Right to Die

I’m not quite sure where to stand on the Right to Die (euthanasia) issue. Should a severally suffering individual be allowed to commit suicide with their doctor’s assistance? Should there be a ban on medically assisted suicides?
I was first exposed to the debate about euthanasia in discussions about such matters with my mother when I was growing up. Later in a high school class where the topic came up, I believed that suicide itself was wrong, but I believed in the right of an individual choose for themself. One thang I’m not sure I was clear on was whether euthanasia is the same as suicide.
These days, my opinion is still pretty much the same in context, but the reasoning is much clearer. Of course, this makes it harder to know where to stand exactly on the issue. In principle, I believe that the individual has the right to determine their own life. But morally, I know that killing one’s self is wrong. Violence is allowed to defend one’s own life or the lives of loved ones, but it is not allowed to take one’s own life. Whether in mercy or in despair or in cruelty, one should not act in such a way against themself.
However, under rule of law, the right of the individual to any choices about themself is important to keeping the government from intruding in the lives of its citizens. The principle of keeping the government out of our lives is just as important because so many other morally correct doctrines can be threatened with too much control given to the authorities. If the government is given the right to tell an individual they cannot control when they die, the door may be opened to forcing unnatural methods to keeping people alive well beyond what nature intended.
Does the Right to Die only mean euthanasia, or does it include the right to refuse medical care that may or may not prevent the onset of a life threatening condition? That creates a pretty damn big gray area that brings the whole question of Right to Die into a state of confusion.
Then there’s the biggest problem with euthanasia. How can the government protect its citizens from being victimized by impatient relatives that may have motives for pursuing euthanasia upon their “loved one”? Even with the concept of keeping an intrusive government out of our lives in mind, it’s hard to justify allowing the possibility of such a scenario.
So, for me, right now, I think the best course of action is to not allow euthanasia. However, I think allowing the person to control what treatments they receive (or not) should be protected. This means a person (or that person’s immediate family, with the spouse having the second say, then if no spouse, the parents to have the third say) has the right to determine whether or not to be kept alive by machine, drugs or other treatment, but that the person may not choose to take the actual action to kill themself. Removing life support is OK because it is letting nature take its course. Euthanasia is not OK because it is a violent unnatural action that ends a life before its time.

Sponge know not

Recent myspace.com exchange about labelling sponges (almost realtime to the actual events):

Ok, just to finish this story (see below), Mia literally labelled her new cleaning sponges with the words "Kitchen" and "Bathroom" with a felt tip pen. Ok, so this is like psycho for two reasons. First, SHE LABELLED HER SPONGES WITH A FELT TIP PEN! Second, the germs are killed off by whatever chemicals being used. Trust me, she's having the cleaning people use some pretty toxic products! ::cough:: As long as these sponges aren't being used more than once, there's not going to be any germ or grime issues between the bathroom and kitchen.
And this "special attention" list she left for the cleaners had more hmphadumpfs than actual words, so she had to rewrite it, but she still mentioned mcp's a couple of times! Don't know what I'm talking about? Then it's a pretty good bet the cleaners won't know either. hehe

Sweet dreams my very clean mia

Ya'no the funny thang? I know someone else is going to read this exchange and think to themself that labelling sponges is a great idea and start doing it too! LOL

Here's Miriam's myspace.com original post:

"Ok so the cleaning people are coming tomorrow..They are really good at cleaning...the best help I think... but seriously anyone that knows me knows that cleaning my house was my hobby...im portugues...thats what us portugue women do...but I digress.... So I am making my "SPECIAL ATTENTION" list for the week.... even though they are good cleaning people they still require some guidance...AGain cleaning my house was my hobby so yeah I am anal...

Anywho so I am making my list and then I remembered... I have new sponges... So since they all look alike I labeled them.. One baths and the other kitchen... Matt is watching this and then gets this worried horrified sorta dismayed look on his face and says" You are phsyco...who ever heard of labeling a sponge.".. Mind you his idea of cleaning a cup is rinsing it and his old bathub is more gray than white....but again I digress...So I ask...if you have good cleaning people with an english issues should you not label your sponges??? I mean who wants the same sponge that cleaned the muck off your toilette to clean the sink on your kitchen??? Gross... I think so

Anywho, just a random thought for the nite..."

Freedom of Religion|Church and State

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;..."

