Category: General

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Hey Religious Right… It’s all or nothing!

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First of all Let me say a few things right up front:

1) I rarely agree with Dan Savage

2) I often disagree with Joe of Joe.my.god

3) I’m not particularly religious

4) I rarely find enough compelling writing in Slate to continue reading more than a paragraph or two.

So you’ll understand that I took my blood pressure and temperature when I found myself reading an entire Slate article, agreeing with Dan Savage AND Joe about religion. I also checked to make sure that none of my neighbors had been raptured. Since I haven’t seen any Zombies walking around I’m going to assume that the zombie apocalypse hasn’t happened.

There’s been a lot of talk about Dan Savage lately. Frankly I hadn’t really paid any attention.

Hey he’s an activist, public speaker, television personality, blogger, sex advice columnist and makes a HELL of  a lot more money per year than I do.

Then Joe.my.god posts an excerpt from a Slate article saying that the author “nailed the Savage Flap”

I read the excerpt and thought “yeah” I agree with that so I went to the full article on Slate.

I  have to say the author makes some really good points. In the article Dan Savage is quoted as pointing out that Christians and Jews for that matter choose to ignore parts of the Bible that they no longer agree with.

Minor things.. .

Don’t eat shellfish

Don’t eat pork

Don’t work on the sabbath.

Stone an adulterer

It’s OK to keep slaves

Don’t mix linen and wool clothing items.

Savage goes on to say in his colorfully irreverent way that If Christians can ignore these things, they can just as easily learn to ignore the proscriptions against homosexuality.

I have to agree with him.

The Christian Right can’t pick and choose which rules it’s going to obey while at the same time condemning people with those same rules… That’s called hypocrisy.

Jesus christ

Hypocrisy on the part of the established religion of the time is one of the reasons Christ got put on the cross. Even the Roman governor found the whole matter distasteful. We know this because he literally washed his hands of it.

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Believe me Pilate would never have put the question to the crowd if he was convinced in the slightest of Christs guilt.

The Romans would have marched Christ and all the other criminals right out to Golgotha and that would have been the end of the story and another false “Prophet”. Rome wasn’t known for dealing lightly with it’s prefectures & they were especially heavy handed in the case of troublemakers or rebels.

The hypocrisy I speak of is not that of the crowd who freed the murderer instead of Christ. The Hypocrisy was on the part of the Pharisees who had become rich and powerful and invested in the Roman occupation. For them, it wasn’t about worshiping their God anymore it was about maintaining the status quo and good relations with Rome.

No I have no intention of deifying either Dan Savage or Joe. They’re both far from saints and certainly can’t walk on water even in their very best heels. I simply point out that Dan Savage is right.

If the Christian right wants to really demonstrate it’s commitment to fundamentalist, literal intrepretation of the Bible… They have to take all of it.

So NOM, Focus on the Family, and all you other hypocrites shut the hell up until you’re ready to have some good old stonings of adulterers. Oh and you can start with a number of your leaders. You know who they are, they made impassioned public pleas for forgiveness when they got caught cheating on their spouses.

Impassioned plea or not… Biblical law is the Biblical law. We know you’re sorry… but the law says you must be stoned to death.

Hummm Starts to sound a LOT like the Taliban doesn’t it?

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Frustrations!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been sporadic in writing lately.

Nothing personal, Just that 1) I haven’t had all that much to say and 2) I’m having a really tough time focusing.

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After the 6th day in a row where I wasn’t able to sit down and write anything.

I shredded a manuscript that I’d been working on, and that quite frankly I was sick and tired of looking at sitting on my desk

No need to worry, the digital copy is safe, and there’s even another hard copy offsite. 

Literally every single time I’d sat down to do anything with the manuscript or it’s associated datafile I’d been interrupted.

What little concentration I had was shattered usually for the rest of the day, so that even if I had the discipline to come back to the writing I wasn’t able to return to the frame of mind needed to put my thoughts on paper.

Here I am in the quiet of the early morning trying to get my eyes to focus properly and voilà I’m able to  put thought to paper. It’s amazing what silence and a cup of coffee can do.

The shredding of the manuscript was cathartic. I felt like I was at least making progress at something. Even if that progress was in the destruction of a burdensome brick of paper that no one in this household respected.

Now I have several decisions to make. 

How do I define that I absolutely need a boundary when I’m writing?

Do I want to continue trying to finish a book or should I let it go?

Do I have enough time and money to finish the first book before I absolutely must return to the hell of a thousand pricks called Corporate America?

I don’t have any answer to these questions yet. 

I do know that either I must make a decision… or time passing will make that decision for me.

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My first shooting match… AKA FUN!

I’ve been Slow to Blog.

