsive gamblers cannot be convinced to stop gambling
through logic. It is necessary to accept that compulsive gamblers are not
rational about gambling: they must come to accept that they are sick and seek
help or healing on their own.
Note: It is a LOT easier to understand irrational behavior that results from a
physical addiction like nicotene or heroin. Psychological addictions (gambling,
overeating, etc) are
incredibly frustrating; especially when the addict is highly intelligent and
knows he/she needs professional help.
(It does say at the bottom of this
page that sugar and flour are addictive, which would explain some
compulsive overeaters, however
this page explains
overeating as psychological addiction.)
(It says in CONSCIOUS
CONTACT: BRAIN, MIND AND ADDICTION, that compulsive gambling has a
neurobiological explanation.)
More help? See the Nevada Council on
Problem Gambling.
If you are a California resident making an every-weekend trip to Las Vegas or
Reno to gamble, and think you might have a problem*, see the
California Council on Problem
Gambling.
*(If you drive to Las Vegas and spend your whole time in the casino and dont
even get a room at the hotel, you DO have a problem.)
Anyone with a problem should at least read
The Four Phases of
Compulsive Gambling!
For those living with a compulsive gambler, there is
Gam-anon: Living with a
compulsive gambler. (My personal advice: don't live with a compulsive
gambler unless you have an infinite supply of money AND patience.)
Casinos in Las Vegas send out promotional material and freebies to past
gamblers, some of whom are addicted and ruining their lives. This is like
whisky manufacturers sending out free samples to alcoholics.
1-800-Bets-Off. A major problem gambling site with free help for problem gamblers.
Reading through the above links, one finds that there are
two distinct types of
compulsive gamblers :
1. Action compulsive
gamblers typically play "skill" games like craps and blackjack.
They see themselves as smarter than average and tend to have a
"system" to beat the casino's odds.Day
Tradersare action gamblers who play at the world's largest casino, the New
York Stock Exchange. They have a "system", and do
"research", so they aren't really gambling. (Yeah, right; any
compulsive gambler with a system will say they are not gambling....their system
makes it a "sure thing".)
2. Escape compulsive
gamblers typically play "luck" games like slot machines and video
poker. They accept that they will lose, but play for the
hypnotic,
almost narcotic effect of repetitious actions on their machines. It says in
Gambling addiction
Q&A"Q. Is there one type of gambling that is more addictive than
others? A. Video poker and slot machines have been referred to as the
"crack cocaine of gambling."
It says in this Problem Gambling FAQ that mental health professionals prefer the term "pathological gambling" to "compulsive gambling". I agree. I have seen firsthand how the uncontrollable urge to gamble can lead to criminal activity. I agree with one pathological gambler I know that "Its a sickness!"
Although the link between pathological gambling and criminal behavior cannot be established as strict cause and effect, it says in this bibliography that "approximately two-thirds of non-incarcerated.......pathological gamblers admit engaging in illegal behavior to finance their gambling activitites...."
Dictionary
definition of "pathological":
1. Of or relating to pathology.
2. Relating to or caused by disease.
3. Of, relating to, or manifesting behavior that is habitual, maladaptive, and
compulsive: a pathological liar.
Diagnostic Criteria for Pathological Gambling(from DSM-IV; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - 4th edition).
Definition of "pathological gambling", from
Problem Gambling Terms:
Pathological gambling: A chronic inability to resist the impulse to gamble. The
term is usually limited to cases where the gambling causes serious damage to a
person's social, vocational, or financial life. Often referred to as compulsive
gambling and less frequently as disordered gambling, it is considered by most
to be an impulse control disorder. It is not synonymous with problem gambling.
Pathological gambling is one of a set of Impulse Control Disorders, and is in the same class as kleptomania, pyromania, and tricotillomania(hair-pulling); all of which are characterized by self-defeating/self-destructive behavior.
My earlier statement, that gambling is highly irrational, was not directed
at pathological gamblers, who are irrational by definition. Rather, its
ordinary, otherwise rational people who believe that their inevitable losses
will be recovered with a "big win", which just isnt going to happen.
In Michigan, the State Lottery had a slogan, "Somebody's going to win, why
not you?" But the odds of winning the Lottery are similar to the odds of
getting a "big win" in Las Vegas; although someone will win, the
probability approachs zero that it will be you.
I just laugh at the TV casino ads here in Las Vegas, which show happy gamblers
celebrating as they win. Even after living in LV for 14 years, I have *never*
known a happy gambler who has had a "big win". I have known unhappy
gamblers who have lost lots of money, and one unhappy compulsive gambler
resigned to a lifetime of losing. Gambling is fun, all right, if you own the
casino, and never give the suckers an even break.
Hope for pathological gamblers(medications)!
*BEST* site I have ever seen about compulsive gambling! (Signs, Symptoms, and Treatment)
I am an unreconstructed '60s hippie* and unmarried.
*(To set the record straight: I was a selective participant: very anti
war in Vietnam, but I did not support the drug use and communal living aspects;
I am glad I missed the 1968 Chicago Police Riot and the Back to the Land
movement.)
(My favorite slogan from the late 60s: "Like Father, Like Son, Like
Hell". Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 50s, I had no use for
parental expectations or for *conformity*, YUCK.)(My father actually went into
HIS father's business!)
(A lot of kids who grew up in the 50s were rebellious: Dad was a full time wage
slave, Mom was a full time SAHM (Stay At Home Mom), the family lived in a
suburb where the houses all
look just the same, kids were expected to do what the parents had done, and
to do as they were told. YUCK.)(My own Mom was not even a full time SAHM, she
had a "cleaning lady" come in once a week to do the hard physical
labor.)
-
I am, luckily, childfree. I did get
married when I was just 20, which means I decided to in my teens, when the
hormones were raging and I was young enough to believe that "til death do
us part" worked the same for us as it did for our parents, both sets of
which did indeed stay married until death parted them, even though both sets
ended in the "for worse" stage with Alzheimer's Disease. I was
divorced after only 8 years. My favorite marriage quote: "If variety is
the spice of life, marriage is the big can of leftover Spam." -public
domain, this quote was included on an actual Spam e-mail I got; the spammers
put in lots of trivial sentences to fool antispam programs.
If you were alive in the '60s, you may remember an antidraft song called
"Alice's Restaurant". You may even remember that there was a long
version that got infrequent air play on student run radio stations at big
universities. I loved it! Somebody has posted the entire
long version of
Alice's Restaurant!
You may also remember my favorite antiwar song, Country Joe McDonald's
I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die
Rag!
New version of these lyrics for Iraq:
Joe McDonald says on his site that the lyrics can be adjusted for new wars. The
following version appeared on the Libertarian_Only Yahoo list:
Well come on all you big strong men.
I hear the man needs your help again.
Got himself in a terrible jam,
Way down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
we're gonna' have a whole lotta fun.
.
Well it's 1,2,3, what are we fighting for,
Don't ask me I don't give a damn.
Next stop gonna' be Iran,
Well it's 5,6,7, open up the Pearly Gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie we're all gonna die.
.
Now come on city boy don't be slow,
Why this wars a go-go-go.
There's plenty of money to be made,
Supplying the army with the tools of the trade.
Just hope and pray if they drop the bomb,
They are gonna drop it on the Taliban.
.
Well it's 1,2,3, what are we fighting for,
Don't ask me I don't give a damn.
Next stop gonna' be Iran,
Well it's 5,6,7, open up the Pearly Gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie we're all gonna die.
.
Now come on Generals, lets move fast,
Your big chance is here at last.
Now you can go and spy on us all,
'cause we're all guilty in the 'eye' of your law.
You know that peace can only be won
when we blow them all to kingdom come.
.
Well it's 1,2,3, what are we fighting for,
Don't ask me I don't give a damn.
Next stop gonna' be Iran,
Well it's 5,6,7, open up the Pearly Gates.
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie we're all gonna die.
.
Now come on all you mothers throughout the land.
Send your sons out to the rich oil land.
Come on Fathers don't hesitate,
Send your Daughter before it's too late.
Be the first one on the block,
to have your girl come home in a box.
.
Well it's 1,2,3, what are we fighting for,
Don't ask me I don't give a damn.
Next stop is Afghanistan,
Well it's 5,6,7, open up the Pearly Gates.
Well it ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie we're all gonna die.
.
Well it's 1,2,3, what are we fighting for,
Don't ask me I don't give a damn.
Next stop gonna' be Iran,
Well it's 5,6,7, open up the Pearly Gates.
Well it ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopie we're all gonna die.
(Country Joe has posted a bunch of different versions of
lyrics for Iraq on his
site.)
A Moment that changed my outlook on life:
When I was in about sixth grade, the Jewish girl my age two houses down told me about her grandparents' death in the Holocaust. My family moved to another city a few years later. At the time I lived on Manhattan in Oak Park, Michigan; I was then too young to really comprehend the enormity of the evil I had been told about......I do now. If I should ever see that woman, I would have the emotional release I was too young for.
Another moment:
Sometime after 1976 I saw the TV movie Escape from Sobibor, about a mass escape from a Nazi extermination camp, a true story.
Yet Another moment:
On 2-22-04, I saw Chasing Freedom,
about an Afghan woman fleeing from the Taliban regime seeking asylum in the
USA. The Taliban attitude toward
women is a LOT like the Nazi attitude toward Jews: that they are subhuman
(in German it was "Untermenschen") .
(A detailed list of atrocities against
women under the Taliban .)
Yet Another moment:
Some years ago I read about the 1914 (WW1) Christmas Truce. On 12-18-07, I finally read the above link carefully. War was not always so brutal....."The Christmas Truce has often been characterized as the last "twitch" of the nineteenth century: the last moment when, in war, two sides would meet each other in proper and mutual respect." WW2 put an end to that.
Political philosophy:
Libertarian
Like many libertarians my age, I was originally a Republican who turned to the
Right after the 1964 nomination of
Barry Goldwater for
President. Further reading revealed that conservatives tend to root their
system in a belief in God, which led me, at least, toward the libertarian view.
In 1968 I read Atlas Shrugged, and found out that Jerome Tuccille was
right in his book It usually begins with Ayn Rand! I am now a Life
Member of the Libertarian Party.
Platform of the Libertarian
Party.......like most Libertarians, I don't agree with 100% of this
document. The only "litmus test" amongst Libertarians is the
"nonagression principle"; that is, we agree that the
initiation of the use of force is always unacceptable.
Yes, I know, the LP is not likely to take over the government. In 1968, at a
mock convention at WMU, a speaker for either the SWP or the SLP said, "Its
better to vote for something you want, and not get it, than to vote for
something you don't want, and get it."
My favorite libertarian quotes: "Even though we've all stood in line at
the DMV, hope springs eternal that some government programs actually work as
intended."
"It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men
determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on
doing evil." -- Fredrich von Hayek, Nobel Laureate in Economics, from
"The Constitution of Liberty"
- both from http://www.downsizedc.com(DownsizeDC).
The Planetary Bill of Rights project
Actual text of the proposed Planetary Bill of Rights(which I support).
Most libertarians want to shrink the government. The trial lawyers are one of society's best allies against government over-regulation. Read John Ross's The Virtues of an Aggressive Plaintiff's Bar: "bad" people or corporations face lawsuits if they are "bad", this does more to promote "good" behavior than an army of government regulators.
For all you folks who (were) afraid that Mrs Clinton will be the next
President, remember that when she was First Lady, her HillaryCare plan went
nowhere even though her party controlled Congress. After two years of Mrs
Clinton, the voters ejected the Democrats from control. That was how Newt
Gingrich got to be Speaker of the House, and eventually made possible the
impeachment
trial of her husband.
(I dont get it. Mrs Clinton has been hanging around Washington, DC since 1992;
hence her claim to "experiance". But if we need "change",
it stands to reason that the more DC experiance a person has, the more likely
that person caused the conditions that need changing. Mrs Clinton is
part of the problem, not part of the solution.)
[Dont get me wrong. I think that the election of Mrs Clinton would be bad
for the USA. I know at least one person who would leave the country, or would
want to, if Mrs Clinton becomes President. I would want to, also, but where to
go? The most civilized countries in the world are former UK colonies (civilized
with the exception of Singapore, where caning (beating with a stick) is still
an acceptable form of criminal punishment.) that have followed the Mother
Country into socialism.]
[Sure, several EU countries are civilized, but I dont want to take the time to
become fluent in French or German or Italian or Spanish just to get away from
Big Sister.]
[Dont get me wrong, part 2: I dont think the current President is a bargain,
either. He's just not bad enough to leave the country over.]
[Dont get me wrong, part 3: If Obama is the Democrat nominee and wins, I could
live with that. Sen Obama is an honest politician, which would be a
welcome change after 16 years of Clinton* and Bush. If Obama gets more votes
and delegates, but is not the Democrat nominee because Mrs Clinton gets the
votes of the "Super Delegates", how is that different from the 2000
election, where the man who got the most votes lost. Consider how different the
USA would be if Al Gore had been elected: no wars in the Middle East, all the
soldiers killed in those wars would still be alive, the US Treasury would be
somewhat more solvent.]
*It is not widely known that:
"On Clinton's last full day as president, Jan. 19, 2001, he agreed to a
five-year (law) license suspension. The agreement came on the condition that
Whitewater prosecutors would not pursue criminal charges against him after he
lied under oath about his relationship with White House intern Monica
Lewinsky." -seen
here
"She (HRC) would be a horrible President" -former Bill Clinton
insider Dick Morris, 1-08-08
Note: On Wed, 2-20-08, after Mrs Clinton's 11th straight defeat, I predicted
that Sen Obama would get the Democrat nomination and would go on to defeat Sen
McCain in the November election. (It will be nice to have two honest
politicians as the major party candidates.) I personally will support the
Libertarian Party nominee, to be selected at their
convention in May(And the nominee
is: Former US Congressman Bob Barr-Barr's Wikipedia entry.
BUMMER! I thought Obama was on his way to
the White House until all those quotes from his Pastor in Chicago came out! I
dont disagree with everything that Rev Jeremiah Wright said: in particular I
agree that what the USA did to the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945(120,000 killed in the
blasts, more later from radiation sickness) was worse than what was done to
the USA on 9/11/01, however a lot of what Rev Wright said could doom Obama in
the November election. I think Obama still has a good chance to get the
Democrat nomination;(6-3-08: and he did!) I don't know if he will be
swift-boated successfully or not. (In his case, a new word might be coined:
"Rev Wrighted".)
Note: Does anyone seriously believe that if her name was still Hillary Rodham,
she would be in the US Senate, and running for President? She would never have
become Senator Clinton if she hadnt become Mrs Clinton first. I used to think
Mrs Clinton was smart, until she made up that ridiculous story about being
under sniper fire in Bosnia. She may have a high IQ, but if she had common
sense she would not make up stories about public events where photographers
were present. (The story is almost unbelievably ridiculous. Her Secret Service
escort would never have allowed the First Lady to enter an area where she was
going to be shot at.)
Note #2: I seriously thought it would be Rudy vs Hillary in November. I never
thought that a guy clever enough to be (twice) elected Mayor of the largest
city in the world would choose such an inept primary strategy. I certainly
didnt think that a woman with access to Bill Clinton's political connections
would be defeated by a virtually unknown 1st term Senator, who has even less
administrative experiance than Mrs Clinton(who has none: yes, she had to make
*important* decisions about what color stationary to order for the First Lady's
Office.)
"The people need wholesome fear; they want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive." - Ernst Röhm, leader of the Nazi SA Brownshirts. I think Röhm was onto something. Most people want Something bigger than themselves to determine their life and free them from the responsibility of thinking. It can be God or the Church, it can be the Party or State, it can be a Leader ("Führer" in German, "Duce" in Italian), it can be the Family. Sartre called this "bad faith".
Human freedom did not have a good 1900's. With the rise of fascism,
communism, and religious intolerence in most of the world, I really am,
"Proud to be an
American, where at least I know I'm free"
However, I am not a "patriot".
I do not believe in "my country, right or wrong".
I do not say things like "America, love it or leave it".
There is a big difference between loving my country and loving my government.
The 20th century also featured war and its associated
genocide,
starting with the Armenian
Genocide(Turkey, 1915).
The single most important event of the 20th century:6-28-14:
The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. This event touched off WW1. The botched conclusion of
WW1 led to the rise of Hitler, WW2, the Holocaust, and the development and use
of the Atomic Bomb. The botched
Partitioning
of the (defeated) Ottoman Empire(which had controlled much of the Middle
East), led to the mess in the Middle East which continues to this day. Events
during WW1 led to the overthrow of the Tsar in Russia, the Bolshivic
Revolution, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. The Cold War, but
for a lot of luck, could have led to the END of civilization. "A new large
scale war will end with the destruction of human culture and
civilization...." -Albert Speer, former
German Minister of Armaments and War Production, at the Nuremburg Trial of
Major War Criminals in 1946.
The Atomic Bomb, in the hands of people who think their God wants them to kill
believers in other Gods, could still bring about the end of civilization.
I also support the legalization of the use of marijuana; most conservatives don't. One exception is Wm F Buckley, Jr., who sailed his yacht outside the twelve mile limit, tried it, and endorsed legalization in his magazine National Review.
And for those who got here from my
HIV-AIDS page
and might be wondering, I'm HIV negative. And for those who think that anyone
who writes about HIV must be in one of the AIDS risk groups, I'm not. What I am
is someone who believed then Surgeon General Koop when he said that everyone is
at risk for HIV, and therefore at risk for AIDS. He was wrong. (Actually, HIV
is a very difficult virus to catch; the only sure ways are to engage in
unprotected receptive anal intercourse with an HIV+ man, and sharing needles
among IV drug users, where at least one of the sharers is HIV+.)(More to the
point, there is no solid scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS.)(John Ross
does think that HIV causes AIDS, but argues that
its
almost impossible to catch HIV (unless, of course, you are an IV drug user
sharing needles or engage in really risky sexual behavior.)
NOTE: I am not an "HIV
denialist". I don't have HIV, I don't know anyone who did or does have
HIV, I don't know anyone who has or had AIDS, I don't even know (AFAIK) any gay
men or IV Drug users or hemophiliacs or pre-early '80s blood transfusion
recipients or Africans. I have no personal reason to want HIV to not cause
AIDS. I'm not a homophobe who wants gay men to get AIDS. Nor do I want anyone
else to get AIDS.
PLUS: If I am an "HIV denialist", then so are Dr. Robert Gallo and
Dr. Luc Montagnier, the co-discoverers of HIV. Both Gallo and Montagnier have
(seperately) concluded that HIV, by itself, is not sufficient to cause AIDS.
Co-facters must be present. (Gallo favors HTLV-1 or
HHV-6 , Montagnier favors
mycoplasma .)