Together with the 14th Amendment, the Freedom of Religion is established in the U.S.A. by the Second Amendment of our Constitution

The two camps, both liberal and conservative, tend to only recognize the virtue of half this clause from the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Liberals tend to only accept the first half of the clause. Conservatives tend to only recognize the second half. Yet, Freedom of Religion can only be guaranteed if both halves are equally recognized.

The first half limits government from enforcing religion upon the populous. This means schools cannot institutionalize prayer. They cannot teach religion in any context except where religion itself is objectively studied in terms of history or social science. It means judges, states and any government institutions cannot promote religion, use it in their proceedings or refer to it in its decision making process. It also means that government cannot give preferential treatment to particular religious organizations. That is to say, it’s ok to give all religious organization a tax-exempt status, but it’s not ok to actually give money to particular groups without using some non-religious common criteria.

On the flip side, the other half of the Freedom of Religion clause prevents our governments from stopping someone from practicing their religion. This means that a school cannot tell a student that they cannot pray during school hours. It means that religions that are in the extreme minority may not be transgressed upon for their practices. Now, reason had intervened with the understanding of this clause. If a religion advocates harming others or their property, this is not protected religion activities. What is protected is what the individual does themself with their own property or within their own life, as long as they are not harming others.

An example of both ends of the second half of the Freedom of Religion clause have been tested out in the litigation involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jehovah’s Witnesses fought for the right to practice their religion within schools. Through the Supreme Court, they have won the right to not salute the flag at school. However, they have also been required to prevent unnecessary harm to their children by being forced to all medical care that involves blood transfusions. As part of their religion, they believe that seeking professional medical care is valuable and important, but have a specific prohibition again the practice of using blood transfusions.

So, the Second Amendment doesn’t allow the government to promote religion, and it does not allow the government from preventing it either. This leads to the contemporary discussion regarding the concept of the separation of church and state. The words “separation of church and state” do not appear in the Second Amendment. Nor do they need to in order to establish such a separation because the words actually used in the Second Amendment establish the even greater and more inclusive principal of Freedom of Religion. Freedom of Religion inherently establishes a de facto separation of church and state, not as a doctrine itself, but as the only practical way to apply the Freedom of Religion principle with the actual wording of the Second Amendment.

Again, the Second Amendment (together with the 14th Amendment) prevents the U.S.A. governments (local, state and national) from promoting, imposing or prohibiting religion on/of its citizens, which creates a de facto separation of church and state.

More and less

It seems like the more busy I get, the less I talk about it. Damn, it's a buzy month though. Well, I moved into my own apt. The neighborhood is a couple steps down from my last, but it's my own place and the bedroom is all hella huge. I already got my car bumped into while it was parked in its spot. That is less annoying that it sounds. I've been hoping for sumfin like that to happen for a long time now so I could at least share the costs of replacing the bumper from previous incidents. This, coupled with a bunch of other items needing attention forced me to take a day off from work last week. I was running all over town taking care of busy that was piling up, including getting the quote estimate for repairing the damage to my car.
In Dec, I had to deal with two drunk asses (that couldn't handle their alcohol in one way or another) on separate nights, ruining two perfectly fun evenings out. Not cool. Well, New Years was laid back and enjoyable, even though everyone was sick.
Last night a group of us got together for a birthday dinner for Ronie and Fernando at House of Genji. Allie and I have had pretty good experiences there recently with fun and talented cooks, so we where a bit underwelmed by last night's cook, but overall we all had a fun time.
What else? Well, there's a bunch of other stuff too, but maybe I'll go into details later.

Pat Robertson

The notion that Pat Robertson might be slowing going insane has recently crossed my mind. Over the past couple of years, he has increasingly said some of the most ridiculous things. This isn't like the 19th Century where one could claim not to have said sumfin, so he always has to make some comment the next day to clarify his outragous statement. His clarification normally contains one or more major undeniable lies to try to make his original statement sound more reasonable. These lies have involved his claiming his original statement did not say what it says. lol The good thang is the people are finally starting to take notion and critize him for the ridiculousness and for the subsequent lies to cover over his ridiculousness. However, for some reason, he's still running the 700 Club. Is no one minding the store over there. Do no one at the 700 Club see that he's starting to slip over the deep end? Psst, the 700 Club is a large corporation that this thinnly guised as a nonprofit charity organization. The fact is, it makes more money than most companies in America, and that it spends that money in the effort to big further wealth. This is illegal for a nonprofit corporation. Anyways, I'm getting off topic. Pat Robertson is going insane. One would think that the people running the 700 Club would want to get their number one money maker back in line with reason to prevent the corporation from being taking as seriously. Hmm

House not home

I'm in the process of moving out of a house that I've lived in for over 4.5 years. Although I've lived in that place for longer that I've live most anywhere else, I never viewed it as a home, only as a house where I lived. Even though I moved into that place only 4 years ago, it really does seem like a life time. I'm different now. My group of friends is different. All of this had nufin to do with the house, so maybe that's why I never thought about it before. Wierd.

