Adventure is worthwhile - Aesop

Decline of Western Civilization

Monday, June 14, 2004

And the award for Self-Perpetuating Southern Redneck Stereotype goes to…

The state is posting billboards with messages such as “Isn’t she a little young?” as part of a campaign to dissuade men from having sex with underage girls.

The campaign is aimed at reducing the number of young girls who have children with older men, the Virginia Department of Health said Monday.

In 1999 and 2000 in Virginia, men over 18 were responsible for 219 births involving girls who were 13 and 14, the department said.

Messages such as “Isn’t she a little young?” and “Sex with a minor, don’t go there” also appear on posters, coasters and napkins in bars, restaurants and stores in five cities.

Inspired by Virginia’s program, Mississippi has announced plans for a similar campaign, “Isn’t she a little related to you?”

Saturday, June 12, 2004

I never cease to be amazed by religious people.

Some of the jurors who voted to spare Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols the death penalty did so because they felt sorry for him, another juror who supported the death penalty told CNN Saturday.

Cecil Bill Reeder said the deliberations were “very emotional,” but in the end, he didn’t feel justice was served.

The former civil service employee, who retired from the local Army munitions plant, said he wanted to “apologize to the victims’ families for not getting justice for their loved ones.”

The jury convicted Nichols on 161 counts of murder for his role in the April 19, 1995, bombing but could not reach the required unanimous decision on whether he should be sentenced to death. Seven voted for execution and five voted against.

“They thought he could do some good in prison because he found religion,” juror Reeder said.

I know there are a number of religious people who read this blog regularly.  I’m not being facetious here, can someone explain this logic to me?  Assuming his newfound religion is legitimate, and not a ploy designed to spare his life, what possible use could this man be in prison?  And even if he could “do some good,” how is this a greater concern than punishment for his crimes and justice for the families of his victims?  I just don’t get it.

Friday, June 04, 2004

And the fatassification of America charges on.

A private emergency medical service plans to begin using an ambulance designed specifically to carry people who weigh 350 pounds or more.

When Jerry Key of American Medical Response began his career more than 30 years ago, he rarely dealt with patients weighing more than 500 pounds, he said.

These days, it is not unusual for the company to transport two or three patients a month who weigh up to 800 pounds, said Key, AMR’s vice president of operations.

Not only is it difficult, it can be dangerous to use a standard stretcher for severely obese patients, he said. Their weight can easily shift, causing the stretcher to tip over and injure patients or staff, he said.

Obese patients are often carried to the ambulance on a large tarp and loaded in without being secured inside the vehicle.

“Think of taking a person who is really large, putting them on a tarp and dragging them onto the floor of an ambulance and now driving down the road. How safe is that?” Key said. “There’s no dignity in that at all.”

Perhaps if the rest of society didn’t best over backwards to accommodate the lifestyle of people who choose to balloon up to 800 lb. these types of ambulances wouldn’t be necessary.

Thursday, June 03, 2004

Because of the move to LA and everything else going on in my life I didn’t get an opportunity to blog on Bill Cosby’s recent comments at an NAACP dinner.  Fortunately others did, and Matt Rosenberg has a great column in today’s NRO giving a blogospheric roundup.  Be sure and check it out.

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

And the latest example of American school violence comes to you from Japan.

An 11-year-old girl slashed a female classmate to death with a box-cutter Tuesday in a shocking attack in an elementary school in southern Japan, police said.

The lunchtime assault happened in a classroom in Sasebo, 650 miles southwest to Tokyo, an official with the Nagasaki Prefectural police said on condition of anonymity.

Police in Sasebo said the victim suffered wounds to the neck and arms. She was slashed by a retractable knife used to cut paper and boxes, police said.

Murder in high school with a box cutter.  Japanese kids are just emulating their violent American peers!

Increasing violence in Japan’s schools and among youth has been a rising concern in recent years.

Not here in the violent cesspool of America where, despite our guns and our death penalty, violent crime rates have been dropping.

Sunday, May 30, 2004

Perhaps it’s just due to everything that went on with my dad recently, but this story really boiled my blood.

A hospital was fined $18,000 Friday because a doctor exaggerated the severity of some patients’ conditions to move them up on the heart transplant waiting list.