"If there is evidence that HIV causes AIDS, there should be scientific
documents which either singly or collectively demonstrate that fact, at least
with a high probability. There is no such document."
Kary Mullis, Biochemist, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry
(This quote was shamelessly copied and pasted from
http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/index.htm.)
Rehab center to AVOID:
In 1/2001, I took a little fall down the stairs. Not serious enough for hospitalization, I was stuck in IHS of Las Vegas, a big disappointment. I had expected something similar to the rehab center in Vicksburg, Michigan , which took excellent care of a really serious problem, a broken hip.
Things I love:
Brilliant* women, computers, cats, books, philosophy, history
*very important note: getting a high score on an IQ test is not the same thing
as being brilliant. Its a great first step, but a personality afflicted with
compulsive irrational behavior*, and/or unable to deal with abstract concepts,
and/or unable to control
her temper does NOT qualify as "brilliant".
*I classify drug addiction
as a "compulsive irrational behavior". Addicts in withdrawl are
certainly NOT "brilliant"; "pathetically irrational" would
be descriptive. BTW, nicotene is an addictive drug. I have seen cigarette
junkies run out of their drug of choice and go into withdrawl: if they really
were highly intelligent, they would admit (at least to themselves) that self
destruction is not rational behavior.
·<There are, of course, lots of other self destructive addictions which
remove a woman from the "brilliant" catagory.
Compulsive
overeaters with the resulting heart straining obesity I have met. (Jean
Nidetch, the founder of Weight Watchers, said that overeaters should begin
by accepting, "I'm fat because I eat too much.") I have only heard
about anorexic
(compulsive undereaters) and
bulimic (binging and
purging) women.
·<There are, of course, lots of irrational thought patterns that remove
a woman from the "brilliant" catagory (for me, anyway). Since I am a
libertarian both philosophically and psychologically, control freaks are
anathema to me. (I have disliked Authority Figures for as long as I can
remember.)
The type of woman I like the most is I,R,I (Intelligent, Rational, and
Independent)(That's independent both psychologically and
financially)(One type of woman I especially don't like is the philosophically
libertarian/psychologically fascist control freak hypocrite.)
My ex-wife never or very rarely wore makeup, and I always accepted this as
"normal". I don't see the purpose of makeup. (I especially don't see
the purpose of lipstick. Who wants to kiss a woman wearing lipstick? Maybe that
is why they wear it!!)(Personally, I find few feminine habits grosser
than wearing red lipstick.)(Ladies, weading red lipstick makes you look
older, which you might want if you are 12!) This quote was posted by
TBill to the Childfree Ms Yahoo group:
***Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone. Here's how much men care about your
eyebrows: do you have two of them? Okay, we're done.***
NOTE: I do not have, never have had, any interest in A. Women 20 years younger
than me. B. Women with large fake breasts, or even large real breasts. C. Women
who think beauty or sexuality are a substitute for intelligence. D. Women who
have kids or want kids, or have grandkids. I can't stand kids!(Plus I
like being free, and am not willing to trade my freedom for the dubious
"pleasures" of fatherhood or step-fatherhood.)
"Dear Abby" said:
Intelligent people talk about ideas
Average people talk about things
Small people talk about other people
Those in the second two catagories do NOT qualify as "brilliant".
My favorite place in the world (so far)
Rondeau Provincial Park,
in Ontario, Canada. Both of my parent's families had summertime vacation
cottages there, and I spent part of my honeymoon there. If I ever get married
again, I hope it will be at Rondeau.
I also loved a beautiful little city near Rondeau named
Ridgetown!
If I can get everything in order, I would love to live there during the summer,
and return to Las Vegas for the winter. (Plus I think it would be fun to drive
to and from.....there is a lot of the USA you will never see if you just fly
over it!)
Cost of the War in Iraq(Hint: its over 404 Billion Dollars on 3/3/07.)
lies.com(the Iraq war, the missing WMD's, etc.)
Warmonger explains Iraq War to Peacenik
SEYMOUR HERSH on torture in Iraq and earlier, in Vietnam
"but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone." -Seymour Hersh
"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."- Reichmarshall Hermann Göring, Nuremberg, 1945.(snopes.com verification of this quote)(this quote was originally recorded by Dr Gustave Gilbert in his book Nuremberg Diary.)
13 MYTHS ABOUT THE CASE FOR WAR IN IRAQ
Iraq civilian body count (How many Iraqi civilians have died so that they could be free of the oppressive Saddam Hussain regime?)
""I like to remind people that if we leave Iraq before the job is done, the enemy will follow us here. And if our job is to protect this country, it's important we get it right in Iraq." -George W. Bush, speaking to the National Governor's Association 3/07. (Remember, how if we withdrew from Vietnam, the Domino Effect would result in Communism spreading to Australia and the Phillippines?)
Rough timetable:
Ron Paul delivers
"35
QUESTIONS THAT WON'T BE ASKED ABOUT IRAQ" address: 9-10-02
US
Congress authorizes invasion of Iraq: 10-10-02(House), 10-11-02(Senate)
USA invades Iraq: 3-2-03
Saddam Hussein
removed from power: 4-9-03
"End of major
combat operations"(aka "Mission Accomplished") announcement:
5-1-03
Cindy
Sheehan arrested by Capitol Police for wearing a t-shirt with writing,
"2,245 Dead. How many more?" to the State of the Union address:
1-31-06
Saddam Hussein executed: 12-30-06
War continues with no end in sight: 2007
"..this war is lost" - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, 4-19-07
The 2007 movie Redacted is
released, a fictionalized account of an actual occurance in Iraq. Bill O'Reilly
is outraged. I wasn't so surprised: I remember the 1968
MyLai
Massacre, where US servicemen killed 500 unarmed Vietnamese. I realize that
most of the soldiers fighting in Iraq were not even alive in 1968, but their
superiors were: the phrase "Support Our Troops" is should not be
unconditional.
(The two men usually associated with MyLai,
Lieutenant
Calley and
Captain
Medina, did not kill those 500 Vietnamese all by themselves.)
"My first act as President would be to order the immediate withdrawal of every single U.S. troop and all U.S. government personnel from Iraq." -Christine Smith, Libertarian Candidate for President, 2008.
"The America I
was born into. . . .no longer exists". I came across this blog entry
after searching for the phrase "Facing a dying nation", which
appeared in the song
The
Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In) at the climax of the movie version of
"Hair", as George Berger is marching into a plane to be flown to
Vietnam, where he is KIA. (This a very dramatic climax. After the plane flys
away, the scene cuts immediately to Arlington National Cemetary and a tombstone
marked GEORGE BERGER and VIETNAM.)(In the play "Hair", it is Claude
who is killed.
(Synopsis
of the play). In the movie, Berger has taken Claudes' place in Boot Camp,
Claude returns to camp after visiting his girlfriend just as the order is given
to march to the plane.
And yes, the America I was born into no longer exists. I was born in 1948, when
the USA held the moral high ground after defeating the Nazis.
In the same year I was born, the UN General Assembly adopted, "without
dissent", The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which states, in part, "Article 5 No one
shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment."
Now, we have secret prisons, suspension of
Habeus
Corpus,
extraordinary
rendition, indefinate imprisonment without trial at Guantánamo Bay,
where we apparently treat some of the "detainees" in a manner that
would make a Gestapo agent proud. (Its not torture, its "Enhanced
interrogation".) (Does anyone believe that
Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed actually did all the things he confessed to doing?) (More:
True
Confessions? The Amazing Tale of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed)
Outsourcing
Torture, from the New Yorker, tells the story of US agents using
"rendition"
to put suspected terrorists in countries where they could be interrogated by
torture, and notes that torture is known as an unreliable way of obtaining
factual information.
"Torture is a crime against civilization. Torturers are perverts. People
who fail to condemn torture are unfit for public office." -George Phillies, candidate for the 2008
Libertarian Party nomination for President
(Phillies on
torture.)
When I was a student at WMU in the late '60s, there was a house at the
bottom of the hill that East Campus is on. In a window, on the back of a window
shade, the occupants had inscribed, "Is there intelligent life on Earth?
Get out of Vietnam Now!" Its time for one that ends "Get out of
Iraq now!"
(Note: I like the idea of one of the LP Presidential candidates (sorry, dont
remember which one), that the Iraq government should hold a vote of Iraq
citizens on the question, "Do you want the USA to continue to occupy
Iraq?". If the vote is No, we can leave!)
Harry Browne's essay: Was George Bush Right?(Argues that after 100,000 dead Iraqis, we are not any safer from terrorism, nor are we or any country in the Middle East any freer; in fact, the USA is less free.)
I have two serious questions: If it was a crime under International Law for Germany to invade Poland in 1939 (waging an aggressive war), why is it not a crime for the USA to invade Iraq, a country that posed no threat to the USA? And if the rationale for the invasion was Iraq's supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction, shouldn't the USA apologize to Iraq and withdraw our troops?
Guantánamo Bay
In 10/01, well before the Iraq war, the USA
invaded a
sovereign country, Afghanistan, supposedly to find the person/people behind
9/11. We didnt find Osama bin Laden, but we did scoop up hundreds of Taliban
and al-Qaeda sympathizers, designated them "unlawful combatants", and
shipped them off to the US Naval Base at Quantánamo Bay, Cuba, where
most of them rot to this day. The US government says they are not POWs entitled
to the protection of the Geneva
Convention. (Human
Rights Watch disagrees.) These people are essentially stateless and
rightless. They have not been charged with any crime under US, International,
or Afghan law, yet they are imprisoned indefinately..(if they are suspected of
being terrorists, they will be tried before a
"military
tribunal"). I *think* the ACLU is trying to get them access to US
courts; good luck! (in 6/04, the US Supreme Court did rule that
detainees
and "enemy combatants" held by the United States are entitled to
challenge their detention in court.)(Unfortunately, the outgoing Congress
reversed the Supreme Court, with the
Military
Commissions Act of 2006 claiming that the detainees are dangerous
terrorists and the courts should not interfere with the President's authority
as Commander-in-Chief. More on this story
here.)
Thankfully, there as been introduced in both houses of Congress the
Restoring
the Constitution Act of 2007, which would undo a lot of the damage done to
civil liberties since 9-11-01.
(Amensty
International on Guantánamo Bay)US: Mark Five
Years of Guantánamo by Closing It
(Why not close Guantánamo? Could it be that the former prisoners, after
being deported back to their home countries, might tell how they were treated?)
Statement
of the ACLU on the military tribunals.
Badnarik on civil liberties and the rights of the detainees.
An Island I loved:
There is an island, near to and part of Honduras, called
Roatan. I visited there in Oct. 2000.
This island has it all: unspoiled beauty and civilization. If it were
practical, I would move there tomorrow!
SIGH! Since Roatan is not practical, I am considering a move to Hawaii.
Things I like:
These computer languages-Fortran,
EasyTrieve,
C++; the Internet; IRC;
Ayn Rand's
philosophy and
writings, esp.
Atlas
Shrugged(semi-official
site)(Please note: I am not a "true believer" Rand devotee: see
former Rand insider Murry Rothbard's
The Sociology of
the Ayn Rand Cult); Richard Adam's novel
Watership Down; the
1973 movie Breezy; the
1995 movie The American
President(yes, I really like movies with unlikely partners); the 1972 movie
The Man; the 1987 TV Movie
Escape From Sobibor; the 1980
movie Somewhere in Time(and
Michael Crawford's rendition of the song
Somewhere
in Time in the Las Vegas extravaganza EFX; practically anything by The
Who, including, among others,
Won't
Get Fooled Again,
The
Kids Are Alright, and especially
Pinball
Wizard,(and even more especially, its rendition by Elton John in the
movie version of the rock opera Tommy)(All the lyrics from Tommy
are here); Richie Sambora's
Ballad of Youth
(Ballad of Youth is a great song for the newly divorced: "Cause when
tomorrow comes, its all just yesterday's news "), the Cure's
Charlotte
Sometimes, Bonnie Tyler's
Total Eclipse of
the Heart, Bad Company's
Bad Company, the
Bangles' version of
Hazy Shade
of Winter, Paul Simon's
My
Little Town(reminds me of my ex-wife's hometown), the Association's
Don't
Blame it on me(reminds me of my ex-wife!),[(and another reminder of my ex,
Gale Garnett's We'll Sing in the
Sunshine(the ending we both remember: "We sang in the sunshine, We
laughed every day, We sang in the sunshine, then you went away.")],
Barbara Lewis's
Hello,
Stranger(reminds me of my ex, who I last saw in 1976, SO long ago, but it
still feels like yesterday), Bob Dylan's version of
Don't think twice,
its all right(reminds me of most of the women I have met post-divorce,
especially the line "you just kinda wasted my precious time"),
Roxette's
Listen
To Your Heart, Led Zepplin's
Stairway to Heaven,
Genesis's Land of
Confusion, the video of which is my all time favorite, another fantastic
Genesis song/video
Jesus He
Knows Me, the Las Vegas show
EFX(closed
12-30-02; the EFX Theatre has since been dismantled. How sad.)(EFX opened
3-23-95 in conjunction with the opening of the
MGM Grand Hotel and Casino.)(I must
admit, I really liked the original version of
EFX,
starring Michael Crawford(who starred in 610 consecutive performances,
until 8-11-96); the original cast soundtrack is still available from
CD Universe, or from
CDnow); fans of EFX can find the lyrics to
the songs in Michael Crawford's "EFX"
here.)(yes,
I did see subsequent EFX stars David Cassidy(NOTE: EFX, starring David Cassidy,
with a cast of 70, was said,
here,
to be the world's largest stage production) and Tommy Tune(twice!), plus I saw
Cassidy's brother, Patrick, guest starring, but I missed the final star Rick
Springfield after breaking my leg); the Shaft series of movies starring Richard
Roundtree; (as a younger person I was a fan on the Disney series
Zorro, and I see a similarity
between Shaft and Zorro; both are anti-establishment individuals who fight
injustice!)(Zorro was created in 1919 by Johnston McCulley, Shaft was created
c. 1970 by Ernest Tidyman.)(my personal philosophy towards violence: it a LOT
easier to shoot someone, like Shaft does, than to commit a very personal act
like running someone through with a sword, like Zorro does sometimes); the
miniseries
V, and its conclusion
V, The Final Battle, which are a
parallel to the Nazi novement in Germany(Note: this was the intention of the
creator of V, Kenneth Johnson,
who wrote and directed the first miniseries, but Johnson disliked the script
for the second miniseries, and was not involved with it; Johnson is currently
working on a third miniseries V:
The Second Generation, which will
ignore the events of
the second miniseries and the events of the short lived follow-up TV
series.); a truely remarkable "Like", the Sci-fi horror movie
Event Horizon, which is very
bloody but still intellectually challenging flic: the term "Event
Horizon" is used as the name of a spaceship in this movie, but it is a
scientific term, see
here;
discussing the things I love or like.
A movie everyone should see once:
Idiocracy: Shows the eventual effect of smart people delaying/avoiding altogether having children, while less intelligent people breed like rabbits. (This is sometimes called Dysgenics.)
A movie I haven't seen, but wish I had:
Twist of Fate: A member of the SS participates in the failed attempt to kill Hitler, then disguises himself as a Jew to escape punishment, lands in a concentration camp, and ends up fighting for Israel. This movie was based on the novel Pursuit, by Robert L. Fish, which is still available through Amazon.com's network of used booksellers, and I got the book. Thanks, Amazon.com!
My favorite song of all time:
It used to be Pinball Wizard. Then it was EFX. In 2000, I got
the video to an old movie I like, R.P.M., and its opening song,
Melanie's Stop! I
don't want to hear it anymore, has reached the (probably temporary)**
position of my favorite song! Unfortunately, it was released as a RECORD, you
know, those black things you play on a "record player", but has never
been released on a CD. (The album wasn't. I am told that the song was released
on Melanie compilation CDs, which may be out of production by now.) I wonder
how much pre-CD music is now lost forever, except at MP3 sites? Even the lyrics
to old songs are hard to find, especially since the US music industry was
successful in effectively squashing www.lyrics.ch, "The International Lyrics
Server". Luckily, there is another huge lyrics archive still running:
Gunther Anderson's Lyric
Pages!
2nd favorite: Superstar.....hauntingly
beautiful; unfortunately singer Karen Carpenter died after struggling with
anorexia.
3rd favorite:
The
Entertainer, by Billy Joel. (Extra verse that BJ
used in live shows.)
4th favorite:They Don't Know
(about us), Kirsty MacColl's love song. Its not the explicit lyrics of this
song, its the brilliant arrangement and the singer's style.
5th favorite: Suite: Judy Blue
Eyes, by Stephen Stills. Another song where its not the explicit lyrics,
but the brilliant arrangement and the singer's style!
6th favorite: Edge of
Seventeen aka "Just like the white winged dove", by Stevie Nicks.
Yet another song where its not the explicit lyrics, but........
**yes, it was temporary. The song
White Rabbit,
written by Grace Slick and performed by
Jefferson Airplane with Grace
Slick doing the singing, was played during and at the end of the movie
The Game, is my new favorite !
I remember this song from the late 60's, but I only came to appreciate it in
2007.
Note: "The Game" is a very "Nowhere Man" ish movie,
except that the protagonist of "The Game" knows who They are, and has
been to the office of Them (of course, when he goes back to the office, it
isn't there anymore, and nobody remembers it ever being there.)(There is a lot
of breaking glass in "The Game", too.)
The greatest entertainer living (In My Humble Opinion):
Tom
Lehrer, no question. Best known for his album, "That Was the Year That
Was", he was an academic first, an entertainer second; and yes, he is
still alive. All of his lyrics are
here, just scroll down
to "Tom Lehrer" once you get there.
And the best group effort:
Rush, best known for their album
Hemispheres. Rush
was influenced by novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand ( her influence is notable in
their song Limelight), and
produced hard rock music with philosophical lyrics. I am forever indebted to
former co-worker Marianne Petty, who introduced me to the music of Rush.
Paris Hilton:
Other than her biological relatives and paparazzi who make money taking
pictures of her, who cares about the antics of the Heirhead? She is as
interesting as the never ending saga of Anna Nichole Smith.
Update: I did watch
Larry
King's interview with Paris after she got out of jail. .. When actually
asked a question and thinking about the answer, she does not seem so much of an
airhead after all. I wonder if her airhead personna is just an act for the
public?
(After seeing the video she made about the 2008 presidential election, I am
convinced that the airhead personna is indeed an act. Paris Hilton reminds me
of Hillary Clinton: smart, but not exactly overendowed with common sense.)
And who cares about Octomom? She may be interesting as a study in
compulsive irrationality: how many women with six kids she can't support would
want more?
My favorite movie:
It used to be Breezy. Then I saw
The Long Kiss Goodnight. It has
a strong female lead and a fascinating story about an ex-CIA agent (with
amnesia) turned conventional Mom whose past comes back to get her.