News whore Letterman

I'm such a news whore right now. Here's another interesting piece:

Lady gets restraining order against Letterman for sending her secret coded messages over the TV that instructed her to do thangs like move east and marry him. Ummm, that is funny. You can't make this stuff up!

Unions still have their place

I used to believe that Unions are no longer necessary, but I'm not so sure anymore. As the union power recedes over time, employers are becoming increasing arrogant again. (Enron wouldn't have come close to getting away with their scam with union bosses on their tail.) It's not yet as bad as the 1800's, but we aren't as far off from reliving that nightmare again as some seem to think.
Already, some of the basic protections for workers are being scaled back, being wrongfully labelled as "archaic". We should be pushing world's developing nations to aspirer to meeting the challenge of copying our system of labor. We should not be rolling back our system to compete with them. As someone who is firmly rooted in white collar middle class, I can say the only thang protecting my career is the rarity of my work skills. As the world market becomes more competitive, that rarity will diminish, as with many American jobs. We need to help other countries realize that having a suitable standard of living is just as important as having one or two successful companies in their country. Henry Ford gave us clear examples of how to run companies that benefit the employees and in turn, benefit the company because employee prosperity is spent buying company products. Anyways, we are on a slippery slope that we should back away from.

Breathe of relief

On the AP today: "'We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom,' [U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III] wrote in his 139-page opinion."
This was part of the judge's finding in the case where the then Dover Area School Board attempted to cram that ridiculous notion of Intelligent Design into our U.S. classrooms as an alternative to the Theory of Evolution. The judge also had other harsh words for the school board and their actions.
I doubt there will be an appeal to the ruling since the Dover area community kicked all 8 of those guilty school board members out of office earlier this year.
I expect that religious leaders will now push for a repackaged Intelligent Design concept under some different name, and that we will be having this issue come up again within 15 years. What these I.D. proponents don't realize is that the more they try to become scientifically accepted, the more they will eventually have to adopt evolution and natural selection into their own belief systems. This is pretty much the end of the legal road for anyone that wants to dearly hold on to the traditional biblical creation myths and force those myths on everyone else. From this point on, the movement behind I.D. will eventually turn into a scienitific group that will one day turn it's back on it's own origins.
The only other legal battle pursuable by the religious faithful is to pretend that the 1st Amendment of the Constitution doesn't really forbid government tampering in a society's religious beliefs. If they can convince a judge of this nonsense somewhere along the line, they may still be able to openly get religion back into our school system. But then all hell will really break lose because every religious group in existence will claim their right to be present in our schools. I'm guessing that any judge, regardless of their beliefs will want that to be the result of their ruling. Given that, even this battle will be lost once and for all by the religious nuts one day.

Drunks

It's weird how alcohol affects everyone differently. In some bizarre way, I'm almost jealous of people that lose control when they are drunk. Then again, I have no real desire to have no control over my person, and I'm thankful that not even getting mind numbingly drunk takes that away from me. But what happens to drunks when they are out of control and blackout, especially during these out of control periods? It's as though the person's Frontal Lobe and short term memory centers shut down. (I'm not going into the particulars as to why I'm wondering about this right now, but it is being triggered by multiple separate events this weekend.) They lose the ability to properly respond to emotional impulses. This suggests a shut down of the reasoning area of the brain, the Frontal Lobe. They also have a limited ability to retain memories of when this happens, which suggests a shut down of the short term memory areas. It must be a very strange feeling to wake up and be told of your actions, but having no ability to recall the memory of those actions. I never want to experience that myself, but I am curious how others feel when they experience it.

Hugs and Kisses

I just tried these Kissables. I assume that Hersey came out with this product to compete directly with M&M's. I tried Kissables. They are good. To me, they taste better than M&M's. I'd recommend at least trying them out. The only thang that I don't like about the candy is the odd shape, but I think that's only because I'm so accustomed to M&M's. Other than that, that are pretty good.