The New York Health Department cited Albany Medical Center Hospital for nine violations and accused a physician of submitting inaccurate information to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which runs the nation’s transplant system under a federal contract.

Inspectors comparing medical charts and information sent to the transplant network found that in five cases, the hospital falsely reported that the patients would die within a week without a heart transplant.

The investigation came after a routine audit last year by the network found record-keeping discrepancies for the majority of 45 patients listed as most critically in need of a new heart. The state investigation concurred with the network’s report.

“The pride and the drive for success took over common sense,” said state Health Commissioner Antonia Novello, adding that the hospital lacked oversight on the program’s record-keeping.

I’m not a very litigious person, but if I was the surviving family members of someone who was on the transplant list during this time period and died waiting for a heart, I’d be calling a lawyer.  The reason the transplant list exists is so that doctors can perform triage on patients and determine which ones truly need the donor heart before the others.  These doctors, either for personal gratification or glorification, lied to get their patients further up on the list than they deserved, the end result of which is that a more deserving patient died.

Simply disgusting.  These doctors should have their medical licenses revoked.

We Americans are ignorant, obese, gluttonous pigs.  So says countries that refuse to look in the mirror.

Childhood obesity is a global crisis, says a report released on Friday by a group of researchers called the International Obesity Taskforce. It says 10 per cent (155 million) of the world’s school-age children are overweight and 2-3 per cent of those are obese. One graph shows that the prevalence of overweight and obese 10-year-olds in Australia is approaching 30 per cent, placing us fifth in the world after Malta, Italy, the US and Chile, with the problem worse in boys than girls.

The figures accord with a 2002 report by the NSW Childhood Obesity Secretariat which found that more than one in five children here is overweight and getting fatter at a rate higher than almost anywhere else in the world.

The number of obese Australian children more than tripled between 1985 and 1995. Dubbed Generation O, they’re condemned to diabetes, premature puberty, gallstones, sleep apnoea, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and ridiculously premature death. A Royal Prince Alfred Hospital study published last month found overweight children as young as nine were at risk of heart attack and stroke from diseased arteries and blood vessels. The arteries of some overweight children had thickened as much as those of heavy adult smokers.

Smug Sydneysiders like to tell stories about the grossly fat Americans they have seen on their travels who take up two seats on planes, need reinforced toilet seats and eat super size fries and two hot dogs at once. But we are just as bad.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, obesity is a byproduct of wealth, ease, and luxury.  It is natural for humans to be lazy, and when you have the finances available to you to do so you can be as lazy as you like.  Why go out on the weekends and to backbreaking yard work when you can hire a bunch of illegals to do it for you for dirt cheap?  Why go out and participate in sports when you can sit at home and watch 14 different sports all at the same time?  Why take the hard life when you can take the easy one?

Obesity is a function of opulence, and America is the world’s most opulent society.  We have more wealth than anyone else, so it makes sense that this obesity problem would strike here first.  But the rest of the world’s wealthy societies—the UK, Europe, Australia, etc.—are not far behind us, and you’re starting to see them suffer from exactly the same problems. 

But, of course, it’s much easier to simply point fingers at lard-assed Americans and laugh, isn’t it?

Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Let’s talk about double standards.

A woman has no parental rights over the twins she was raising with her lesbian partner - even though she is the childrens’ genetic mother, an appeals court ruled.

Upholding a lower court ruling, the 1st District Court of Appeal decided only the woman’s partner - who gave birth to the twins after artificial insemination with eggs provided by her lover - has full parental rights.

The court said though the genetic mother was a loving, at-home parent, “functioning as a parent does not bestow legal status as a parent.”

“An adoption decree would provide objective, formalized proof of the parties’ parentage intentions,” the court said.

The case is expected to be appealed to the California Supreme Court, but underscores that laws dealing with parental rights for gay or lesbian couples are largely unmapped territory.

The woman suing for parental rights - identified in court papers as K.M. - never sought to adopt the now-8-year-old twins, who live with their birth mother in Massachusetts. Her attorney, Jill Hersh, said her client “didn’t adopt because she was the biological mother. She didn’t think she had to.