And THEN I saw The Odessa
File! This movie begins on 11-22-63, as a German man driving home pulls his
car over to the side of the road to listen to the news about the assassination
of John F. Kennedy. What he sees then will bring him into contact with the
ODESSA, the organization of
former members of the SS. I had read the novel this movie is based on, but had
forgotten the very big surprise ending. Best movie I have ever seen.
2nd favorite: Pretty Woman,
another "unlikely partners who fall in love" movie.
I must admit that the original Shaft, starring Richard
Roundtree, is my co-favorite movie.
The movie I have actually watched the most over the years is
Point Break, about a group of
surfers who rob banks (as "the ex-presidents") to finance the endless
summer, and the FBI agents trying to stop them.
New favorite(2008): I greatly enjoy the 2001 remake of
Ocean's Eleven. Its not that
I am a fan of crime, but these criminals are brilliant. Its a "brilliant
criminals vs. arrogant, ruthless, and extremely rich casino owner"
movie.
Lamest movie of all time
Micki + Maude: not only does the male lead marry two women (secretly), he gets them both pregnant at the same time, they have the same OB-GYN, they deliver at the same time and have adjoining rooms in the same hospital. A monument to human stupidity!
Most pronatalist-mythological movie so far
Baby Boom, features what I
call Pronatalist Myth
#1: If you have a baby, you will LOVE everything about the experiance. I knew I
would HATE the experiance, primarily the loss of personal freedom, which I
think is the real reason I am divorced today. My ex was a passionate
Mommiewannabe, I had no interest: I was history. My foolish ex had gotten her
tubes tied when she was still interested in being married to me, then proceeded
to replace me with a guy 20 yrs older than her, so she couldn't even adopt.
(Today's (9-4-07) CompuServe news reports that to today's incoming college
freshman anyone born before 1989 is OLD! Then what is someone born before the
1929 Stock Market Crash?)(Hey, you could ask HIM if his parents told him about
President
FDR going on TV in 1929 to explain the crash! )(Gees, you would think a guy
who has been in the US Senate for over 30 years (Joe Biden) would know that
Herbert Hoover was
President in 1929.)
In this movie the lead female is a successful businesswoman who
"inherited" a baby when a relative died leaving the baby to her care.
Her first impulse, to put the baby up for adoption, fails when she hears the
baby cry as she walks away. No sacrifice is too much for the sake of the baby:
Stepmom loses her job, and her boyfriend, so she packs up and moves to Vermont,
where she meets Mr Right, who of course loves the child, and they live happily
ever after.
Scariest Horror Movie ever
Yours, Mine, and Ours: A widower with 10 children marries a widow with 8 children, and they have another(Ours). Based loosely on a real couple! (Frank and Helen Beardsley)
A movie I thought would suck, but was great
Legally Blonde: I just
happened to watch this on TV, thinking it would be a "dumb blonde makes a
fool of herself" movie, but she turns out to be a brilliant person; even
she wasn't impressed by her high LSAT scores and her admission to
Harvard Law School. The (stated) moral of the story is "first impressions
are not always correct." This movie includes (at the start, where she
really does behave like a blonde airhead, and at the end, when she graduates
from Harvard) the song
Perfect Day.
In the movie, the protagonist ("Elle Woods") has graduated from
(undergraduate)college in California and attends Law School.
The movie was (loosely) based on the novel Legally Blonde, by
Amanda
Brown. There is now a series of prequel novels, by
Natalie Standiford, which start
when the protagonist was a sophomore at Beverly Hills High School.
Although the publisher of these prequel books is "Hyperion Paperbacks for
Children", these are NOT children's books, if "children" means
"pre-teens". (I think there is a good chance that Amanda and Natalie
are two pen names for the same person. Their writing styles are quite similar.
"Natalie" claims to be 85
years old and plays in a rock band (!), so "Natalie" is
definately a fake name, or at least a real name with hopelessly fake info.)
At least two (unsuccessful) attempts have been made to produce a TV series, but
the play Legally
Blonde is set to open on Broadway 4-29-07.
Funniest movie I have ever seen
Liar Liar, starring Jim Carrey, not to be confused with "Liar, Liar".
Wild in the Streets (1968)
The movie Wild in the Streets, and its theme song The Shape of Things to Come, have been on my mind since the late 60s. The plot is explained at this popup laden Geocities site and at this excellant site. This is a story of power corrupting, with the newly powerful turning into what they had crusaded against: fascists, and not just the relatively benign Mussolini type of fascism, but the more malignent and brutal Hitler style. I dont think its an accident that the guards at the camps (where the "older people" are incarcerated) wear all black, just like the German SS "blackshirts", although it is true that the SS wore grey field uniforms while actually on (dusty) duty. Their black uniforms were for more "dressy" occasions.
The movie/book that made me think
Fatherland, based on the
novel Fatherland,
by Robert Harris. WHAT IF: Germany does not commit to "total war"
against the USA after Pearl Harbor. The USA uses the atomic bomb to defeat
Japan, Germany uses its superior conventional forces to defeat the French and
British. The ensuing "cold war" is between the USA and Germany, after
the Normandy landings are defeated, and Germany has had time to also develop
the atomic bomb.
The Soviet Union retreats from Stalingrad; the Soviet government relocates east
to the other side of the Ural Mountains and never overruns the death camps in
Poland; so the Germans suppress all knowledge of the Holocaust; including
arranging accidents that kill all the participants at the
Wannsee
Conference, where the "Final Solution" was formalized. In the
1960s a German homicide investigator uncovers the truth, and has it revealed to
the US President.*
*The Rehabilitation of the reputation of SS member Arthur Nebe
SS Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe was the head of the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police; non-political crimes) both in real life and in the above movie. During the war he served for a time as head of Einsatzgruppe B in the Soviet Union, and as such is commonly regarded as being a war criminal. He also took part in the famous unsuccessful attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944. Nebe eluded the Gestapo until Jan 16, 1945, after which he was turned over to the People's Court, which convicted him. He was hung by the Nazis on Apr 3, 1945. See: Arthur Nebe - War Criminal or Infiltrator?
My favorite book of any kind
Primary Philosophy, by Michael Scriven, copyright 1966. This was my textbook when I took Introduction to Philosophy in the late '60s. Scriven was my first exposure to a systematic examination of the arguments for and against the existence of God. A work of genius, now a lifelong companion.
The book that had the most influence on me
The Baby Trap, by Ellen Peck, copyright 1971. This book shaped a lot of my childfree thinking. The back cover states: "STOP Before you even think of having a baby, you must read this book. It could keep you from making the biggest mistake of your life!" Peck was a founder of the National Organization for Non-Parents, which I was long a member of. Peck later co-edited "Pronatalism: The Myth of Mom and Apple Pie", another fine book.
My favorite novel
The Fifth Horseman, by Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre, copyright 1980, has terrorists in New York City armed with an atomic bomb, long before Osama bin Laden brought down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, killing almost 3,000 people. (But then, they weren't really people, right? They were not Islamic Arabs. Kind of like the Nazi view that Jews were sub-human.)
There have been at least three other novels titled, "The Fifth
Horseman"; the one by Richard Sherbaniuk, in 2001, is closest to the theme
of the one above, his plot has the fifth horseman being biological; Genetically
Modified Organisms that are turned into weapons of mass destruction.
The others are by Jose Antonio, concerning the Mexican Revolution, and Gregg
Gonzalaz, an extension of the "Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow"
legend. Another: "The Fifth Horseman is Riding" subtitled "A
celebration of the American countryside and a documentary of what we are doing
to destroy it" by Larry Van Goethem. (I would LOVE to live in the
countryside!)
Best book on AIDS I have ever read
Wrongful Death: The AIDS Trial, by Stephen Thomas (Author's promo page). This is a fictional account of a class action lawsuit brought against: 1. Dr. Robert Gallo, the man who announced in 1984 that he had found the cause of AIDS, a retrovirus he called HTLV-3 (now HIV); 2. the drug company that made and sold AZT(GlaxoSmithKline, formerly Burroughs Wellcome); 3. the Food and Drug Administration, which approved AZT for use as an AIDS treatment.)
2nd Best book on AIDS I have ever read
Are you positive?, also by Stephen Thomas(Author's promo page). This is a fictional account of the prosecution of an HIV+ man for murder; having unprotected sex with a woman who later died from AIDS, showing how unreliable the "HIV tests" are and how damaging the antiretrovirals prescribed to treat AIDS are.
Most compelling novel I have read
The Body, by Richard Ben Sapir....by "compelling", I mean, I couldn't put it down. I HAD to find out what would happen next.
Most intriging book I have read
Unintended Consequences, by John Ross
(publisher's
introduction)(author's
Unintended Consequences FAQ) I bought this book in 2004 after reading a
review of it in the Feb/Mar 1996 issue of Freedom Network News, an
ISIL newsletter, for no better reason than
knowing that the plot touched on the 1943
Warsaw
Ghetto Uprising(Jan 18-21, Apr 19-May 16) . The book turned out to be over
800 pages long! The author is a brilliant writer; the novel sucked me right in.
It is about the "gun culture", and I dont even LIKE guns. But on a
deeper level, its about the suppression of the gun culture, and consequently
the suppression of freedom. (Minor quibble: Ross states in his UC FAQ regarding
resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "it is generally
believed that all of them were killed." However, the Wiesenthal Center
page about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the immediately preceding link) says
that "several dozen fighters were saved by escaping through the
sewers". Perhaps the highest level escapee was
Marek Edelman, 2nd in
command of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization). (A
longish bio of
Edelman, who was still alive in 2006.) Edelman was, by design, not at the
ZOB HQ bunker at 18 Mila St. when it was overrun by the Waffen-SS. Edelman
escaped from the ghetto and lived to fight in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
There exists on the Web,
right
here, if it is authentic, what would be a history of the Warsaw Ghetto from
its inception to its destruction, by Marek Edelman, described as "one of
the leaders of the Jewish Uprising".
Confession: I used to read books a LOT! From 4/2000 until 3/2004 I
was hooked on the Web* and didn't read ANY. Unintended Consequences was
so good, and so interesting, I started reading books again! I just (5/05)
finished I'm Okay you're a brat, by
Susan Jeffers, PhD, perhaps one of
the best books I have ever read. Jeffers argues that there are so many
variables in a child's life that it doesn't follow from "Child A is a bad
person", therefore the parent(s) of Child A were bad parent(s). You can
substitute "good" for "bad" in the previous sentence;
parents cannot take credit for good children, and need not take the blame (as
they do) for bad children. There are many determining factors in a child's life
over which parents have no control whatsoever.
*Confession, part 2: I can't blame the Web entirely. I was married to a
woman who (consistently!) turned on the TV as soon as she came home; it was
usually on. I was informed that I would not be married much longer during
The Jacksons! After she was
gone I did watch TV some, but the set broke and MONTHS passed before I bothered
to replace it, with a cheap Black and White portable; I didn't think I was
missing anything.... it was then I started to realize that TV was not an
inherently integral part of life. But it took living with a woman whose taste
in TV was "usually on to almost anti-intellectual (mindless)
programming" to turn me against TV, except for special events: the last TV
I remember watching was the 2004 Libertarian National Convention on C-Span.
(Yes, I have been watching Fox News to get info about the 2008 Presidential
election. I used to watch CNN, until they dumped Paula Zahn.)
Religion:
"Believe nothing because a so-called wise man said it.
Believe nothing because a belief is generally held.
Believe nothing because it is written in ancient books.
Believe nothing because it is said to be of divine origin.
Believe nothing because someone else believes it.
Believe only what you yourself judge to be true."
-Buddha
I would add my own, "Believe nothing because a "friend" is so
insecure in her beliefs she will not discuss them unless you pretend to believe
them, too." Perhaps DJ has never heard of
The Great
Commission.
Let me start by saying that I belong to the ACLU, support them 99% of the time, and do not
get upset about a public display of the Ten Commandments. This
editorial
from Science & Theology News tells why; I do not think that displaying
a religious icon is an establishment of religion, any more than having a
Christmas tree or holding a "Christmas Party" at a government
building would be.
(The Ten Commandments in the US Supreme
Court building-includes pictures!)
(For example: If the President of the United States has a Christmas tree on the
White House lawn, that just means the President is a Christian. It doesn't mean
that Christianity is a state religion.)
(According to adherents.com, the population
of the USA is 82% Christian, after that, only "no preference" is in
double digits.)(I'm hardly a religious person, but if the Christians want to
have a cross on Mount
Soledad, its fine with me. As long as the government leaves me free to hold
whatever religious beliefs I choose, no display of a cross, or a Star of David*
or whatever, is going to make me change my mind.)
*(NOT unlikely: in 2000,Sen. Joe Lieberman, who
is Jewish, should have been elected Vice President. Gore/Lieberman got half a
million votes more than Bush/Cheney.)
In addition, I'm not upset that
"Under
God" is in the Pledge of Allegiance. This may be a violation of
seperation of Church and State, but I doubt that many thinking adults
believe in the existence of God solely because they said "Under God"
every morning in elementary school.
In addition, again, I have no problem with the teaching of evolution (as a
scientific theory) and
"Intelligent
Design" as an alternate hypothesis in public schools. Again, I doubt
that many thinking adults either believe or don't believe in the existence of
God because they heard either of these ideas in Junior High School (usually
grades 7-9 in the USA) Science class.
A gentleman named Bobby Henderson has suggested that a third hypothesis should
be taught, as well: Everything was created by the
Flying Spaghetti Monster!
-
I am a "fan", not a member, of the Roman Catholic Church. I find
their Thomist
philosophy to be intellectually intriguing. I am also a fan of Judaism, which
also has a solid philosophical grounding. (See the writings of
Maimonides,
in particular. Maimonides, often called Rambam[RaMBaM (Rabbi Moses ben
Maimon)], is contrasted to Aristotle
here.
Maimonides and Aristotle were both major influences on the great medieval
champion of reason, Thomas
Aquinas). Aquinas argues that
we can know God by natural
reason in this life*, part of his masterwork
Summa Theologica
*This appears almost word for word in
The Catechism of
the Catholic Church, specifically at
Part 1,
Chapter 1, section 3.
The 1913 edition of The Catholic
Encyclopedia is now online; they explain that newer editions are still
protected by copyright, plus my own opinion is that Catholic doctrine is
timeless and changes little in the kind of entries one finds in an
encyclopedia. Actual performance of Mass and the relationship of the Catholic
Church to what used to be called "heretics" (Protestants and Orthodox
Christians) was changed dramatically at the
Second Vatican
Council. (Actually, I am not now, nor have I ever been, especially
religious.)
I have come to like the Jewish religion a great deal; they are incredibly
intellectual, even today, more so than the Catholics. (one *brilliant* example
of Catholic apologetics today is Catholic
Answers.) I live right down the street from the Desert Torah Academy, and
was disappointed to find out that it is for k-8 kids, not adults. Where do we
over-50 types go? (Well, of course, we should start with the
Conversion to Judaism Homepage.) (I grew
up in a Jewish neighborhood, and now feel like I really missed out; there was
so much I could have learned!)(Some years ago I got first the Catholic
Encyclopedia, then the Jewish one; perhaps no accident!) There are places like
Talmud Torah in New
Jersey, but not in Las Vegas....The 1906 edition of the
Jewish Encyclopedia
is also online.
Perhaps my greatest problem with Christianity is the doctrine of
Original Sin. An
excellent article questioning Original Sin is
here. I really like
this exerpt from The differences
between Judaism and Christianity: "Judaism does not accept the
notion of original sin, the idea that people are bad from birth and cannot
remove sin by themselves but need an act of grace provided by the sacrificial
death of Jesus as atonement for all of humanity's sins. For Christians, there
are no other forms of salvation other than through Jesus." I also like
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Articles of Faith
#2: "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not
for Adam's transgression." A great introduction to the LDS Church is
Kay's LDS
Site; it was certainly my introduction. The LDS church is often ignored due
to the popular belief that it supports polygamy. Not so:
since 1904 polygamy is
grounds for excommunication . The idea that
Joseph Smith was
sent by God and inspired to write (translate, actually) the Book of Mormon is
at least as believable as the idea that the prophets of the Old Testament were
sent by God and inspired to write the O.T. books that bear their names. (The
same logic applies to Prophetess
Ellen
G. White of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, of course.) The
Book of
Mormon can be read online.
Several years ago I was visited repeatedly by members of
Jehovah's Witnesses(official site);
also Wikipedia entry
for Jehovah's Witnesses. They knew I was a nonbeliever, but talking to them
was fascinating! (Although considered to be a "cult" by
mainstream Christians, I found the ones I talked to rational and likable.) They
have a well organized belief system that is well worth listening to and reading
about. I got a bunch of their books and a Windows CD-ROM for only marginal
financial contributions. The CD-ROM contains the back issues of their cerebral
publication The Watchtower, and its more-for-the-common-folks cousin
Awake!, as well as their hardcover and other softcover publications.
The Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry
(CARM) has a
page critical of Jehovah's
Witnesses.
Longtime atheist philosopher
Antony Flew seems to
now be a Deist(NOT a
Fideist)*, accepting that
God exists on the basis of philosophical proofs, but denying, apparently,
belief in any particular "revealed" religion. (Antony Flew's discussion with Christian
apologist Gary Habermas.) This is controversial and awaits publication of
Flews' revised God and Philosophy in April, 2005 for his definitive
statement. (Review of Flew's
new book There is a God.)
BTW, I have three of Flew's books and they all spell his first name Antony, not
Anthony. Flew has a truely great mind. His ability to remain
"friends" with
Habermas
is very commendable, for both. I identify with Antony Flew, in that while I
share his rejection of approaches to religion that are not compatible with
reason, like him I have no burning desire to convince believers that they are
wrong. Believers are very interesting to talk to, but proselytizer/believers
are better read and studied. It's a rare proselytizer/believer who won't try to
"convert you to the Truth". I wish there were more theists like
Habermas out there.
*(A better article on Fideism, IMHO, from the
Catholic Encyclopedia.)(Fideism is the doctrine that religious truth can be
discovered only by faith, not by reason.)
The Anthony Flew
brouhaha explores this controversy.
Also online: the Holy Koran
Islam 101-(on terrorism and jihad.)
It was the rational Islamic philosophers like Averroes who preserved the writings of Aristotle during the "Dark Ages"; without them, there might have been no extant Aristotle for Aquinas to be influenced by.
Islamism(the Taliban, Hamas, Osama bin Laden, Ayatollah Khomeini, Islamic Jihad) is not Islam. It more correctly resembles 20th century totalitarianism: fascism and communism. "Countries ruled by Islamists.......are among the most unfree places on earth"-Apolegetics Index, page on Islamism. A new word has been coined to describe this trend: Islamofascism.