Monday I woke up crabby, hurting, and out of sorts. A massage helped out there. Today… well it just sort of got away from me.

Sunday, I participated in my first shooting match ever.

I was nervous. Here’s the deal, whenever I try anything new I get nervous. I’m not talking butterflies in the stomach I’m talking hands shaking nervous. In extreme cases it looks like I’ve got the DTs. 

The more dangerous the activity the worse the shakes get even if that danger is only perceived. Opening a 100K computer system isn’t any big deal for me because I know what to expect NOW, but that first system in front of the customer… I looked like I was fresh out of the Betty Ford Clinic. The shakes don’t instill confidence in your audience… Trust me on this!

The same was true Sunday. 

I had a number of “New” things. going on.

1) I’d never walked around with a holstered weapon (Unloaded) at a firing range.

2) I’d only fired guns around my family members (picture small groups of immediate family)

3) I’d only fired at targets from a stationary position, this competition you move to engage targets at some of the stages.

4) I’m familiar with firearms, but not confident enough yet that we’ve seen each other naked.

Thank goodness I was there with friends. One friend was teasing me right from the start. He said “Perhaps you should have taken an Ambien before you got onto the range.” Believe it or not that made me feel better. You know there’s not much point in trying to hide the shakes when your bud just called you out on ’em. By the third stage the shakes were minimal. By the end of the match I was annoyed with my target accuracy or lack thereof instead of being pleased that I was hitting the targets.

I want to point out that while I had fun… Safety is first and foremost in everybody’s minds. There is a pretty strict protocol and the rules are to be followed at all times. The Club reserves the right to ask you to leave if you’re doing something unsafe. On the other side of the coin… there are tons of experienced people around who will answer any questions or give you helpful hints.

The folks at the Palm Springs Gun Club were awesome the weekend before last, and equally awesome this past weekend. 

I felt very comfortable and “at home” at the club. There’s a “Stock Gun Match” next Saturday. I’m sorry that I’m going to miss it. I’ve got plans with a friend on Saturday afternoon and Don’t think that I could get to the match and still get back to my place in time.

Of course the other factor is that I’m waiting on a grip screw from Sig Sauer.  Sometime during the match on Sunday,  I lost a screw and as I finished the match the grip was working itself loose. (being held on by only one screw.) I’m not going to say that the loose grip affected my score… I could probably make a case for it, but none of the guys I was shooting with would buy it… so there’s no point.

The  friend who talked me into trying this shooting match thing suggested that I just tape the grips on the gun and go for it. Tempting!!! But then I started thinking about cleaning the sticky tape crap out of the textured part of the grips and figure… Nah I’ll wait & go to the next match.

Here is a video of me shooting. Yeah I SUCK! So what? It’s a condition that is reparable with lots and lots of practice. I also noticed watching the video that I’m so tense that I was trying to loosen up by unconsciously shrugging my shoulders and it was like I just couldn’t quite get comfortable.

You’ll also see that I’m struggling to get magazines out of my pockets during the reload. My hearing protection and my magazine holders finally showed up this week. Gee, only two days late!

I’m slow as sin but I was very fortunate to have a friend that’s been doing this for a long time, encouraging me. You can also hear the Range Safety Officer encouraging and coaching me.

You see John the Range Safety Officer standing behind me to the right. At one of the other stages of the match John, stopped me and corrected me on a potentially unsafe thing I did. (Finger on trigger… while moving to engage another group of targets.) It wasn’t a major infraction it was a simple mistake and frankly I appreciated that he was keeping an eye on me.

After I finished that stage I said “Thank you, I didn’t give it a thought.” He gave me this big smile and said “You never think of stuff like that until you stumble and shoot yourself…” I didn’t make that mistake for the rest of the day.  At the next stages, John began volunteering info about my stance and how to better proceed and improve. I don’t think I told him Thank you nearly enough… 

Next Time I see him… I will.

Now that you’ve seen what a sucky inexperienced shooter looks like… 

Here’s a video of what someone who knows what they’re doing looks like. This is from a different match at a different location.

I’m not completely sure, but I think this gentleman is the man behind me acting as a Range Safety Officer in the first video. The reason I’m not completely sure is that he was firing an exotic looking weapon in the match where he was a Range Safety Officer for me, and in this video he isn’t firing the same gun plus you never see his face. 

Nonetheless, this is a representative example of how you’re supposed to shoot in these matches.

In the first video you can hear coaching and encouragement. You have to admire the fact that really experienced competitive shooters are patient and willing to coach complete newbies.

Needless to say I was, and am impressed.

So In summary, I had a great time. I suck. These people are very nice. I want to go again. 

I’m going to catch some matches at a couple of other sites and then probably join one of the gun clubs as a regular participant.