“The legal system hasn’t caught up with the modern-day facts of this case,” Hersch said.

Let’s compare and contrast this with the male world.  Say I go to a bar, get drunk, and end up impregnating the local bar skank outside behind the dumpster.  Then, ten years later, she comes and finds me and tells me I have a son.  I am immediately liable for child support and all that good stuff simply by virtue of the child having my genetics.  In the case with the women, we have a mother with genetics in the child being denied support because she didn’t specifically adopt the kid.  What is the difference here?  This isn’t a gay marriage issue, because paternity is not dependent on there being any kind of married union.

If functioning as a parent does not bestow legal parent status, then how does simply squirting your load inside a gal get legal parent status bestowed on you years later?  I agree, this is an area where case law is woefully inadequate, and the California legislature needs to enact some kind of legal framework to deal with these issues.

Sunday, May 09, 2004

Here’s the latest example of the Catholic Church standing up to do the right thing.

A judge Wednesday rejected a Roman Catholic diocese’s claim that the constitutional separation of church and state bars it from being sued for allegedly failing to stop sexually abusive priests.

The Altoona-Johnstown Diocese had argued that judicial second-guessing of how bishops hire, fire, assign or discipline priests would infringe on the church’s freedom of religion.

Blair County Judge Hiram Carpenter disagreed, ruling that lawsuits filed by alleged victims of sexual abuse involve “not an attack on the freedom to believe, but rather an attack on the freedom to act contrary to the laws of the commonwealth.”

Someone needs to send these priests a copy of the Bible, because they damn sure don’t seem to have read it recently.  What an absolutely despicable argument to make.  Keeping molester priests in power and away from the law is a church and state issue?  That’s simply disgusting.

The next time one of the old farts on the Supreme Court feels like bugging out of there, I have the perfect replacement for him.

A couple has been ordered not to conceive any more children until the ones they already have are no longer in foster care.

A civil liberties advocate said the court ruling unsealed Friday was “blatantly unconstitutional.”

Monroe County Family Court Judge Marilyn O’Connor ruled March 31 that both parents “should not have yet another child which must be cared for at public expense.”

“The facts of this case and the reality of parenthood cry out for family planning education,” she ruled. “This court believes the constitutional right to have children is overcome when society must bear the financial and everyday burden of care.”

Halla-fucking-lujah!  Someone has just, with this ruling, actually introduced the revolutionary notion that parents who cannot afford to have kids should not be permitted to have any more until they can take care of them.  See, most normal people make a conscious decision not to have a kid until the family situation is appropriate for it.  And for those who do not make that decision and end up with a whole litter of whelping pups suckling at the ample government teat, this court decision is directed right at you.  And guess who isn’t happy with the decision.

I don’t know of any precedent that would permit a judge to do this,” Anna Schissel, staff attorney for the Reproductive Rights Project of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester. “And even if there were a precedent, it would be blatantly unconstitutional because it violates the United States Constitution and the New York Constitution.”

Neither parent attended the proceeding or secured legal representation. The mother waived her right to a lawyer, and the father never showed up in court.

How is this unconstitutional.  They can’t have any more kids until they can take care of the ones they have.  Exactly what is the problem here?

Friday, May 07, 2004

I was just on Yahoo browsing through the movie reviews for the new flick Van Helsing, when I came across this review written by a kid who had seen the film.  If you want to know why Western Civilization is doomed, just read.

MAN>>>DAH BEST~!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
by hunkman692000 (movies profile) May 7, 2004
9 of 20 people found this review helpful