Theological Dictionary-includes a LOT of terms from philosophy and from religions other than Christianity and Judaism. This is a MASSIVE site with definitions about things religious. Very useful.
Martin Luther's 95 theses.
Gospel of Thomas. It says in the intro that this might be the elusive Q document, which might be a source for Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
The entire 38 volume set of the writings of the
Early Church Fathers, indexed by
Volume.( alternate location,
includes alphabetic index by author.) This set includes
Origen Contra
Celsus. Celsus was
a Roman pagan philosopher who had written an attack on Christ and Christianity
called "On the True Doctrine", which was saved from suppression as
Origen had quoted most of the
original in writing a reply to it.
(If you are a Pastor or scholar or need to impress others with how
"learned" you are, you can buy the actual books from
CBD, for $199.99; list price is
$1,100.00.)
Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy (Original 1910 Edition, public domain, not a Christian Science site.)
Maimonides' best known "popular" work: Guide for the perplexed
Maimonides identified 613 Commandments(!) in the law of Moses.
HUMANAE VITAE, the encyclical of Pope Paul VI regarding birth control. (It's in English!)
Anselm's Ontological
Argument for the Existence of God. Also:
Internet Encyclopedia
of Philosophy-Ontological Argument. I learned this one in college
Philosophy. It is absolutely fascinating! Simply stated:
1. God is that Being than which none more perfect can be conceived.
2. A Being would be less than perfect if it did not exist.
3. Therefore, God Exists.
Aquinas did not accept Anselm's proof, but had his own Five Ways.
Really good: The Case for the existence of God, a modern (1995), rational look at the existence of God.
Pascal's Wager, a very popular but unfortunately unsound reason to believe in the existence of God: If you believe and there is a God, you will be rewarded; if you don't believe and there is a God, you will be punished. Therefore, in the absence of proof, it is rational to believe, as that is the only way you will get a post-death reward. But, if you believe *only* to get rewarded, God will see you as the hypocrite (you dont really believe!) you are, and punish you anyway.
Pascal's Wager is one of a group of Pragmatic Arguments for Belief in God. They don't prove that God exists, just that it is a good idea to believe that God exists!
Is "faith" alone a sufficient reason to believe in the existence of God? Aquinas and the the modern Thomists argue that faith is necessary only for the "mysteries" (or for those unable to follow an abstract argument), but that for the main question the Evidentialist approach is conclusive. See The Epistemology of Religion.
The "problem of evil" is considered by many nonbelievers to be a proof of the nonexistence of the God of Christianity. Two academic philosophical examanations are here and here, a Catholic philosophical examanation is here; Aquinas's position (from his Summa Theologica) is here; a Jewish perspective, from an article on Cabala, is here. The Christian Scientists get around the problem of evil entirely by denying the existence of evil. From An Introduction to Christian Science: "Christian Science is a religion of reason and revelation. In harmony with the Bible, it teaches that God is the only creator, and that all that He created is good. If this is true, it follows that sickness and evil, which are not good, can be no part of His creation."
Somewhere I read it this viewpoint:
God is all powerful, therefore He has the ability to eradicate evil.
God is all good, therefore He has the desire to eradicate evil.
Evil exists.
Therefore, God is not all powerful AND all good.
(Copied and pasted from Religion Quotes)"Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. . . . If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. . . . If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?" Epicurus
Is "Creation Science" really science? Creationism is looked at
positively here, and
philosophically balanced
here. Many think
that Creationism was decisively defeated at the
"Scopes Monkey
Trial" in 1925, basing their "knowledge" on Hollywood's
version of events: the
play(by Jerome Lawrence and
Robert E. Lee)/movie "Inherit the
Wind" . It didnt happen that way, though: see
The
Scopes "Monkey Trial" Home Page. The Skeptic's Dictionary entry
on Creation Science says
that creationism is pseudoscience.
The open minded might want to read:
Creationism
as a thinking disorder, which is almost an extended ad hominem argument: it
compares creationists to anorexics.
Anyone who wants to find out what *really* happened at the Scopes Trial can get
a complete transcript of the trial from the
Answers in Genesisbookstore; I
did. The title of the book is "The World's Most Famous Court Trial"
and sub-titled "Tennessee Evolution Case". (AiG is an explicitely
young Earth
organization; they hold that the Earth is only thousands, not millions, of
years old.) (Based on the use of "Day" in the Bible, Creation only
took six literal 24 hour days: their thinking does not, AFAIK, include the idea
of Archbishop Ussher
that Creation took place in 4004 BC.)(Oct 23, 4004
BC, to be more exact.)(AiG does sell Ussher's book The Annals of the
World, but they do not seem to be pushing his explicit reasoning or his
precise dating.)
The authors of the play Inherit The Wind, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E.
Lee state, in the book transcript of the play, which the movie closely
resembles: "Inherit the Wind is not history", and
"Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre.
It is not 1925. The stage directions set time as "Not too long ago."
It could have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow."
Do "Bible Codes" show that "the Bible was written by an intelligence far beyond the abilities of mankind"? And do the codes predict events like 9/11 and the Holocaust? The Isaac Newton Bible Code Research Society says "yes". The Skeptic's Dictionary entry on Bible Codes is.....skeptical.
Internet Sacred Text Archive; lots more online religious texts.
And more: Ancient texts library.
And still more: Early Christian Writings: New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers.
Back in the late-70s, I saw a TV special (sponsered by the Interfaith
Committee Against Blasphemy, chaired by the Rev. Dr. W. S. McBirnie.) debunking
the 1976 movie The Passover
Plot, which was based on the
book by the same
name , by Dr.
Hugh J. Schonfield. Schonfield was a Jewish Bible scholar, and did not
think that Jesus was the Son of God, but he DID think that Jesus was the
Messiah. (More important, Schonfield thought that Jesus himself saw himself as
the Messiah, and as a Jew, and not as the founder of a new religion.) I was
young and curious, so I bought and read the book. Very interesting....
(Christian Courier's
Pass Over
"The Passover Plot", plus Dr Norman Geisler's
refutation
of Schonfield's hypothesis; this is a PDF file.) Schonfield would go on to
do another translation of the New Testament (published as The Original New
Testament in the UK, The Authentic New Testament in the US), billed
as: "A Radical Translation and Reinterpretation", and a followup to
The Passover Plot called Those Incredible Christians.
Schonfield's root thesis, that the Holy Bible's account of the life of Jesus is
not entirely accurate, is shared by
Dr Barbara
Thiering,
who after
22 years at the School of Divinity at the Univ of Sydney (Australia),
cannot be written off as a non- or anti-Christian. Thiering has several books
that doubt specifically that Jesus died on the Cross.
In 1843-44, William Miller predicted three times with absolute certaintainty the exact date of the Second Coming, ie., the end of the world as we know it. After three strikes he was out and his following dissipated. (Many of the "Millerites" became founders or early members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.) People who claim certain knowledge about current events based on their reading of a Holy Book might keep Mr. Miller in mind. (Special Letter to the Adventists contains the math behind Miller's predictions, plus his disagreement with attempts to explain his failure!)
The Date Setters Diary lists many other failed predictions of the Second Coming.
Even in modern times, some people are scared by the
Left Behind scenerio; that there will
soon be a Rapture, where all the saved Christians are taken up into Heaven,
followed by a Tribulation, where everyone not raptured (left behind) will be
subjected to the misrule of the antichrist. Left Behind presupposes a
pre-tribulation rapture, which is not exactly universally accepted as
biblically sound. See: Rebuttal of the Pretribulation
Rapture. Author Gary
DeMar has written, "End Time Fiction: A Biblical Consideration of the
Left Behind Theology", refuting the position of the Left Behind authors.
Western Michigan University Prof. of Ancient History
Paul
Maier, an ordained minister, says (on the back cover of "End Time
Fiction.....") that the ONLY part of Left Behind that will actually happen
is the Second Coming of Christ.
Also: The Rapture -- Is It
Scriptural?
In "Left Behind", the antichrist is depicted as the UN
Secretary-General. See Who is
the antichrist?
My own view is that the Book of Revelation (the last book of the Christian
Bible, aka Apocalypse
to Roman Catholics) is subject to so many different interpretations that it's
hard for someone without a Doctorate in Theology to really understand it.
When did the Last Days begin?1. 1947, with the founding of the State of Isreal? 2. During the earthly ministry of Jesus, in the early first century AD? 3. Sometime before 2000? Test your own theory at this link!
There is a minority view called Preterism, that holds that the End Times have already happened, and that Jesus has already returned! The Preterists (generally) think that the Roman Army's destruction of Jeruselum, especially the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the consequent permanent stop of ritual animal sacrifices, was the "End" referred to in Scripture. (Preterist Q & A)(What is Preterism?)
In 1914, former SDA member D M Canright wrote Seventh-day Adventism Renounced; amongst other things, Canright demolished Ellen White's claim that *every* word she wrote was inspired by God.
Years ago, someone in Kalamazoo, Michigan gave me a little book called "Knowing Him Better", which is Ellen White's book Steps to Christ in current day English. I promised to read it. I didn't. Doing the research to find out about William Miller (above) led me to Ellen White. I really will read it this time. My thanks to whoever gave me the book in the first place!
The best of the non-believers:
Robert G Ingersoll
's What Must We
Do To Be Saved?,
and
Why
I am an Agnostic.(Writings
of Robert Ingersoll.)
The thinking man's theist: John Ankerberg.
Wiccan and Magick Terms. Magick is sorcery: supernatural, unlike magic, which is just illusion performed by humans skilled at sleight of hand.
Magick(Wikipedia entry)
Magick(Skeptic's Dictionary entry)
Ingersoll's Superstition.
My personal favorite theist: Dr. Norman Geisler, author of the over 800
page long Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. Geisler has a PhD
in Philosophy(Loyola University). I've never heard him speak, but from his
books and his website I get the impression that he is a logical, rational,
intellectual theist, not an emotionalist. If I were a theist, I'd want to be in
his company.
My favorite Christian apologist: Ravi
Zarcharias, author of The Lamb and the Führer: Jesus talks with
Hitler, which argues what I call the "morality is impossible without
belief in the Christian version of God" position, and The Lotus and The
Cross: Jesus talks with Buddha . (He has another
"imaginary
conversations" book that I havent read, yet.)(Another
book of his, Light in the Shadow of Jihad, also argues the
"morality is impossible without...." position:
The Argument from
Morality, in Philosophy.
My favorite Catholic apologist:
Martin de Porres
Kennedy , author of A Phidelphia Catholic in King James's Court,
which brilliantly answers common Protestant misconceptions about Catholicism.
And finally: dreamed up for the
Okhrana (Tsarist Secret
Police ) before the Russian Revolution and accepted by Hitler as proof of
the Jewish plan to dominate the world:The Protocols of the
Learned Elders of Zion. (Wikipedia
entry on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".)(I have actually
read on the Internet,
here,
in an article praising Julius Streicher (!), that the Protocols were the
secret minutes of the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in
1897!
NOTE: Also on this page Streicher is quoted as stating on the stand at
Nuremberg that the Holocaust did not happen. But, OTOH, here is the
Nuremberg Indictment
of Streicher, which accuse him of making it possible, and certainly make it
sound like something he would have wanted to have happen. (I have a difficult
time with the execution of Streicher: in the USA we value freedom of speech and
press(Streicher was a newspaper publisher), and hold killers responsible for
their actions, regardless of their motivation.)(Relatively respectable Germans
like Colonel General Jodl and Field Marshall Keitel were convicted of
"waging an aggresive war" and executed. Although acting on orders,
they "should have known better". Surely the people who put Jews in
cattle cars for transport to extermination camps knew better, more so than
military officers who were doing what they were trained to do and ordered to
do. But I digress....)
"Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And everybody hates the Jews"
-Tom Lehrer, National Brotherhood
Week
It is to be believed because it is absurd-Tertullian(lived approx 155-230 AD)
My view of the Christian version of God
The Christian God is supposed to be very, very smart, and the Creator of everything. But when God created human beings and told them not to do something, it never occured to Him that they would do it. God's design was so flawed that He had to drown everyone except one family, who then became the ancestors of everyone alive today. That one family still begat lots of sinners, so God sent Himself, in human form, to be executed to save us all from God's minor error, if only we would accept this human, who we call Jesus (in English), as our Saviour.
Its all mythology.
When I was a little boy, my parents told me about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Jesus, and God. When I became old enough to think for myself, I put aside Mom and Dad's view of reality.
I wouldn't be too surprised if there really was a wandering preacher named something like Jesus, and that he ran afoul of the Authority of his time. I would be surprised if someone could prove that the mythological stuff like the Virgin Birth, bringing the dead back to life, and his own death followed by his own coming back to life, actually happened.
Why do Christian people believe in Jesus and God?
Why do some Islamic people want to die for Allah?
Why did Julius
Streicher publich the children's book
The Poisonous
Mushroom?
Becauase if you get to the kids early enough, they will never question this
stuff, unless they happen to grow up in a time like the late 1960s
in the USA, when "questioning accepted truth" was the norm, or
their parents encourage "questioning" behaviour.
My two big gripes with God, if He exists:
Thanks to "original sin", my Uncle Bill, Dr. William Derr, a
surgeon, is dead when I need to ask him questions, plus a great neurosurgeon,
Dr. Frederick Latimer, is old enough to at least be retired. Those 2 MDs I
trusted more than any other. One of the consequences of "original
sin" is a shortened lifespan.
How it came out: After 5 days in Hoag
Hospital, in Orange County, California, Dr.
Duma's non-invasive Gamma Knife left me in roughly the shape I had been
admitted in.
The political/philosophical question I have the hardest time with:
Abortion. I've been on both sides of this issue. The best, the very best
anti-abortion site is Libertarians for Life.
The coordinator of
this group is an atheist, you will find no religious content here. (I object to
the Christian religious argument against abortion, as there are plenty of
mainstream theologians who read the same Bible and find no argument against
abortion in it.)
I have noted with interest the very public change of "Jane Roe", one
of the plaintiffs in Roe vs. Wade. She now regrets the part she played
in the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down laws making it a crime
to get or perform an abortion. "Jane Roe" tells her story
here.
I am convinced, however, that forcing a woman through a pregnancy is a form of
involuntary servitude. As soon as the medical technology is devised, and it may
already have been (An author named Victor Koman presented this in a novel
called Solomon's Knife; reviews and the author's comments can be found
here),
I will support legislation outlawing abortion procedures that are fatal to the
unborn infant, in favor of transplantation to a willing host mother or a
premature birth situation in a hospital. (Yes, the latter would cost money.
Time for any well-heeled right-to-lifers to put their money where their beliefs
are. I am not "well-heeled", but I will pledge whatever I can to end
prenatal infanticide once and for all.)
Once it becomes a medical certainty that the unborn child can survive outside
of its biological mother, it is no longer valid to argue that said child is the
property of the mother, hers to dispose of at her whim. At the time an unborn
child can survive independently, it becomes a full human being with the same
rights as those of us lucky enough to have been born. I deny that conditions
such as rape, incest, or hazard to the mother's life have any bearing on the
question of the humanity of the unborn. No mother will be forced to continue
her pregnancy, given the options above. I reject the idea that a mother has a
"right" to kill her child, whether before or after its birth.
For an immediate reduction in the abortion rate: guys, there is this device
known as a condom....yes, I know from experience that sex with a condom is
inferior, but it beats making a woman go through something that might scar her
mentally for life. Maybe someday "they" will invent a condom that
allows all the sensory delight of unprotected sex but will not let even
something as small as a virus pass between sex partners.
The political/philosophical question I have the LEAST trouble with:
Should smoking around non-smokers be legal? It is established beyond doubt
that smoking is "hazardous to your health" (Surgeon General's
Warnings)(Surgeon
General's Reports). Smokers are addicted to nicotine and ignore the health
risk to themselves and those they live with. For the same reason that it is
illegal to shoot others with a gun, except in self defense, it should also be
illegal to subject others to one's toxic and carcinogenic cigarette/cigar/pipe
smoke.
Need help quitting? You won't get it from me; I've never been a smoker and have
no personal understanding; but
this guy knows
how!
For the more conventional, the American Cancer Society Quitting Smoking page is
here
For the "I could never quit" people, try the CDC's
You Can Quit Smoking
Consumer Guide.
The US Surgeon General has a
5 day plan to get
ready (to quit).
About smoking, seriously now, folks
I'm a libertarian. If other people want to inhale toxic gas, that's their business. I do think that people who sell substances which, when taken as directed long enough, will kill you, should label their products with the same skull and crossbones that any other poisonous product carries. (I understand that in the European Union and in Australia cigarette packs are labeled, among other things, "SMOKING KILLS IN A SLOW AND PAINFUL WAY ".) I don't think the government has any obligation to support smokers after they get, say, lung cancer: how many smokers still alive really think that smoking is a harmless diversion anymore? They know perfectly well they are killing themselves. Health insurance companies should charge higher rates to smokers to cover the inevititable health costs that smokers incur.
Television, the vast wasteland:
I agree with Newton Minow, former chairman of the FCC, that television is a
vast
wasteland. He did say that before CNN arrived, though. Among the very few
broadcast network programs I have found worth watching are: 1.
Forever Knight, 2.
Nowhere Man(a
fascinating page of theories about the plot of this show is
here)
, 3. TW3, 4.
Nightmare
Cafe, 5. The Invaders, 6.
The Time Tunnel (All have
been cancelled; if you are not old enough to know what TW3 is short for, it was
a brilliant satire on the news which Tom Lehrer has immortalized on his album
called "That Was The Year That Was".)
Many years ago, I was a nightly watcher of
Mary Hartman, Mary
Hartman!
Back in the early 60s I watched The
Fugitive, and I plan to watch its
2000 reincarnation.
And my favorite comedy: Married...with Children!
Best single episode of a TV show: "The Twilight Zone"....He's
Alive, which ties directly to: Most Depressing move I've ever seen:
Exodus. where survivors of
the Holocaust flee to Palestine and found the State of Isreal, only to find
that the Palestinian Arabs dislike them as much as the German Nazis did. The He
in "He's Alive" is Adolph Hitler, who is still alive wherever hatred
and irrational prejudice persist:
and:
2nd most depressing movie I've ever seen:
West Side Story, which is a
modern Romeo and Juliet story. Luckily, I had read a
synopsis, so I knew
in advance how sad the ending was going to be. At the end, "Maria",
the female lead, condemns the hatred and prejudice of the rival gangs (one
ordinary white guys with (Northern) European ancestors, one Peurto Rican) that
causes the deaths. But personally, the way that "Tony and Maria" meet
reminded me a lot of the way I met my ex-wife. (Although it was not love at
first sight for me, at some level I just *knew* it would work for us. And it
did; I would still be married to her today if I hadn't gotten sick.)