King Kong

Peter Jackson is a genius. He's not a genius because he's great at story telling or special effects. He is great at those. His true talent lies in having a complete understanding of the material he's working with. He gets it.

I didn't like the King Kong movies. The original is just too archaic to watch. The remake was completely miserable. And what's this about King Kong vs. Godzilla? What's that about? Peter Jackson produced and directed the 2005 King Kong version. He has not only redeemed the King Kong story, he has brought it to the level that the story deserves. King Kong still isn't one of my favorite stories, but it is now one that I now really enjoy and have a new found respect for. I think Peter Jackson understood the story better than its original director, producer and possibly the original writer too.

I highly recommend King Kong!

My life isn't one of those stories where I find my true love and live happily ever after from the start. I've written before about living much of my early life in a haze and only coming out of that haze since I past my quarter century mark. I was alert and sentient, but maybe not as alert and sentient and I shoulda been. This caused me to miss a lot of opportunities that were laid about before me. Opportunities to further my life in career, love, friendships, etc all lost. I was dumb...Intelligent, but dumb. The problem with having intelligence is that it can enable you to fool yourself into thinking you know more than you really do. lol
Not only could I have got laid much earlier, I coulda prolly had a couple of girlfriends by my early 20's. But no. I wasn't ready. The longer one wants to explore these areas, the harder it gets to have the breakout experience that opens your world, such as a first love or even just getting laid. If this blog were to go back to my early 20's, the text would be filled with frustrations that I would prolly now find embarrassing. Maybe it's a good thang my blog beings in 2002. lol I was well on my way to becoming who I am at that point.
In my younger years, I fear I was loved long before I know what love really was. If not love, then at least there was girls who where attracted to me that I just didn't...I just was unable to know it. Insecurities were the main cause. I had nothing to be insecure about, but when one is young, one doesn't know that. I'm no exception, though I guess I hid it pretty well, even from myself. Intelligence allowed me to come up with reasonings that nurtured my insecurities rather than defeat them. It took me a long time to figure out that I wasn't ugly. It took me even longer to figure out that I'm actually fairly attractive. It took me even longer to understand that certain people are more attracted to each other than others types of people and that it doesn't matter what one person likes cuz everyone is different with different tastes. There should be a class that teaches children this in grammar school. lol ...nevermind, there is... ...I was screwed up by my parents like everyone else...hehe. Most of my insecurities do come from my mom and dad, or at least how they raised me. I'm not sure where my early life haze come from, though. I still slip into it once in a while, but I've learned to use it as a tool (hard to explain...saving that topic for another time). It holds no grip over me any more.
Nowadays, I feel as though I'm experiencing life on my own terms. I have great friends and great loves (past and present). Most of all, I look forward to the days ahead of me in this life.

Dec Birthdays

This weekend, Allie and I helped celebrate 3 birthdays. I know several other people that have their birthdays in Dec as well. It seems that there are a high number of birthdays in Dec, or maybe I'm just noticing them more cuz I keep thinking it sucks for all these people to have their birthday so close to Xmas. Anyways, the weekend was fun. We first stopped over for my little cuzin's birthday and to drop off the remaining Xmas gifts for the family at my aunt's house. We then headed from there to a friend's birthday dinner in Sacramento. After trying to hit up a few bars that foolishly charged cover (can we say, "um, no!"), we ended up at a 24hr bowling place around midnight and played a few hours. I was tired by 3am, so Allie and I headed to our nice comfy hotel room.
When we finally woke up, we checked out and headed over to this nice mall and did a little shopping before heading off to San Francisco...for more shopping. We finally joined her family for a birthday dinner for her brother at an authentic Chinese restaurant in Pacifica. After that, we headed to my place and prolly fell asleep around midnight last night.
On Friday night before dinner, I found out that I'm going to be a neighbor to Dave's ex-brother at the apt complex I'm moving to. Dave, Miriam, myself, Sven and his g/f all met up for dinner. I got home late that night too. ::yawn:: Am I supposed to be getting more sleep than this?

Here's a heart warming Xmas story for ya

"Armed police boarded the aircraft after the shooting, with some passengers in hysterics. McAlhany said he remembers having a shotgun pressed into his head by one officer, and hearing cries and screams from many passengers aboard the aircraft..."

Sounds like the police are the terrorist in this case. The war on terror doesn't seem to be a war, more of an alliance with terror.