***** (5 Star Activity Rating)

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CISPA Ahhh a rose by any other name, Is still a stinking pile…

First it was SOPA, and PIPA.

Now it’s CISPA.

People, this is classic government Bull Shit! One of the thnigs that you must remember about our governement is that the idiots running it are… well idiots! 

Having worked however briefly with the government, I can tell you one true thing. Projects, AKA Bad Ideas never die. They’re just recycled.

Politicians are inherently lazy. They’re not going to create anything new or original they’re going to pick up the tattered remains of some discarded bill. They’ll read about 10 lines of the summary, then they’ll put a new name on it, dress it up with some fancy new benefit and have it on the Senate floor again in a year.

“One Bill” Gill Cedillo is a great example of this. Except in his case he kept presenting the same bill over and over again in the House. He thought it was a good idea for illegal immigrants to have drivers licenses. Every year for 4 or 6 years he’d dust off this stupid bill and present it to the House.

One year is was about Safety, then Next years he said the illegals would get insurance, the next year he made the case that California would see increased registration fees, and so on. In every case his bill was voted DOWN because the people raised hell and in a loud voice told Sacramento HELL NO! 

The people saw that giving Drivers Licenses to illegal immigrants would make being here illegally seem more legitimate. 

The problem with politicians is that they keep presenting the same shit in a different Sunday Hat over and over again. After a while, we’ve all heard about some astoundingly bad idea and voted it down enough times that we think it’s a dead issue. When we turn our attention elsewhere… that’s when one of these moronic ideas gets through the House and Senate and becomes Law.

So it is with this new stupidity.

CISPA Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

First of all there are only a few organizations within our Government that have the technology and / or brain power to begin to worry about cybernetic data. They ALREADY share information and have since shortly after 911.

The real concern with this Act is much the same the same as it was with SOPA and PIPA OUR privacy. Unless you’re ready for an Orwellian future we all need to pay close attention to the erosion of our privacy.

The primary opposition for this incarnation of a Gee we’re the government you can trust us to spy on you act is that the controls for who is spyed on, where, when, and why are so weak. By WEAK I mean without warrant, or even probable cause.

Even President Obama who in my opinion has serious socialist leanings is against this particular act. He’s already stated publicly that he will not sign this into law. (Hey, even a broken clock is right 2 minutes a day.)

So for those who missed it the first time…

365 Orwell1984

CISPA Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act

Allows for the routine monitoring of any corporation, or individual who the government may find of interest. This monitoring will be done with no warrants, and no judicial oversight.

Couple this with the concept that all it takes for you to BE a terrorist is for the President to SAY you are a terrorist.

The implication is obvious. If someone in the government were to decide that you were a bit too much of an activist or you were exposing criminal wrongdoing via a blog, email, YouTube, or other electronic means. (Think about the secret service scandal. )

The electronic evidence could and would be turned over to government representatives simply because they asked Google, AT&T or whoever. BOOM, suddenly you’re arrested for being a terrorist insurgent trying to undermine the United States. Oh and by the way,  the government would have all the evidence they needed to try, and convict you in a military court. Hope you like GITMO during hurricane season.

This act if passed would also circumvent the Wiretap act and Electronic Privacy act. Both of these acts were passed specifically to prevent this kind of abuse.

So get on the phone, get on email, post your opposition to your blogs, LIGHT UP THE CONGRESSIONAL SWITCHBOARD Demand to be heard.

Demand that your representative answer why suddenly they’re willing to undermine our freedoms? Why haven’t they repealed the Wiretap act and Electronic Privacy act if they now think that CISPA is the proper way to go?

Take control, make your representatives REPRESENT YOU!

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Had a good day In Palm Springs

It was hotter than Hell!

By the time I decided to leave it was 104F, but what a great day.

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I went to Palm Springs for a shooting match.

I was expecting to meet a friend who’s a regular participant but I’d screwed up on my calendar, I was supposed to meet him NEXT Sunday! OOOOPPPSSS!

I’d showed up with my camera, not a gun so there was perhaps some understandable suspicion on the part of the gun club members. My plan had been to snap some pictures of my buddy and his daughter while they participated in the competition.

After I’d observed for a while, one of the folks participating in the match spoke to me. When I told him I wasn’t a spy for “The Other Side” trying to dig up dirt on the evils of guns he laughed and opened right up. 

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I’d screwed up and my friend wasn’t going to be there, but I decided to stay, observe and learn what I could. As it turns out that was a good decision. The crew shooting was a gregarious bunch and genuinely decent people. Two Englishmen were perhaps the most welcoming. 

After spending about half the day watching, I decided that I will be out there again next Sunday. Next time I’ll be participating. I think it’s something that I’d like to do as a bit of a hobby.

We’ll see how it goes after next weekend.