(This movie is not completely depressing. It has some great songs, and it has a
great female character, a tomboy nicknamed "Anybodys", who wants to
join the white guys' gang; instead of whining about discrimination she sets out
to prove she is worthy, and succeeds.)
(I also really like the song
America,
which in the movie is a disagreement between Puerto Rican girls who like
America, and Puerto Rican guys who don't. In the play's version of
America, the
disagreement is between PR girls who like America and detest PR, and other PR
girls who want to go back to San Juan. The anti-PR lyrics in the play were all
removed for the movie.
Most television SUCKS ! "Free" TV is nothing but an advertising delivery service (and it could get worse! AOL and Microsoft are developing interactive TV (SpyTV), which will monitor your viewing and deliver advertising customized to your personality) . In between commercials, there are mindless soap operas, mindless game shows, mindless sitcoms, and with the exception of the more cerebral "The Apprentice", mindless and sometimes downright gross "reality TV". YUCK! Even cable TV, originally conceived as commercial free since the viewer was paying for it, is also drowning in advertising and mediocre programming. Only the "premium" channels like HBO and Showtime are anywhere near commercial free.
"Television is about advertising, and advertising is about selling people things they don't need. "-Barbara Dudley (seen here). I abhor TV advertising, and love the remote control with its MUTE button. I especially abhor those "Did you have a loved one die from using Product X? If so, call our sleazy law firm. We will get you Big Money!" (Of course, we will keep half for ourselves.)
On 6-26-05, I read on CompuServe that 50% of "us" leave the TV on all the time, whether someone is watching it or not. If its just for background noise, play a CD instead! Those of us who like to think or read do better without obnoxious commercials blaring in the background!
How Television Affects The Mind. Scary; this article argues that television is addictive! (I HIGHLY recommend that frequent TV viewers read this.)
Are you addicted to TV? (A 5-question quiz)
Most thought provoking page I have ever read:
Debate about the "Neuro-Semantic Political Illusion Complex"(NSPIC)- this is an anarcho-libertarian page I found rivitingly interesting: there is a long argument about whether "government" is something that really exists.
(2nd) Most thought provoking page I have ever read:
Warning: this is a page about Christianity. If you are a militant atheist, you may not like it. But if you are an open-minded nonbeliever like me, or if you are a Christian looking for a greater understanding of your history, or any non-Christian trying to figure Christianity out, check out Who are YOU in the Body?
(3rd) Most thought provoking page I have ever read:
Understanding the lyrics of "American Pie"-Speculation, as the original author never said what the lyrics meant. Just tonight, 6-6-09, I saw Dion on Fox News explaining that he was supposed to be on the plane "the day the music died".
Dumbest Thing I EVER did:
When I was a
freshman
in college, in 1967, I had unprotected sex with a woman my age.
DUMB!(It may have been the
Summer of Love in San
Francisco, but it almost became the Summer of Unintended Pregnancy in Michigan
for me.) The resulting pregnancy scare gave me a (permanent, it turned out)
desire to never have kids; I value my freedom too much to turn my life over to
childrearing. In 1994 I took the logical step and got a vasectomy*; the horror
(to me) of possibly producing a litter of anklebiters is now safely past
history.
*I would have done it a LOT sooner, but an MD in Michigan had advised against
surgery: the vasectomy procedure was really pretty minor, certainly preferable
to the psychological damage I would have suffered as a Dah-dee.
The four luckiest/best things that ever happened to me:
Regarding the woman in the previous paragraph,
1. After telling me that the midpoint of a woman's cycle is the best time to
have sex and avoid pregnancy (later reading revealed that it's really the best
time to conceive), and that she was at that point, she didn't get pregnant.
(Thank goodness! It would be unfair to say that little kids are irrational;
actually they are arational.)
2. After we got married, I held my no-kids ground. She could have pressed the
issue and prevailed; I will always be grateful to her for not doing so. I would
have been a terrible father, and I am so glad to be
childfree!(Being an
honesty-compulsive, I must add that she disagrees with me on whether I would
have been a good father to this day.)(Probably more important: I cannot recall
a time in my life, EVER, that I wanted to have children. See
Ann Landers'
famous "The Childless Couple".) (Also Ann Lander's
If You Had It To Do Over
Again— Would You Have Children?) (Think having kids isnt expensive?
Thanks to LV No
Kidding, I know about
bankrate.com's What
is the cost of raising a child? )
Children are so overrated
Happily Childfree FAQ
3. Near the end of my marriage, when I was suffering from agoraphobia, she
dumped me for Greener Pastures. She told me later that she felt that it was
what I needed to recover. She was right. Someone once suggested that I have
"unresolved anger towards (my ex-wife)". More like unexpressed
gratitude! I know she read this; she emailed me to correct the spelling errors,
but I will leave it up for her anyway: THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING!!
4. On my 50th birthday in 1998, my ex-wife, who I last heard from in 1976,
called me to wish me Happy Birthday. I didnt even recognize her voice! What a
nice thing for her to do!
Biggest mistake I EVER made:
Being an idiot and letting my marriage collapse!!! My advice to married people, based on what I did NOT do: Do not make pre-marital promises that do not have to be kept for years and then not keep them. (I had promised that we would have children. Years later, the whole idea was so repugnant I could barely speak to my then-wife about it. The marriage was doomed.) Talk about important things, especially things that might effect your whole future, way ahead of time. Always stay in communication with your spouse. Never assume that because you are decent and faithful, your loved one will be there tomorrow. Never assume that because you have a piece of paper from the government, and you made some promises in front of a religious or secular authority, you have guaranteed affection for life. Never assume that because your parents were good at living happily after ever, you know how to emulate their success. (And from what I have seen in other marriages, never assume that having children will keep you together.) Never assume anything, you have to work at staying in love.
My rant against having children:
I do not see the reason for having children. Repopulation? One family with 12 kids surely relieves many of us of ANY necessity to procreate. Love? To each their own: I find nothing lovable in small children . Parental pressure? Since your parents did it, must you do it? Heirs? I have left my vast fortune(!) to a cat charity!
More reasons for not having children can be found at the childfree webring!
I dislike small children. I especially dislike baybees. Typically, I refer to them as anklebiters, rugrats, and similar unflattering labels . I have found a webpage that rationally (no name calling) considers the "having children question": The Shame of Not Wanting Children.
My favorite childfree essay! This woman says exactly what I would say about having children, if I could write as well as she does.
Very humorous! 'So when
are you going to have kids.'
And the other side:
101
REASONS FOR HAVING CHILDREN!(Warning: this author is a religious
überbreeder who obviously plans to keep having kids as long as it is
biologically possible.)(I read in the comments on this page,
Breeder
Bingo, that she has had 12 so far!!)
And the other side of that:
101
reasons to NOT have kids.
Guys! Want to know what your wife's/girlfriend's body will look like after
pregnency and childbirth? See The
Shape of a Mother. I knew a woman, who, after 2 C-sections, was so ashamed
of her stomach that she only had sex in pitch darkness. However, I knew another
woman who had 2 C-sections and plastic surgery, and you would never know she
had even been pregnent.
I have come to think of parenthood as a sort of
BDSM activity. It's great for
women who like morning sickness,
nausea and vomiting, intense labor pain, stretch marks, and don't mind that
men will never think of them as sexually attractive again. It's great for men
who like losing their freedom, and dont mind the end of a spontaneous sex life
with the mother of the child.
"if people knew what hell it was raising an infant, they would never have sex in the first place." -Bristol Palin
I used to think that I just never wanted children of my own. I don't agree
with Jerry Steinberg, "founding non-father" of
No Kidding! that children are
wonderful, just not for him. I am a lot closer to the attitude of
this woman, that small children are no fun to be around, period. As part of
this, I have stuck to women my age whose children are grown, forgetting that
grown children can have children, which due to "circumstances" can
get put in MY household. NEVER AGAIN! Having a house full of kid toys,
kid videos, and kid sounds is sufficiently obnoxious to make me thank God, if
there is one, that I was never "blessed" with children!
Note: on 9-18-00, this child was reunited with its father!!!!!
While Granny's grandoffspring was living here, she said, "Grandma, your smoking makes me cough!" Granny kept right on smoking, of course. Why not? Granny has been inhaling this poison herself for 40 years, and it hadnt killed her (yet) . It says this at the Philip Morris USA Secondhand Smoke page: "Particular care should be exercised where children are concerned, and adults should avoid smoking around them. "
5-4-01: More "circumstances"! The child doesn't live here, but it is grandma's (my now ex-gf) responsibility during the day, and is in my presence. Listen, Granny, if I had wanted little kids around I would have had my own!
Isn't she CUTE?
6-3-01: The child is around until its' Daddy gets his life in order. How
annoying! I think one doesn't appreciate how having small children around
effects one's life until one is around! YUCK! I have had a life of freedom,
thanks to my ex-wife's not forcing the "having children question".
Listen up, Granny! I moved in with YOU, not with your family.I would rather
sell the house and go back to living alone than put up with your Offspring's
Offspring. I have a few additional comments about your grandoffspring:
YIPPEE!!!!! On 12-12-01, Daddy and his offspring moved back to California!
And then on 12-18-03, Granny announced that SHE was leaving too, to persue her chosen career as a professional compulsive gambler.
But she returned; then on 9-30-04 announced she was leaving AGAIN!
But she didnt go, then on 2-4-05 announced she was leaving AGAIN! The drama
continues.
(Her 2 big complaints: I dont like her high volume, imbecile level TV watching,
and I keep reminding her that she stole from me to finance her gambling
addiction.)(She seriously believes that after you scam someone, the victim will
not resent it, and never mention it again. She calls mentioning her bizarre
financial activities a JUPA (John UnProvoked Attack). Uh Huh...
Finally, on 7-19-05, the grandoffspring returns for a "3 day, 2 night visit", but those "circumstances" will make it longer than that. Having the grandoffspring around does have a good effect: it makes me SO GRATEFUL to my ex-wife for not oops-ing me when she was on "the pill".
Gulp! And then on 9-20-05 she died. "Dont it always seem to go....That you don't know what you've got....Till it's gone." (From Big Yellow Taxi, by Joni Mitchell.) Although she was a brilliant woman who I miss a lot, she was a VERY heavy smoker; I have had a poster since before I knew her with the theme, "Smoking Kills", and I think it did.
(My ex once wrote in a poem:
"Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As each of us sometimes learns."
-
How true! Putting up with the grandoffspring was easy compared to having granny die.)
And on a semi-related subject:
Why do many women keep their married name (i.e. their husband's name) in the event of divorce? It makes sense if the divorce occurs when the couple has small children and the wife gets custody. It doesn't make sense after the children have grown up and are living independently. It really doesn't make sense if there were no children, as in my case! (And why do women automatically take their husband's last name when they get married, anyway? In bygone days, it might have been to show ownership, in the same way that slaveowners surnamed their slaves, but haven't we moved past that point yet? I see absolutely no reason for Miss Smith, who marries a Mr Jones, to become Mrs Jones. Sure its tradition, but just because we have always done a silly thing, must we keep doing a silly thing?)
The big scam:
Paradise by the dashboard light. An all-too-true look at the relationship between (some) men and (some) women: in exchange for sex, this woman demands eternal love and lifelong happiness.
Things I despise:
War(especially the Vietnam
War)(Vietnam
War Overview.)(I was in college on May 4, 1970, during the infamous
Kent State Massacre; if memory serves,
there was a big demonstration on the WMU campus after word was received, which
was broken up without fatalities by the Michigan State Police: at KSU 4 people
were killed by the Ohio National Guard. I still love the sad song
Ohio); violence,
hatred, the Holocaust, the Allied firebombing of
Dresden
in 1945; the so-called
USA
Patriot Act,aka
Dictatorship
at your doorstep, a rightwing overreaction to 9/11 (it says
here
that Pres. GW Bush has Patriot Act 2 ready)(now before Congress , its
called the
"Domestic
Security Enhancement Act of 2003")(!)(Wikipedia
entry for DSEA03)(there is also a "secret law", which you the
citizen are not allowed to read, that requires showing ID in order to board a
plane. This is being challenged in
Gilmore vs. Gonzales); those
parts of the US criminal justice system that incarcerate people for committing
"crimes" that have no victim, paying
taxes(LOL,
written April 15!). That was last time! This April 15('98)(and in '99, '00,
'01, '02, '03, '04, '05, '06, '07, and '08) I used
Kiplinger TaxCut(now called H & R
Block TaxCut)(4-15-06 Warning: The 2005 tax year version of TaxCut has
very dangerous code in it: if you elect to pay the electronic filing fee out of
your refund, you are agreeing to let Block turn your refund over to people you
owe money to. I will not be using TaxCut again. But I did in '07.
Despite Block's sneaky code, their product really is good. I always hated
filling out form 1040: using TaxCut is much less painful. ) software to
electronically prepare and file, a BIG improvement over doing it by hand.
"Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman
Yeah, I'm the tax-ma-an"
-George Harrison, 1966
(Lyrics and image seen on the front cover of Mind Bets, the newsletter and
journal of Southern Nevada Mensa, April, 2005 issue, Hillary Litwak, Editor.)
*****"Race" prejudice*****
I'm not even sure that "race" is a viable concept. I see what is
commonly called "race" as being a
subspecies
of humans, not entirely dissimilar to the concept of "breed" as used
to describe different types of cats or dogs. Breeds are different, and
some breeds are better in certain ways for certain functions; for example,
German Shepards are preferable to Beagles as "seeing eye" dogs for
blind humans, however, it does not follow that German Shepards are
"superior" to Beagles.
I see race prejudice as being inherently irrational. The differences between
the races are mostly cultural, not genetic.
*****Community Property*****
"Community Property" is my least favorite legal concept. In states with rigid Community Property laws, "goldigger" types will seek out wealthy spouses. It is foolish to think that the wealthy partner is the only victim of this scheme. The non-wealthy, non-working partner can easily fall into a state of mental disuse, so that when the wealthier partner finally gets tired of being exploited, the goldigger can be left without a thought in her head.
*****The Nuremberg Trials*****
The post WW2
Nuremberg
Trials(International Military Tribunal-Major War Criminals), where the
defeated Germans were tried and convicted of committing crimes that did not
exist before they were committed. (Please note: my complaint is with the trial
of civilian and military personnel tried for "conspiracy to wage an
aggressive war" or "waging an aggressive war", not with the
trial of the architects of the Final Solution for "crimes against
humanity".)
A
(long) account of the creation and operation of the IMT.
Judgment of the
International Military Tribunal (Major War Criminals) at Nuremberg(quite
detailed.)
The Nuremberg trials were followed by the
Tokyo Trials, where the
defeated Japanese got the same treatment.
NOTE: At the Tokyo Trials (International Military Tribunal-Far East), some
Japanese were tried for using a form of torture called
Waterboarding. In his confirmation
hearings in 2007, Attorney General nominee Judge Mukasey did not know if
waterboarding was torture.
"Why do we kill people who kill people to show killing people is
wrong?" - seen in the Northern Sun
Catalog.
"the crime for which the Nazis were tried had never been formulated as a
crime with the definiteness required by our legal standards..... By our
standards that crime arose under an
ex post facto
law." -former US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas .
Particularly absurd was the inclusion of Soviet judges, representing a country
that rivaled Nazi Germany in the commission of war crimes; the
Katyn Forest
Massacre of Polish Officers by the Soviet military comes to mind. (Wikipedia entry for Katyn
Forest Massacre.) (Also the Red Army's inaction during the 1944
Warsaw
Uprising(Aug 1-Oct 2) of the
Polish
Home Army(Armia
Krajowa, the Polish Underground, or just AK), which was, as the Soviets had
hoped, wiped out by the Germans.) (Also the Soviet treatment of German POW's;
of 91,000 Germans captured after the
Battle of
Stalingrad, only 6,000 survived to return to Germany.)
Also the Soviet invasion of
Finland on Nov 30, 1939, and the
Soviet
invasion of Eastern Poland on Sept 17, 1939(The Soviets had agreed to split
Poland with Germany, which invaded Poland from the west on Sept 1, 1939).
"It is not right to bring to trial officers or men who have acted under
orders from higher authority... The most brutal act of the War was the dropping
of the Atom Bombs on Japan... I consider it wrong to try Admirals, Generals,
and Air Marshals for carrying out definite orders from the highest
authority...the Allies were far from guiltless and should have taken that into
fuller consideration."
-Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Chatfield, P.C., G.C.B.
I agree with Lord Chatfield about the use of the Atom Bomb.* Incinerating
Japanese civilians to shorten the war was just as immoral as the firebombings
of Dresden
and Hamburg,
where the Allies incinerated German civilians to break the will of the German
leadership and shorten the war.
-
I watched the movie Judgement at
Nuremberg, which is about the 1948 trial of Nazi judges. The prosecution
shows the films that were taken when the Western Allies liberated the
concentration camps in Western Germany, like Dachau. The defense attorney
objects, and wonders out loud about films of charred bodies at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. I dont think I have ever seen such a film; perhaps the USA has
suppressed the graphic evidence of its use of mass murder.
(In the movie"Nuremberg" there is a
reference to the Nazi position that Jews were "not really
human". In the Twilight Zone episode
The
Encounter, these words are put into the mouth of a US WW2 (Pacific Ocean
area) veteran, "We were told that the Japanese were 'not really
human '." IF this happened in real life, then the position of the US
government towards people it wanted to mass murder was identical to the Nazi
position.)
Note: I have always found the Holocaust to be depressing.
Especially things like the Diary of
Anne Frank, and the story of the escape ship
St.Louis,
whose over 900 Jewish passengers from Germany were denied entry to the United
States in June, 1939; over 600 of them perished in the Holocaust after the USA
forced them back to Europe. (Also depressing is the "revivisionist"
view that the Holocaust never happened. See
Why
"Revisionism" Isn't, and
A Brief History
of Holocaust Denial.)(Skeptic's Dictionary entry on
Holocaust Denial)( The Simon Weisenthal Center
Faq #5 lists
the number of victims by country, hard to do if there were no victims!)
Himmler explicitly refers to the ongoing extermination of Jews in his
Posen Speech of
10/4/43. (Full
text of the Posen Speech, in German with an English translation.)
However, the Rescuers, people
like
Raoul
Wallenberg(A Swedish diplomat to Hungary, Wallenberg stood up to both the
German SS killers and the indigenous Hungarian fascist
Arrow
Cross killers)(Wallenberg
was arrested by the Soviets after the fall of Budapest, and
his
fate is still uncertain), Oskar Schindler (a German industrialist who ran a
fake war production plant that employed Jews, who were protected as
"essential to the war effort"),
Carl Lutz and
Sempo
Sugihara, who defied/outwitted the Gestapo to save Jews, are an uplifting
part of an otherwise dreary portion of the history of humanity. (These
Righteous
Gentiles are now honored in Jerusalem, which I hope to visit in a year or
two.) There was also the very underground
White
Rose anti-Nazi German resistance. (Unfortunately, the White Rose was
discovered by the Gestapo in 1943, and most of them were executed.)