1st of all......thiz movie rocked rocked rocked....to those who hates the movie...juz stop right ther...ok let me start...for thiz kind of movies therz alwayz 2 kind of ppl who wacthes it...Group A and Group B...lets start wit Group A..group A are those who don know anything bout vampires...dracula dr.jackle n’ mrhyde not frankestine....when they see thiz movie its nothing more then a action movie....visual effectz n stuff...bla bla lada lada lada...they ckeck out the gurl...they talk bout the gadjetz n stuff....im sure 98% of thiz group would have enjoyed the last scene wher the wearwolf n dracula fightz...for them they don see how we see it...(btw im in Group B...DOH).....ok.lets go 2 Group B>>> when we see the movie....we see all the ppl come 2 life....for xzample....the scene wher they showed Paris...wat went tru my mind waz...Dr.jackle n mr.hyde...coz therz the place he runz 2 from london....but most of us might have made a mistake when the showed the dead women on the streetz....1st i tot it waz Jack The Ripper...see..atz wat im tokin bout,......by knowing all thiz stuff...it makes Group B enjoy thiz movie in dat kind...n the story waz gr8...somthing new for us....the twist waz when the dracula callz helsing as Gabriel...as u all know....gabriel iz god left hand.....so heer it iz....the best movie of all time...i loved it...n im goin 2 watch it again 2day wit my buddies....

Just think, folks.  When we’re old and retired this kid and those like him are going to be running the world. 

Friday, April 30, 2004

I don’t know about you guys but I get a TON of porno spam.  Probably a third of all the email I get is spam, and most of that is for one perversion or another.  Normally it gets picked up by the spam filter, but quite a bit still ends up in my mailbox.

The latest thing seems to be women gagging while giving head.  Like, the guy shoves his tool so far down her throat that it actually triggers her gag reflex and she chokes.  Now I like good dirty porno as much as anyone else, but this is really disturbing.  It’s completely degrading, almost in a rape fantasy sort of way. 

Can someone explain the appeal of this to me?

The title of this article, Woman Allegedly Exposes Breasts on Stage, seemed intriguing.  (How do you “allegedly” bare your breatst in front of a crowd full of people.) But the details are what make it great.

A woman has been charged with trespassing after allegedly exposing her breasts at a North Idaho College student concert.

Mary Ellen Bartee, 51, allegedly lifted her shirt and exposed her breasts on the concert stage at the Student Union Building on Wednesday at the end of the concert by the band Raining Jane.

Police were summoned, and only intended to remove her from campus.

“But when she said she was not going to leave and I would have to arrest her and take her to ail,” officer Brian Brumbaugh says he did just that.

“I should have been arrested for indecent exposure,” Bartee told a judge during her court appearance Thursday, when she pleaded innocent to trespassing. A jury trial will be scheduled.

51 and flashing her boobies?  My God.  A woman’s breasts at 51 look like a sweat sock with a tennis ball in the bottom of it.  They should have charged her for a crime against humanity.

Thursday, April 29, 2004

Americans are so fat that entire specialty industries have sprung up to take advantage of this ever-expanding market.  (See here.) Well, meet the latest product aimed at the rotund.

There are big bucks in big thongs.

Retailer Torrid is carving out a niche that fits – in the plus-sized market.

The company sells sexy clothes for large young women in more than 50 stores across the country. The Wall Street Journal reports Torrid has everything from camisole-and-thong lingerie sets to belly-button revealing T-shirts.

CEO Betsy McLaughlin says her customers want to be sexy and feminine – in sizes from 12-to-26.

I shudder at the thought.  It reminds me of that scene from Shallow Hal where the fat Gwynneth Paltrow character throws that huge purple thong onto Jack Black.  Being a formerly hugely obese person myself, I wish that people were more motivated to take care of their obesity problem, rather than seek out solutions to work around it.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

The University of the Incarnate Word, which by its name I am assuming to be a Christian school of some kind, has created a Mascot Task Force to explore whether to change the name of its mascot from the Crusaders to something else.  The task force has recommended that they do so.  Their explanation is pretty detailed, but it can be summed up in this one paragraph.

[T]he mascot that we have now needs to be changed to something more culturally sensitive.

Why? One, the Crusades were nothing to be proud of. Two, the history of the mascot at UIW is not very old. Three, we must lead the way when it comes to reaching out to our global community. We must remove impediments that could muffle our effectiveness in a post-9/11 world. Four, in a litigious society, it would be wise for us to be sensitive to those who may feel harassed by our current mascot. Finally, the cost of change is not as costly as remaining rooted in the status quo.

Out of all these considerations, which one do you think pulls the most weight?  The litigious society.  They can dress it up all they want, but they’re afraid of being sued by some uppity Muslim, and they’re caving in just like Spain.