Anti-Jewish actions did not die with the German Nazi Party in 1945. Today in the USA there is a nationalist.org, which uses the same symbol as the Hungarian Arrow Cross noted in the previous paragraph. I support the Anti Defamation League. The ADL has A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos, and Tattoos, which includes the Crosstar(US Nationalist)/Arrow Cross Symbol.
Lest anyone think that Russians and Germans are more evil than others,
during the Vietnam War the USA napalmed a 9 year old girl named
Kim Phuc; the picture taken
by Nick Ut, of Kim running naked after removing her burning clothes changed
many minds about the morality of the war; it bothers me to this day.
Kim Phuc herself has forgiven the American who set up the bombing, that story
is in the link above.
And of course, there was that shameful phase of US History that can best be
referred to as Indian
Removal, of which the
Trail of Tears
alone cost about 4,000 lives. The final (military) act of this shameful phase
of US History was the
Wounded Knee
Massacre.
SIGH! On the front cover of the Spring-Summer 2005
Nothern Sun catalog, there is a
picture of 4 armed Native Americans with
the words, HOMELAND SECURITY "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492". It
looked a lot like this:
I understand that Columbus Day, the day a
group of European sailors "discovered" America, is considered to be a
day of mourning by the decendents of the people who were already here in 1492,
people who were
killed*(some
by force of arms, more by European diseases), enslaved, or put on
"reservations" ("rural ghettos" would be more
accurate)(When I see
"Pine Ridge
Reservation" , I think "Warsaw Ghetto")( "I am told
that the life expectancy here on Pine Ridge is between 48-52 years old."
-David Swallow). I support the Libertarian Party on
American
Indian Rights, especially the part about abolishing the Bureau of Indian
Affairs.
* In his 1992 book American Holocaust(prologue, page x), author David E.
Stannard (Professer of American Studies, University of Hawaii) estimates the
loss of Native American life to "between 90 and 98 percent", and
"95 percent has become a working rule of thumb."; and at page 151
estimates the total dead at "close to 100,000,000." (That is in the
whole "New World", North, Central, and South America.) In
HIDING GENOCIDE: The National
Museum of the American Indian , Carter Camp puts the death toll at
200,000,000. (Population
History of American indigenous peoples)
"Open borders"? It is amusing to note that those who are upset
about "illegal immigration" are mostly people with European
ancestors. These ancestors did not ask permission from the people who already
lived in "America" before coming over from Europe.
*****Book Burning*****
I do love books! In May and June, 1933, the German Nazi Party held massive book burnings, especially of books by these authors. The pictures of SA(Brownshirts) men throwing books onto the fires show what the intolerant and authoritarian mind is capable of.
It goes on: In my ex-wife's hometown, a Christian church burned not only
Harry Potter books (sorcery), but the Book of Morman and any Holy Bible
other than the King James Version.
(Story here)
(Wikipedia:
King James Only Movement.)
*****most logical fallacies*****
I dont *despise* all logical
fallacies, but there are two I find especially loathsome:
1. The
Appeal to Popularity, "most people believe X, therefore X is
true". Many people have an almost religious devotion to popular beliefs,
and want to criminalize rejection of their pet belief: According to Jarret
Wollstein, writing in Freedom Network News #75, May/June 2007, an
ISIL publication, "Global warming true
believers also insist that...global warming skeptics are either industry
shills, incredibly misguided, or simply evil and should be silenced."(Global
Warming: Myths and Reality).
2. Ad Hominem
Arguments, "Mr X is a (insert unpopular political, religious, racial,
or ethnic group). Mr X believes Y. Therefore Y is false." This seems to be
obviously false reasoning, but it is incredibly common. How else does one
justify locking up US
citizens of Japanese descent during WW2, but by an ad hominem argument in
the form: "Mr X(a US citizen) is Japanese. Japanese people (in Japan)
favor an attack by the Empire of Japan on the USA's West Coast. Therefore, Mr X
is an Enemy of the State and should be "detained" in a
"relocation camp".
And, saving the worst for last Compulsive gamblers, Casino owners, and Junk Debt Buyers
These three are somewhat interrelated: Casino owners get rich by exploiting
the (mentally ill) compulsive gamblers; compulsive gamblers get money to gamble
with by exploiting non gamblers; junk debt buyers get rich by re-exploiting the
same non gamblers. Junk Debt Buyers are really gamblers themselves: they buy up
worthless bad debt for pennies on the dollar and hope they can turn those
pennies into dollars. I have
personally
been exploited by a compulsive gambler, then re-exploited by a
junk
debt buyer after not paying some of the debt the compulsive gambler had
racked up on my credit cards. (Compulsive gamblers can lose an enormous
amount of money trying to "win back" money they have
"borrowed" and then lost.) (A very interesting story about a
compulsive gambler who is suing casinos for $20 million for not stopping
her. I hope she (a lawyer) wins; she is absolutely right that "Nobody
in their right mind would gamble for four or five straight days without
sleeping.")
(In a rational, moral world, casino owners would agree to eject obviously
mentally unstable gamblers and have a shared "blacklist". Cutting off
free alcoholic drinks to unstable gamblers would be a good idea, too. I was
once with a gambler who was ejected after getting drunk on free drinks and
tried to stagger across the street to the next casino. She is lucky to be
alive.)
People who try to get rich by exploiting other people's mental illness are
the scum of the Earth!
Historical speculation:
A few years ago S Nv Mensa asked this question on its' mailing list:
"If you could go back in time once and change history, what would you
do?" One of the most popular answers was "Kill Hitler". This
idea was dismissed by one member on the grounds that someone just as bad would
have taken his place. I have since had reason to look into the incredibly
byzantine prewar German power structure and have come to this conclusion:
Killing Hitler in the late 1930s would probably have precipitated a power
struggle between the police, led by Himmler, and the military, led by less
"racial purity" types but more prowar types (Göring, for
example). So yes, someone just as bad or worse would have taken over.
Killing Hitler on the battlefield during WW1 might have prevented the entire
rise of the Nazi movement and averted the European part of WW2 and the
Holocaust!
A Thought:
I just saw (3-6-01) a documentary on A&E about the Gambino crime family in New York City. Individual mobsters can kill a few people and control a small part of society. (In the same sense, in 3-02 CompuServe ran a piece about the "10 most evil men", people like Charles Manson and the "Son of Sam" and others who killed a few people.) But to really do evil, it is far more effective to take over the government. Hitler was able to erect a mass murder apparatus that killed six million Jews alone. The RSHA (Reich Security Main Office, which included the Gestapo) had power unimanginable to the Cosa Nostra. If Hitler had read more History, he might not have made the mistake of invading Russia like Napoleon foolishly did before him. Scary!
Another scary aspect of Nazi (and other totalitarian) gov't
Night and Fog, where enemies of the Reich, particularly resistance organization operatives, were not only executed but had all record of their existence erased.
Historical things I wonder about:
Vince Foster,
a lawyer(Deputy White House Counsel) for President Clinton, formerly a partner
with Hillary Clinton in the Rose Law Firm, who (officially) killed himself on
July 20, 1993, by (officially) putting an 80 year old .38 in his mouth and
pulling the trigger. Many doubt the official story. (101
Peculiarities Surrounding the Death of Vince Foster ).
Of these 101 Pecularities, the three I found to be the most interesting:
1. It is normal police procedure to treat a violent death as a homocide until
there is no doubt. There was no homocide investigation.
2. It is normal Federal procedure for the FBI to handle the investigation of a
violent death of a highly placed government employee. The Director of the FBI
had been fired by the President the day before Foster's body was found; the
first time a US President fired the Director. The Park Police handled the
investigation.
3. There was no blood or other tissue found on the gun, even though it was
loaded with high velocity (extra powerful) ammunition, which should have blown
out the back of Foster's head and left a very messy (bloody) death scene. There
was no pool of blood under Foster's head. (Plus, the gun was found in Foster's
hand.)(A man uses a powerful gun to shoot himself in the head, and the gun
stays in his hand?
http://fbicover-up.com-a large Foster
site with extensive documentation.
Was Sen. Paul Wellstone
murdered?(In 2002, just before Election Day; he was running for
reelection. There is a book out by James Fetzer and
Four Arrows,
"American Assassination: The Strange Death of Sen. Paul Wellstone",
which argues that it WAS murder.
Anastasia
Romanov, one of the daughters of Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia.
The whole Royal Family was ordered executed after the success of the Bolshevic
Revolution in 1917. Many have thought that Anastasia survived the slaughter,
including especially Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Anastasia.......it says
in this
account of the story that science has now proven that Anna was not
Anastasia.
The O.J. Simpson Trial: I
watched the whole thing on television, and agreed with the jury's verdict. I
could never shake a "reasonable doubt". It appears most white folks
think he was guilty; and most black folks think he was not guilty. I don't
know. (BTW, there is a LONG article
here,
arguing that Kato Kaelin is the "real killer".) (I have no idea who
the "real killer" was, but I am convinced that the prosecution blew
it in the criminal trial when they did not prepare their own witness Mark
Fuhrman. His blatant perjury under cross-examination by F. Lee Bailey was fatal
to the prosecution.)(It says in
this
account of the case that the testimony of Defense expert witness Dr. Henry
Lee was the deciding factor to the Jury.)
French Marshal
Henri
Philippe Petain, hero of the Allied victory at Verdun in 1916, later
head of the Vichy French government from 1940-1944. Was he a traitor? I don't
know.
"Custer's
Last Stand", or the "Battle of the Little Bighorn". What
led a previously successful military leader to divide his forces in the face of
an overwhelmingly superior enemy??
The German WW2 battleship Bismark. Though superior to any single
Allied warship of the time, what made the German Admiralty think it could stand
up to the whole British fleet? The Germans had been successful, sort of, in WW1
at the Battle of
Jutland, where they had a fleet to oppose the British.
The Gunfight at the OK Corral(Tombstone, Arizona,
USA, October 26, 1881), in which 5 cowboys (the Clantons) stood up to 4
experienced gunfighters (US Marshal Virgil Earp, Deputy US Marshal Wyatt Earp,
Morgan Earp, plus "Doc" Holliday), and (predictably) lost.
Gestapo
Chief Heinrich Müller, who
walked out of the
Führerbunker on April 29, 1945 , never to be confirmed seen again(dead
or alive), although three volumes of his
"memoirs" exist and are for sale online! (Note: This is an IHR
site. I have no connetion with, or sympathy for, the IHR.) (declassified
CIA report on Müller.)
Martin
Bormann , said to be the #2 man in Germany after 1. the failure of
original #2
Göring's
Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britian, and 2. the flight of Deputy Führer
Rudolf Hess to England in 1941, and prior to the Allied victory in 1945.
Bormann was indicted at Nuremberg and sentenced to death in absentia, as
he was never apprehended. Ladislas Farago's book After-math(copyright
1974) claims that Bormann escaped to South America. It says
here that Bormann's
body was found in 1972 in Berlin and identified! However, Hugh Thomas' 1995
book The Murder of Adolf Hitler has a long section about the survival of
Bormann until 2-15-59, when he died in Paraguay from stomach cancer.
Rudolf Hess,
Deputy Führer of Germany until his flight to England (above). There is a
book called The Murder of Rudolf Hess, by W. Hugh Thomas, which argues
(quite convincingly) that the man imprisoned by the British in the Tower of
London, later tried at Nuremberg and imprisoned at Spandau Prison until his
death, was NOT Hess at all. Thomas says the real Hess was wounded in WW1, but
the Hess the British held was examined at Nuremberg and showed no trace of the
wound. If true, this would explain Hess's "amnesia", and
Göring's belief that Hess was insane. (Göring sat next to Hess in the
dock at Nuremberg.)
Thomas, who is a Medical Doctor, has another book (pub. in the UK as SS-1
The Unlikely Death of Heinrich Himmler, pub. in the US asThe Strange
Death of Heinrich Himmler A Forensic Examination, which I havent read yet,
which argues that the body supposed to be Himmler was not Himmler. But not to
worry. If Himmler did survive the end of WW2, he would be 107 years old if he
was still alive.
Adolph
Eichmann, Nazi butcher who was abducted by the Mossad from Argentina,
taken to Israel, tried, and executed. As a civil libertarian I deplore the lack
of due process for Eichmann, but of course I also deplore the fate of his
victims. [Eichmann was head of the infamous "section 4-B-4" (RSHA Dept 4, Gestapo; B,
religions; 4, Jews). (Structure
of the RSHA.)] A partial parallel would be the USA's seizure of Panamanian
chief of government
Manuel
Noriega, his trial and imprisonment for violating US law.
Gallipoli,
a WW1 Allied military disaster. Whatever made the British think that this was a
viable plan?
The Scott Peterson
murder trial: If the body of Laci was so decomposed that cause of
death could not be determined (nobody was ever able to determine time or place
of death, nor was a murder weapon ever found, nor was a plausable motive ever
presented)(the autopsy report on Laci stated "Cause of Death:
Unknown" and "Method of Death: Homocide." HUH? Without a known
cause of death they can know she was killed?), how can a jury find that
*anyone* killed her? "To a moral certainty and beyond a reasonable
doubt"? All the prosecution can *prove* is that Laci is dead.
(scottisinnocent.com: argues that
Scott P is *innocent*, not just that there is a reasonable doubt of his
guilt.)(Scott's attorney, Mark Geragos, is
continuing the
investigation.)(Marlene Newell's
Why Scott Peterson is NOT Guilty.)
[Update 3-16-05: well, the jury did vote guilty and recommended the death
penalty. The judge did then sentence Scott to death. There will be an automatic
appeal to the California Supreme Court, where hopefully it can be argued
successfully that this purely circumstantial case leaves a big hole of
reasonable doubt; too much doubt to justify either conviction or execution.]
Update 12-14-05: Yesterday, California executed
Stan Tookie
Williams. Tookie also maintained his innocence. Thinking about him and
Scott Peterson, I have decided that the usual "guilt beyond a reasonable
doubt" test may not be enough for the death penalty. Before the State
kills someone, they better be able to establish guilt "beyond a shadow of
a doubt", which is real hard to do with just circumstantial evidence.
(A really good read:
Presumption
of Innocence, which is something Scott (and OJ, and Leonard Peltier(below),
and Assata Shakur(below) did not get from the media or from the general
public.)
Marlene's
complete e-book "The Journey from Presumption to Conviction" is now
online
-
The
Leonard Peltier murder trial: Another case where, like with OJ and
Scott Peterson, there were no actual eyewitnesses, the defendent asserted his
innocence, and there was some question about the ability of the circumstantial
evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. (The State's case against
Leonard: Two FBI Agents were killed on the Pine Ridge Reservation on June 26,
1975; two people who were arrested and tried were acquitted; Peltier was
physically present on the Reservation the day of the murders; when a Law
Enforcement Officer is killed, somebody has to pay; Peltier had a gun; Peltier
belonged to AIM, the American Indian Movement; therefore Leonard Peltier shot
the FBI Agents.)
Yes, I'd rather err on the side of the defense than lock up or execute someone
who cannot be proven guilty. (Note: Peltier was nominated for President in 2004
by the Peace and Freedom Party in
California, and got over 25,000 votes.)
Free Leonard Peltier page.
Statement of Facts,
from one of Peltier's attorneys.
Peltier's story is told, partly by him, partly by his appellant attorney
William Kunstler, partly by many others, in the DVD
Incident at Oglala.
Amnesty
International's APPEAL FOR THE RELEASE OF LEONARD PELTIER.
It is known that President Clinton considered granting clemency to Peltier
before his term as President expired on Jan. 20, 2001. A federal judge had
indicated that clemency should be considered back in 1991. Clinton took no
action; see: LEONARD
PELTIER: CLEMENCY WHAT HAPPENED?(CNN:
In
one of his last acts as president, Clinton grants 140 pardons (his brother
Roger and Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, but NOT Leonard Peltier.)
NOTE: One used to be able to donate to, or buy stuff from the
Leonard Peltier Defense
Committee(LPDC) online using PayPal. For some reason, PayPal
no longer allows
this: The LPDC is urging a boycott of PayPal and its parent company eBay.
Note: In 2008, Peltier
himself disolved the LPDC and formed the "Leonard Peltier Defense
Offense Committee". The website of the LPDOC is
here!
NOTE: Probably more important: Peltier, born 9-12-44, who is now 63 and not in
the best health (not surprising: he was convicted in 1977; 25+ years in prison
is not a recipe for good health; , was transferred from Leavenworth and tossed
in the "Hole" at his new prison home in Terre Haute, Indiana over the
4th of July weekend, 2005. He stays in the "Hole" (solitary
confinement) until the transfer paperwork is complete. (I could be wrong, but
how many 60+ year old men are such a danger to society they must be held in a
maximum security prison?)
In mid-August, Peltier was transferred again to the federal prison at
Lewisburg, Pa., where his "rights" were restored.
Assata Shakur aka
JoAnne Chesimard (her birth name, she considers it her slave name), another
very dubious (no eyewitnesses, plus testimony from neurologists that she was
not physically capable of doing what she was accused of doing) murder
conviction. Where Peltier fled to Canada to escape US justice, and was
extradited, then convicted and jailed, Assata Shukar was convicted, jailed,
escaped, and fled to Cuba, where the government is FAR less likely to agree to
US extradition requests. She is still free in Havana. Various US police
agencies have offered huge rewards for her capture. (Assata Shakur Speaks!)(Assata Shakur Wikipedia
entry.)
The JonBenet Ramsey
murder: Here we have the opposite situation; an accused who claims he
did it, but the local prosecuter refuses to go to trial because there is no
proof that the accused really did do it. From the news accounts I was inclined
to think that the accused, one John Mark Karr, probably did do it.
Who (if anyone) planned to
kill
President John Kennedy ? The CIA? The Mafia? I didn't seriously doubt
that Lee Harvey Oswald was the actual shooter.*(Mark Lane argued, in
Oswald
Innocent? A Lawyer's Brief, that LHO could not have been proven guilty in
court beyond a reasonable doubt)
*(Robert Groden argues in his video/DVD
JFK: The Case for Conspiracy,
that there was not enough time for LHO to have run downstairs after shooting
JFK from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository, to the lunchroom on
the 2nd floor where he was found, therefore LHO was not the shooter!)(I haven't
thought Oswald was the only shooter since I saw Oliver Stone's movie
"JFK". This movie
is a dramatic telling of the events surrounding the Clay Shaw trial in New
Orleans, and includes exerpts from the famous
Zapruder Film that show, to me
at least, that the fatal bullet that struck JFK in the head came from the
front; LHO was *behind* JFK.)
Who (if anyone other than LHO) were the brains behind the killing?
This paper, by Michael
Collins Piper, argues that the CIA, the Mafia, and the Mossad (Isreali
Intelligence) were all in on the planning. (His theory:
David Ben-Gurion ,
the Prime
Minister of Isreal from 1948-1954 and 1955-1963, had it done because JFK
was going to block Isreal's nuclear program. Here is Ken Rahn's
refutation
of Piper's theory.) Yes, Piper seems to have an anti-Jewish tilt, but the
facts are always independent from a specific author's bias. Ad hominem
arguments are always fallacies; it will never follow from:
1. Mr. X is anti-Jewish [(or anti-Catholic, or anti-(insert ethnic group of
choice)].
2. Mr. X's opinion on individual Jews, or Catholics, or whomever.........
Therefore, Mr X is wrong.
There are a LOT of other conspiracy theories regarding the John Kennedy
assassination: here is a list of
books written, and summaries of, various theories, both simple and
bizarre.......
And another list of books with summaries(there have been hundreds of books!):
here.
But, here is a FAQ which
argues: Oswald was the lone killer, there was no conspiracy, and the
Warren
Commission Report got it right.
The Academic JFK Assassination
Site reaches the same three conclusions.
BUT, again! In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations(HSCA) reported
a "probable conspiracy" in the JFK assassination!
BUT, yet again, in this page about Lee
Harvey Oswald, it says that four of the seven members of the Warren
Commission "expressed doubts about the Commission's conclusions within a
decade of their report."
AND, there is Best Evidence: The
Research Video, presented by David Lifton, who also wrote the book
Best Evidence. Lifton presents
hard evidence that the coffin containing the body of JFK that left Dallas was
not the coffin that arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where the
autopsy was performed; furthur, that the condition of the body had demonstrably
changed from the time it left Parkland Hospital in Dallas, before it reached
Bethesda. This 1980 book and 1990 video came out too late to be considered even
by the HSCA.
Before Lifton published his book, Fred T. Newcombe and Perry Adams published
the same basic theory in Skeptic in 1975:
Did
Someone Alter the Medical Evidence?
I got a newish DVD on eBay, called "JFKII....the Bush Connection",
the cover of which can be seen
here,
which argues for a truely MASSIVE conspiracy, includes Lifton's ideas and
relies on former New Orleans DA Jim Garrison's investigation, and names former
President George H. W. Bush (elected in 1988, defeated by Clinton in 1992) as
one of the conspirators.....beyond a reasonable doubt. The alledged conspiracy
goes all the way back to GHWB's college fraternity Skull & Bones; I've
watched it twice....its VERY interesting, but I have a reasonable doubt about
the Bush connection. I also have a reasonable doubt about the conclusions of
the Warren Commission, especially the
magic bullet
theory, originally advanced by then-WC attorney
Arlen Specter.
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Earl Warren said we're not going to know the truth for 75 years and it's better that we don't." -Walter Matthau, who played Sen. Russell Long in Oliver Stone's JFK. (This quote appears on this page.)
Rose Cheramie, aka Melba Christine Marcades, a heroin addict, had advance knowledge according to PROBE, V6,N5, of both the time and place of the assassination. (HSCA staff report on Rose Cheramie.)(Here is a page saying that Rose Cheramie's story was bogus.)(And another, saying that her story was true, but her main detracter is bogus!)
So why are people still, over 40 years later, so interested in the death of JFK? I think that the events of 11-22-63 in Dallas were a Turning Point in History. With JFK dead, Lyndon Johnson became President. Under LBJ, the USA launched a major escalation in the Vietnam War, which eventually killed 47,410 (US battle deaths), mostly men my age. (It says on this page that 6 women were killed in Vietnam.)
So, who do I think planned to kill JFK? Dunno, but here are some possibles:
Diem: President of
South Vietnam. Diem had Motive. He was ousted from office and killed on
11-2-63, in a coup that JFK probably had foreknowledge of and which
probably would not have happened if JFK had ordered it stopped. Since
JFK outlived Diem by three weeks, the hypothesis is that Diem had set the
machinery in motion before his death. But Diem was on the other side of the
world and would have needed major co-conspirators to pull off a murder in
downtown Dallas. (CIA?)
Castro. Premier of
Cuba. Castro also had Motive. If JFK had delivered air support in the 1961
Bay of Pigs
invasion , Castro might well have also lost his office and his life. Plus,
if I have heard the rumor that JFK was going to get the Mafia to kill Castro,
then surely Castro heard it, too.
(More to come)
I AM SHOCKED! I had always thought that at least we knew for sure that Sirhan Sirhan had shot Robert Kennedy in 1968. But Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the LA County Coroner and Medical Examiner, said that Sirhan could not have fired the fatal shot. (See here, for the 1st quote I saw, and here, for details.) So I looked it up. There is a PROBE Magazine article, Vol 5, No 3, demonstrating the scientific problem with the "Sirhan as the lone gunman" idea. (here are 6 more PROBE articles about the RFK assassination.)
I'm not so shockable anymore! The HSCA has also found a probable cospiracy in the assassination of Martin Luthur King, Jr. The HSCA does think that James Earl Ray did shoot MLK. Ray, who was never actually tried by a jury, denied it, and wrote a book before he died asserting his innocence. (There are 8 PROBE articles about the MLK assassination.)(Ray's attorney, William Pepper, wrote WHY JAMES EARL RAY DESERVES A TRIAL NOW.(The King family agreed.)
*It would be unfair to remember Lyndon Johnson just for the Vietnam disaster. During his presidency, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed. These Acts dramatically changed America for the better.
Organizations I belong to: (in no particular order)
Mensa,
Southern Nevada Mensa,(my
comments on its
Oct, 2000 to Oct, 2001 behavior)(my
campaign statement
when I successfully ran for Treasurer in 10/01, 9/02, 9/03, 9/04, 9/05 and
9/06, and successfully ran for Asst LocSec in 9/07, and for Treasurer in 9/08),
the Libertarian Party, and as such I supported
Harry Browne for President in
2000(Browne's
essay on the events of 9-11-01, their causes, and their aftermath.)[my
second choice was George W. Bush, who might have had the election stolen from
him the way
Kennedy's
supporters stole the Presidency from Nixon in 1960(looking back, I wish
Gore had won)]. In 2004, before the LP convention in May(May 27-31), I am supporting former
radio talk show host (now full time campaigner)
Gary Nolan, winner
of the
California LP primary, and the
Massachusetts,
Missouri, and Wisconsin LP primaries; I will, of course, support the LP
nominee; also running is Hollywood producer
Aaron Russo(here is his
IMDB entry, he's best known as
the producer of "The Rose" in 1979.), computer consultant
Michael Badnarik, who won on the 3rd
ballot*(an analysis of the LP convention by a Russo backer is
here; another
analysis critical of Russo from Reason Magazine
here), jazz
musician Jeff Diket, and !
Dave Hollist.
(Hollist on the
issues)(Hollist has really thought things out! I'd support him in an
instant!!)
*(Aaron Russo got the most votes on the first ballot; the second ballot was a
virtual tie between Russo(first), Badnarik(second), and Nolan third; Nolan then
withdrew and asked his supporters to vote for Badnarik.)
Actual vote totals by
ballot.
(I was impressed by Russo; I was hoping he would run again in 2008, but
unfortunately he died between elections. Before he died, Russo produced,
directed, wrote, and starred in America: Freedom to Fascism,
There is already, 2-2-05, an announced candidate for the 2008 Libertarian nomination, and he has a website up.....Jim Burns for President! Burns is from Las Vegas, Nevada.
Dave Hollist is also already in the 2008 race; here is his updated campaign
site:I'LL TRADE YOU.
Other organizations I belong to: Sigma Tau Gamma, my social fraternity when I was a student at WMU(Chi chapter)(elected Treasurer twice)(it's said there will soon be a Las Vegas Alumni chapter, and I will join that), the ACLU, the International Society for Individual Liberty, the American Humanist Association, the Humanist Association of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada, the Phoenix OS/2 Society, and Peacefire(although this is a teenagers' anti-censorware organization, they allow us older folks to join, but not as "full" members.), and the new in 2008 ,The Objectivist Party, which was on the ballot in two states.
My theory about Nixon becoming a "crook"
There is a link in the previous paragraph about the 1960 USA Presidential
election, where John Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon, possibly with the
illegitimate help of Richard Daley(died 1976), then Mayor of Chicago. Nixon
felt that he had won, but kept quiet for the good of the country. Could
brooding about this have produced the man who later had to resign the
Presidency to avoid impeachment and removal for his crimes?
SHAMEFUL ADMISSION, placed way down on the page where it won't be seen: I voted
for Nixon in 1968. I even had a "Nixon's the One" placard in the
window of my apartment at Married Housing at WMU. But I did NOT vote for Nixon
in 1972. And I NEVER voted for George W Bush!
Online services, good, bad, and OK
The best online service I've ever seen (well, I loved it, faults and all;
the problems had been fixed on a new version which was never released) was
called 
. Born
3-21-96, it was killed by its parents 1-31-97.
Bring Back WOW! is
an effort to do just that. CompuServe
is pretty good; they have FINALLY announced an unlimited price; $24.95.
Prodigy Internet, from what I've seen, is
also pretty good. The service I'd most like to avoid is America Online; see
www. For people who are not too fond of
AOL, there is an
AOL
SUCKS SUPERSITE!(I thought AOL was bad until I looked carefully at WebRing.
Dont click on any link to webring.com unless you LOVE pop-up ads.) A TV ad for
AOL (seen 3-9-98) contains this line, shown briefly, "Availability may be
limited, especially during peak hours". (Amusing note: WOW!, with its
problems attracted, and continues to attract, support pages, while the #1
online service attracts mostly aolsucks pages.)Please say it isn't true
Dept.: On 9-8-97, H&R Block sold CompuServe to WorldCom, which in turn
sold the online service part(ie. most) of CompuServe to AOL. Ugh! WorldCom kept
the CompuServe network, and got AOL's network subsidiary. I've been on CS since
1992, when I got a modem for my (then)8088-based computer, I was a member of
WOW! from CompuServe, then SpryNet(owned by CS) when WOW! was killed; but I
will move to Prodigy Internet when CompuServe and SpryNet are taken over by
AOL. My main HIV-AIDS page already exists on two other servers, so it will
continue there, and
there, without
interruption. I had seen myself as a "life member" of CompuServe, but
I will have nothing to do with AOL. (Note: SPRY, Inc. is such an incredibly
classy operation that I don't think even AOL can mess them up, so I have
decided to stick with SpryNet. Which worked out fine, as AOL has sold Sprynet
to MindSpring!)
My Favorite websites:
Unfortunately, most of my favorite sites are now defunct:
1. AppleKay's sites are all gone: her interest in computers replaced by the
chores of procreation.
2. All of the former homepages.go.com were deleted by Go.com without any
notification. (Most of these were former members.wbs.net homepages which had
all been transferred to the domain go.com after Go took over WBS.)
BUT, using archive.org, I was able to retrieve archived copies of SOME of these
missing favorites, and those URLs are used here
In addition to the now defunct
AppleKay's
Movie Cafe* and the sites for the organizations I belong to, there are (at
least) three other AppleKay Design projects, kayla.net,
NeonVox's homepage,
digital MINT,
her review of the movie
Goonies,
and HER FBI
Profile. Other favorites:
Berry's
homepage(Berry has deleted most of her excellent page, and invites those
who wish she hadn't to write her at: berrysweet1@hotmail.com),
DrvnMyNeon's (a/k/a Phoenix) homepage
Note to Drvn: I found a diskette with a copy of your old page, it even has the
Neon pic! I miss DrvnMyNeon.
, Charlotte's Web Page,
Ask ms-analysis!
"the Internet's answer to Dear Abby and Miss Manners", my ISP
Sprynet,
Netscape,
The
Sinister Sliding Stones Studies SIG, the Cat Fanciers' Association(CFA), and finally!
wolfeyes'
homepage. Plus some recent additions:
Yvonne's
homepage, and Vivien's homepage,
and Legacy's Page
My favorite website of all:
Sappy Love Songs; and
they actually play with Windows Media Player.
On 3/28/98, I came across this former WOW! writer's Master's thesis. It is a brilliant look at her hypertext writing and at the whole concept of writing for the Web: Kim Amaral's Graduate Thesis.
And......WOW Lives!
*This address leads to the most recent version still extant. If you ever saw AppleKay's Movie Cafe, and thought it was a really exceptional site, write kayla@hehe.com, and tell her so!
Pet peeves:(in no particular order)(Please note: a pet peeve is just a minor irritation; no big deal. I hope my favorite bird understands that.)
People who use "cyber" as a noun or verb meaning to talk about sex
or in a sexual manner online; people who display hypocrisy, dishonesty,
stupidity, or irrationality; web authors who put in links to non-existent
pages(you know who you are); web authors who write untrue statements intended
to have a psychological effect on some particular person, ignoring the
possibility that others will read and believe untruths; the UNIX operating
system, which is fine for AT&T but why do universities insist on using it,
and making students learn it?(These students were probably exposed to Apple
operating systems in high school, and will need to know Microsoft systems in
the real world.)(Compulsive honesty: I actually like
and am going to install several
variants of it, including Linux, and
FreeBSD on my computer.); the idea that
marriage MUST produce children; parents who overprotect their teenage children,
forbidding them to watch MTV or use Internet chat programs (if anybody wants to
get Powwow®, download it
here!)(sad news: the owner/operator of PowWow was taken over by
CMGI,
which killed PowWow 3-1-01); IRC room operators who use automated scripts to
give the impression that they are present and participating; people who start
things (the Save WOW! movement comes to mind) and sort of fade away;
people who have excellent web sites, run out of time to maintain them,
discontinue them, and then criticize others for doing the same thing; IRC room
operators who say things like "I have the Power", and use it to
"kick", meaning eject, those whose opinions they disagree with;
Geocities' obnoxious "Word from one of our sponsors" window, which
opens on every Geocities page and sub-page (this has been largely fixed by
Yahoo, which seems to be in control at Geocities)(Yahoo then replaced the
obnoxious ad for Geocities with obnoxious popup ads); Xoom's even more
obnoxious Xoombar, which is always onscreen and provides an absolute guarantee
that I will never get a "free homepage" there. Past peeve:
ICQ, which was a great idea but was slowly
collapsing under the weight of its users. ICQ probably never expected to be the
massive popular success it has become, and as a free service cannot upgrade its
system with user revenue. Confirmed: AOL has bought Mirabilis, parent company
of ICQ, 5/98.
My gripes with Microsoft:
Microsoft's unethical attempt to capture the web browser market by giving MS
Internet Explorer away free (Netscape responds, Jan, 1998, by offering to give
Communicator/Navigator away free, too.); Microsoft's alliance with various
online services, which must offer MSIE, exclusively, in their Windows95/98
version in exchange for getting their service's icon included with Win95/98.
Prodigy used to be really bad; if you closed MSIE you got disconnected
from Prodigy; the appearance of a website (www.zone.com) which offers software
that will not run on any version of Netscape, nor on any Apple or UNIX system,
but only with Win95/98 and version 3+ of MSIE; the MS FrontPage HTML editor,
which allows non-standard markup codes that are (surprise!) supported only by
MSIE, creating the illusion that MSIE is a superior browser; Microsoft deepens
the illusion by distributing non-standard, allegedly GIF, images which are only
recognized by MSIE; Prodigy's MSIE "hidden" cache folders. HINT: If
the user has Windows95/98, use the find command with the keyword cache. Once
found, go to "properties" and remove the checkmark from the
"hidden" box. These cache folders are in \Windows\Temporary Internet
Files, and will eventually take over a chunk of your hard drive if they are not
monitored. Catch: the next time you sign on to Prodigy, they get re-hidden, so
I wrote an unhide routine into my autoexec.bat:
attrib -h c:\windows\tempor~1\cache1 (repeat for cache2-cache4).
(Good news: Prodigy had published instructions on how to use Netscape as the
default browser, after long claims of "incompatibility", then said
you only had to use MSIE to sign up, then dropped the requirement entirely! I
was going to remove MSIE from my computer, but I will keep the relatively
non-intrusive version 3.02 for testing.); With the introduction of Windows98
Microsoft declared that MSIE was an "integral part of the Operating
System"!
I strongly object to the emerging, as I call it, IEonlyism, where websites and
various services can only be accessed with MSIE. (I wonder how much M$ pays
software vendors to include "You must have IE X.X installed to install
this software"?) If Microsoft gets a defacto browser monopoly and does not
support IE for systems other than Windows, the entire World Wide Web could
become "Windoze Only". Malicious hackers LOVE the Microsoft monopoly!
Malware need not be written for non Windows, non IE computers!
32-bit Windows users are only too familiar with the
Vulcan
Nerve Pinch, also called the "Microsoft Maneuver", but known best
as Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Anyone interested in Microsoft's practices might want to check out the
Boycott Micro$oft site. Business users
who are a little tired of Windows NT might want to see O'Reilly &
Associates' News
Focus: Microsoft. A "UNIX Geek" expresses his attitude toward
Microsoft
here.
And here is Microsoft Humor,
very lenghty! (An Internet friend who tried IE4, has this reaction to the
Active Desktop buttons that have appeared promoting IE, "no it gives you
an active headache...")
"Windows 95: Five years ago, corporate software giant, Microsoft, spent
millions of dollars, and put a team of hundreds of highly specialized
programmers on an extensive and highly ambitious project to find another name
for the Apple Menu." -- David R. Hendrickson
"Saying Windows 95 is equal to Macintosh is like finding a potato that
looks like Jesus and believing you've seen the Second Coming." -Guy
Kawasaki
--
I must admit, I have never owned, or even tried out, an Apple computer. For all
I know, they may be far superior to the Intel hardware/Microsoft Windows
computers that are dominant in the USA.
And finally, there is The International Anti-Microsoft Network!
Good News!!!
An attempt is being made to produce an OS that will run both Windows and Linux programs, called Lindows(now called Linspire, after Microsoft found some foreign countries that would declare "Lindows" a trademark or copyright violation). Now out of beta, its "Windows" support ends with Windows 3.1, like IBM's OS/2 Windows support does. More good news: An attempt is being made to get the Mac OS X to run on Intel, the OS would be called Rhapsody. (Apple did develop Rhapsody in the late 90s but never released it.)
Lest anyone think that I do not practice what I preach, in Oct
Nov Dec? '98 (actually Feb. '99), I will be replacing Windows95
on my computer with IBM's OS/2 4.0 32-bit
operating system. IBM's official claim is that OS/2 will run "most Windows
3.x applications", however, it will run Windows 95/98/NT applications if
the user installs "Win32s". Instructions on this can be found in
The Win32-OS/2 Project, now moved
and renamed The Odin Project.
My first try at installing OS/2 on 9/27/98 failed when my A drive crashed. After buying a fabulous new external diskette drive that will run the new 120MB diskettes as well as the old "legacy" 1.44MB type from Imation, on 10/17/98 I learned the hard way that the OS/2 install program expects you to have a working diskette drive A, and that good old bug ridden Windows95 does not make it easy to change drive designations, so for the moment I am still running Winblows. Then, on 10/24/98 I learned that if I had read the manual "Up and Running" that comes with OS/2, I would have found out the easy way about the "first 528MB" boot partition size limit on IDE hard drives! Getting a BIOS translation utility is required to access the area above this limit; I have ordered and installed the one mentioned in the manual, Ontrack Disk Manager. Unfortunately, the next try proved that buying a diskette drive without drivers, hoping the existing NEC drivers will be compatible, was not too bright. Luckily, I found a supplier that sells NEC diskette drives, so now, 11-27-98, I am waiting on WestCoast Computer Parts. Unfortunately, WestCoast is out of stock on this particular floppy, so I have ordered more 120MB SuperDisks, and will use Ontrack to designate the SuperDrive as Drive A.
12-2-98: In the Win32-OS/2 Project, above, the author advises that if you want to convert a Win32 app to OS/2, its best to install it under, say, Windows95 originally. Taking his advice, I have ordered a 10.1 GB Western Digital hard drive to house OS/2 on, and I will let Windows95 remain on my original little 750 MB hard drive. As 10.1 GB is a lot of space, I intend to partition it and install OS/2 in one half, and Linux in the other half! Linux is a free download, but I wanted backup, so I bought it on CD-ROM from Red Hat Software. The *three* CD-ROMs include X Windows, WordPerfect 8 for Linux, Netscape Communicator 4.06, the text editor Emacs, plus one whole CD-ROM contains the source code for the OS.
12-18-98: To install the new hard drive, I needed two little parts, which I got from pccables.com! Once again I had not read enough; this time it was my computer manufacturer's Upgrading and reconfiguring your computer, which insists that if you are going to install a hard drive they didn't make, you have to use their "mass storage rails kit". A net search turned up two places in Canada that might still have this part in stock. I had written to both, but finally found it at good old PC Cables & Parts (pccables.com). They seem to have everything!
12-29-98: And so they did! But once *again*, if I had read the manufacturer's manual, I would have known that the bays I was going to put an internal drive in were made for external drives! The screwholes I was sure would be in there were not once I took off the casing and looked. Duh! Maybe it will fit in the floppy drive bay.
Consumer Alert: If you want an operating system that just installs easily without too much thought, you want Microsoft® Windows®. But if you really love computers, and like thinking and challenges, and want to learn a lot about hardware and software, you will love OS/2.
On 12-30-98 I experienced what every computer owner has heard about, but
which I didn't expect to happen to ME. The IDE hard drive controller in my
machine can only support some limited drive capacity, and 10.1GB was way over
the limit. I fried my original hard drive as well as the 10.1GB one. After
several service calls, my poor computer went into the shop for a replacement
motherboard and CD-ROM drive. I replaced all of the other moving working parts
myself. The service tech told me that my configuration would support four IDE
devices, with the maximum hard drive size being less than 4GB, so I got three
Seagate3+ GB hard drives, and on 2-18-99
I installed OS/2 on one of them. Having had a LOT of time offline to think
about it, I decided to install some other operating systems as well. On the day
I finally got my OS/2, I also installed BeOS
4.0. I have installed DR.-DOS, which
takes up where MS-DOS ended, and restored Win95 on 4-23-99. Future
installations will be: FreeBSD 3.0,
Solaris 7,
RedHat Linux 5.2,
Slackware Linux 3.5 ,OpenBSD 2.5 and Windows 3.1(for old times
sake), for a total of 10 OS, with two slots open. I will probably get
Windows2000 if Bill Gates keeps his word and Win98 is his last OS based on
MS-DOS. And he has! Anyone interested can get
Windows 2000 now! (There
are discounts to bona-fide purchasers of Windows NT 3.51 or 4.0.) Windows 2000
has these system requirements: 166MHz Pentium or higher, 32 MB of RAM with 64
MB recommended, 2 GB hard disk with 650 MB free. (I was a beta tester for
Windows 2000 and can verify that Microsoft really does test its' products
before releasing them! Who would have thought?)
DISCLAIMER: I have installed and run Windows 2000 beta 3, and now the
regular production version, and it does have MS-DOS in it, it is just called
"command prompt", and appears under "Accessories". The good
old DOS commands are there; missing now is the old backup command, which with
restore was moved to Windows, under Accessories, System Tools.
10-27-08: I'm still running Windows 2000 Professional; I skipped XP and have
heard nothing but bad news about Vista
4-14-09: Earlier this year I got a new laptop that was supposed to come with
Vista, but all it had was Linux and a blank Win32 partition. I did NOT
complain, just bought a copy of XP, formatted the whole hard drive, and
installed XP, which is a very good OS. Not everything Microsoft does is crap!
Slight change of plans: I have become quite fond of OS/2, after running 4.0 on my desktop. Through a service called Warpcast, I found out about eBay auctions, and ended up bidding on OS/2 Warp 3, Warp 3 Connect, OS/2 2.1, and OS/2 1.2! I plan to run them all, sacrificing a few of the BSD and Linux versions to get space.
System Disaster II
7-11-01: I had also got, on eBay, Windows NT 3.1. Installing it on my Drive #1, where MS systems have to go, corrupted Windows 98, which was listed as "unformatted". To reinstall W98 I had to format the partition, losing everything! Bummer!!! I had not backed up my saved e-mail or my MP3 files. NT 3.1 was the first of the NT series, and had no support for IDE CD-ROMs, so the installation was done with the vast number of diskettes, and failed during the first restart, after about 7 diskettes, when it encountered my boot manager, System Commander Deluxe, from V Communications. I suspect it would have installed correctly if I had followed the SysCommDeluxe instructions on adding OSs!
Slight change of plans #2: I have discovered
CP/M
, the first microcomputer operating system, written by the late
Dr. Gary Kildall.
(8-bit)CP/M was ported to a 16-bit system called
QDOS, the rights to which were
bought by Bill Gates and licensed to IBM for use in the first IBM PC. Gary
Kildall's company, Digital Research, developed CP/M-86, which was also shipped
with the first IBM PC, but at a
much higher price($250)
than DOS($40) . Another high priced OS,
UCSD
P-System, also was shipped. I plan to run 1.CP/M-86 1.1 in my
computer, along with 2-5. OS/2, all 4 major revisions, 6.
DR-DOS 7.02, 7. Win95, 8. WinNT 4.0, 9. Win
3.1, 10. FreeBSD 4.0, 11.
Caldera Linux 3.1,
12, Solaris 8, 13-15. BeOS
5.0 (unfortunately Be, Inc. has gone under, that story
here, so in sadness
I will also run 4.0 and 4.5) and 16. Micro
C/OS 2.03, 17.OS-9, plus now
that it is out on CD-ROM, 18. QNX!!
Idea: I am an OS junkie; my computer has a (limited) secondary controller, and I have another hard drive, so add 19. NetBSD 1.5, 20. OpenBSD 2.5, and two small UNIX-like teaching systems: 21. Minix, and 22. Xinu. And finally, 23. Windows 3.11, 24. Plan 9 (Plan 9 is Bell Lab's update of UNIX.), 25. eComStation (eComStation is Serenity System's update of OS/2 4.0.) I will use the secondary controller for old systems that do not use long filenames.
Additions!
Somehow I will also fit in 26. Debian Linux 2.2r2
Subtractions:
I realized that the above scheme was overambitious! So I got a second computer, a Sun Blade 100, with an UltraSPARC processor instead of an Intel one. I can run Solaris 8, Debian Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD , and QNX there, after I find something like Partition Magic (probably GNU Parted) for SPARC, plus I will discard the two small UNIX like teaching systems=8 subtractions so far; PLUS Uc/os, which can run within Linux=9, leaving a manageable 15 OS in the Intel computer; also adding the now defunct NewDeal(GeOS, graphical, runnable from within Windows95.)
Things that annoy me:
People who use false names online to imply that they are the opposite of
their real sex; people who borrow money, promise up and down to pay it back,
and then default; a good friend who borrows money, consistently making
repayments until she makes me beneficiary on a life insurance policy. BUT, she
is only two years older than I, which means that statistically she should
outlive me. Chances of collection: slim; IRC system administrators who ban an
entire domain for the sins of one user; male sexual predators whose actions
convince females that the phrase, "men only care about one thing", is
true; censorware like Cyber Patrol, which was probably written to block kids'
access to porn sites but has greatly expanded to block things like Planned
Parenthood. A group of teenagers has organized
to protest this nonsense. (A member of Peacefire says that
as bad as Cyber Patrol is, a censorware program called CYBERsitter is even more
restrictive.); males whose idea of marital commitment ends with the wife's
menopause; females who abandon sex after menopause without trying estrogen
therapy, who have no medical reason not to try estrogen.
Women I have loved: (in order)
The saddest part about this section is that I have loved, with the exceptions of my ex-wife, Joyce, and my ex-fiancee, mostly smokers, who in shortening their lives have probably shortened mine.
Confession: As strange as it seems, my former wife was the first woman I
dated. (I was asked out by a girl in the eighth grade, but the event was
cancelled. It took me a long time to figure out that I was not actually
irresistible!!) From dating her we progressed to marriage; as a consequence I
never *really* developed what I call "opposite sex skills".
NOTE: "If the girl you want to commit your life to is the first girl
you've ever dated and/or slept with, do NOT fucking marry her. You're a
brainless idiot for even considering it." -Copied from
Reasons
not to get married.. *I* did this, with a woman my age. Just because women
are emotionally mature enough to decide to get married in their teens, does not
mean that men are! I wasn't. Now, 8 years of marriage + a crappy divorce + 25
years of living alone(well, during the 25 yrs I was engaged once and spent more
nights at her house than at mine) + 5 years of living with a hopelessly
irrational compulsive gambler, I am mature enough to try it again,
maybe, or maybe not.....I have always liked women my own age.....by now,
a single woman my age has probably already been married, produced offspring,
divorced, and may even have grand offspring. Unless I am VERY lucky, her
biological spawn, and their spawn, will probably come first, while second
husband comes (a distant) second. (I was once engaged to a woman who actually
said that having a child was the only worthwhile thing she had done with her
life. Very sad; pathetic, even. Luckily, she dumped me when she didn't
need my financial backing anymore.)
(Note: almost without exception, these women fall into the "brilliant
woman" category.) Linda, my first crush, I
haven't seen her since 1966 but I've never forgotten her. My ex-wife, I
will never forget her either, she was the best thing that ever happened to me.
(I'm not a masochist; I would never have married her if I had known her
idea of a lifelong commitment was 8 years if I failed to impregnate her.),
Joyce, she
showed me how to love after a failed marriage. Julie, she never knew how much I
loved her. Karen, my
ex-fiance and the great post-divorce love of my life. Deanna, a long-distance
love is better than none at all. (Deanna is also the person who
"borrowed" over $10,000, bought a life insurance policy with me as
beneficiary, stopped repayments, and then was "wounded and abused"
when I refused to "loan" her more money!)(and then was forced to stop
paying on the life insurance policy!!)(Outrage: Deanna suffered a
career-ending injury on the job, as a Special Education teacher in
California, and the Social Security Administration was dragging its feet in
deciding her claim to Social Security Disability. She was living in an
abandoned car! Luckily, one of her old flames was there for her: thanks, Al.)
Eve, yes, I still love you today. (Eve is a Rare Gem: I should never have lost
contact with her.) Finally, there is Anonymous, probably the second most
brilliant woman I have ever met. And now there is ANOnymous, definately the
most brilliant woman I have ever met.
(Unfortunately, though brilliant, ANOnymous is not Independent. Although she
states an explicit belief in female superiority, she is addicted to male
financial support to sustain her non-working, extravagant lifestyle.)
(On the subject of brilliant women, there is another I should mention. While I
was working for WMU, there was a remarkable
woman who worked as student help in Accounts Receivable. Her father was
Director of Registration at the time, was Roman Catholic, and had twelve
children! I met some of her siblings over the years, and all were above average
intelligence, but this woman had a brain that came along very
occasionally. Now married, I fear she will follow in her mother's
footsteps, and that her exceptional mind will be dulled by the mind numbing
chores of large family motherhood. Pity.)
Mightabeens: practically any unmarried female member in my age group of WMiM or
SNvM! And my #1 Mightabeen of all time, Donna, a brilliant woman who
unfortunately was both a born again Christian and a Mom.....I've got nothing
against born again Christians as long as they are brilliant and can accept that
converting me is beyond their ability, but mothers of small children I must
live without.
(Honesty check: OK, it is possible to love a married woman, and I do, but doing
anything with her that would violate her marriage vows is out.) (For me, that
is. In a free country, what you do is up to you; neither I nor the government
have any business in your bedroom.)
Two women I had a mad crush on in 7th grade (Norup Jr High School)
Lynn Levin and Jill Josephson (I'm not sure about Jill's last name): These were two of the most intelligent women I ever met; they should both have had very successful lives. As my parents moved to another city after my 7th grade, I never saw either again.
Actually, the most wonderful woman I ever met was my ex-wife. She
was very honest and decent and very intelligent, but unfortunately she met Mr.
Right AFTER she married me. Oh well,
live
and learn........
I do not believe in Internet relationships, but I did meet a woman through
ICQ first, then in real life, who I love who I used to live with
, named Hillary(also a
member of Mensa) , pictured below, also her cat PK, and my cat Cleopatra (Cleo
is a tough dark brown tabby, PK is a longhaired orange tabby).
I love cats; once when I was married I had a show quality seal point Balinese and four "regular" housecats; I believe that cats are far more intelligent and independent than dogs. (PLUS, they know how to use the kitty litter box!!)(You can actually leave them alone for a weekend without having to worry about coming home to a mess.)
Hillary's philosophy of money:
1. All money not needed for bare subsistence belongs to casino owners.
2. Any excess money must be turned over to casino owners through a procedure
called "gambling".
3. Anyone who selfishly hoards excess money should be relieved of it so it can
be restored to its' rightful owners.
Hillary's Philosophy of Money is a version of the general "Whats mine
is mine, whats yours is ours" idea:
Deanna's (and my ex-wife's) Philosophy of Money:
1. All money belonging to men belongs to women.
2. Men who selfishly hoard money should "loan" it to women.
3. Women need not repay "loans". Women are
Princesses and
need not return what was always rightfully theirs. Men exist to serve women,
after all.
4. A "Deanna" is morally superior to a "Hillary".
CONSCIOUS CONTACT: BRAIN, MIND AND ADDICTION (explains the biological and psychological nature of addiction).
A great place to flush other peoples' money down the toilet in Las Vegas is
Charlies Outhouse!
If you run out of other peoples' money, get one of them to give you a credit
card with your name and their acct number, and take IT to
The Golden Outhouse.
Now, if
A. Casino owners know that some percentage of their customers are compulsive
gamblers, and
B. They also know that some percentage of compulsive gamblers steal or
otherwise use illegal activities to finance their gambling, and given that
C. It is illegal to knowingly receive and use stolen property.
D. Are casino owners guility of aiding and encouraging illegal behavior by
compulsive gamblers?
E. Are casino owners guilty of knowingly receiving stolen property?
Of course, not all gamblers become compulsive gamblers! The Responsible Gambling Council has a page called Responsible Gambling Tips which shows how non-addicts CAN gamble for fun.
There is some hope for the Hillarys of Nevada. The Nevada Gaming Commission has its Regulation 5.170 , which enables problem gamblers to (in a lucid moment) "self-limit" themselves at a casino by adding themselves to a list of people to be denied essential gambling services like check cashing.
Gamblers! Join Hillary in her one-person No millionaire casino owner left behind program!
For years after being divorced, I looked for that "right woman". I had found her, but like the other times I thought I had, it did not last. I now seriously believe that I met the "right woman" quite by chance, and she dumped me! (Note: One woman I have met post-divorce that I might marry now has made me promise never to ask!)(Another had declared that she would never get married again!! She was hoping to outlive her ex-husband and collect on his Social Security, but you can't collect if you remarry.)
Things I am SICK of:
I am sick to death of lying, hypocritical people:
1. Women who say "in sickness and in health", "for better, for
worse", "until death do us part", etc. and really only mean
"in health" and "for better" and "until someone else
comes along". Liars!
2. Women who say "if you loan me $1,000, I will pay you back." Liars!
3. Women who say "I'm the most virgin virgin you have ever met."
Liars!
4. People who say we have freedom to practice our religion in the USA, but add,
"unless you are an elected public officeholder, like
former Alabama Chief Justice
Roy Moore." Hypocrites! (Come on, folks, displaying the Ten
Commandments is not an establisment of religion, or a symbol of Christianity
as a State Religion. The Ten Commandments were given to Moses, as leader of
the Jews on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land: there have even been
those who maintain that the Ten Commandments are not binding on Christians, an
idea that was condemned by the Roman Catholic Council of Trent,
session VI, canon
19. And why is it bad to have this display at the Alabama Supreme Court,
but perfectly acceptable to have the
Ten Commandments in the US Supreme
Court? )
4. MakeBelieveChristians* who pretend that their "Word of God" only
applies to OTHER people. Hypocrites!
*MakeBelieve, LetsPretend Christians go to church every Sunday, give money to
the Church, go through all the "correct" motions, but never read what
their Jesus said, "And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things
which I say?" (Luke
6:46, KJV)(If you dont like the archaic KJV phrasing, here is the same
verse in
three
modern versions.)(For Roman Catholics,
here is Luke 6 in the
Douay-Rheims version on a Catholic website .) Yes, yes, for a nonreligious
person I DO know a lot about what it says in the Bible. I just don't understand
how someone can think that Jesus was God, and think that the words of Jesus are
accurately recorded in the Holy Bible, and then just ignore what Jesus said.
Its MakeBelieve and LetsPretend, games usually played by small children.
Military stupidity:
This paragraph was inspired by the History Channel's "Great
Blunders in History" series:
Gallipoli,
a WW1 attempt by the British and Australians to capture a location defended by
a far superior Turkish force.
MORE STUPIDITY TO COME! (Actually, looking for military stupidity is like
looking for green grass: there is so much of it it's easy to find!)(Obvious
stupidity: the German invasion of the Soviet Union in WW2; the Germans grossly
underestimating the effect of the Russian Winter, and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor; the Japanese grossly underestimating the effect of Air Power and
Aircraft Carriers.)(They thought Battleships would be decisive.)
Anyone who has read through this whole web page might also like: 714 Things to Be Cynical About! (Yes, I have read them all; there is great wisdom in this list.)
Rev. 6/30/09