Connected

So I went over to my Grandfather's house earlier today, or I guess really yesterday. I am kind of tired and on a bad sleep schedule, which is probably gonna get worse, so things kind of blend right now. Just not in a good, alcoholic buzz sort of way. My mom was there.

Situation - My Grandfather is 90 years old, and probably beginning that degeneration into death that many of those who live to great age eventually do. He really should be in a elder care type facility, with 24 hour medical care. But the situation is what it is, and my mother, my aunt and their brother have made their choices. The reasoning is beyond the scope of this post or anything I am likely to put in a public place. As Nietzsche has stated, paraphased, just because one thinks, one does not think correctly, and my mother and her siblings are opening themselves up to what can potentially be a tragedy of errors.

It was my mother's shift, and as usual she did some of her emotional unloading. As a mentally ill person, who has been in successful treatment, honestly its all bullshit. People place their own perceptive masks over what they see, listen to, etc and for the most part do damage to themselves.

There is no point in fighting an inevitability on any level, even emotionally, because you can't win, and the act of losing, whether its a singular crushing event, such as a death, or a long drawn out, craptacular experience, does not change the fact that the process and the result are inevitable.

So long as my mother has chosen to participate in that situation where her and her siblings take care of him, they just have to deal with it, and the most positive way, path which minimizes the damage, is to work with the situation as best one can.

Now, in the process of this conversation, things drifted around to my niece, technically my cousin Sara's daughter, but Michael and Sara are, emotionally and spiritually my brother and sister, heck I think of the other grandkids like that too, but more of a younger set of siblings, the kind you look out for, first and foremost. Caroline's 8th birthday party is today and I sort of can't go. I have both health and finance issues which prevent that. That does not mean that I won't go, who knows there may be a last minute solution.

My mother made a comment that hit on one of my emotional strings. She said, roughly, "that there will be enough people there and that she won't miss you".

Well damn it, I want her to miss me. I want her to want me around.

More to the point, but more drawn out, way back in my psychotherapy, I had this persistent feeling of being totally disconnected from the events around me. And in reality, while I was connected in sense, it was not in a way that made me emotionally healthy. I was disconnected and it hurt. It has only been over the last year or so, that I have advanced to the point of forming more tangible social connections, and though I still suck at them, they are there and I want them.

I think, as human beings, perhaps borrowing roughly from some commentary that I once heard Dennis Prager make on his short lived, but awesome tv show, we sometimes want to be alone, but we don't ever want to be lonely. To be disconnected.

The Least Worst of.....

Never have I understood the title of the Type O' Negative best of album so well, given my most recent life affecting decision.

I have been out of work since approximately Feb 1st or so, with a lower back/lumbar/disc problem of some sort that also cause me, temporarily, to lose most feeling and a lot of strength in my right leg. After spending several months wondering if things were ever going to get better, if it would be better to just not wake up, I received the letter from work which stated that my job would be vacated if I did not return by a certain date.

Money has been tight. Due to a combination in once circum... well that's a story for another time. Suffice it to say that money has been tight. With the termination of my job, would go my health insurance.

So my options were

- Welfare, which would cover the health care costs, provide some ancillary benefits such as food stamps and such but would cost me my apartment.

-Unemployment, which would mean no more health coverage unless I could afford it on my own via the Cobra coverage, though the money would pay my bills and I would be able to attend school with extra financial aid. This last bit would probably be true of welfare as well.

-Return to work, which gives me my salary, and health care coverage.

I asked my doctor for a prescription pain killer, which I am certain that I would need to return to work, and spoke to my supervisor about not having to work 12 hour shifts anymore, and it turned out she eliminated those anyway, and got the evening shift, so returning to work turned out to be the least worst option...

Rest in Peace Peter Steele

The Garden (of Delusion)

Damn you blizzard! This is what I get for WoW downtime. Usually I put these movies on, on the other screen and sort of glance over for the cool moments, or the tit shots or the fight scenes or whatever and just use them to help past the lack of background noise. But no. Blizzard has to make me pay attention to this shit completely....

Movie in question....The Garden.

Now, this movie does have one thing going for it. Lance Henriksen. Lance the man. Perhaps the most underrated actor of all time. Generally speaking, anything, and I mean anything with Lance fucking Henriksen in it, is worth one fucking watch. He has some all time classics like Pumpkinhead for example or Alien.

This however is not an all time classic.

It started off well. Slow... but well.

It opens more or less with a troubled boy, in a psychiatric hospital, being tested. He is cutting himself, and having horrible nightmares. The troubles are being expressed in his artwork, which has a dark and twisted nature to it. His parents are recently divorced, his dad recently sober, his mom well too expensive for the budget it seems, nowhere recently to be found. The dad takes him home from the hospital back to the farm in Oregon, for the last of his summer stay, when the boy has a delusion that cause the family suv to go flying over a cliff. Luckily they survive and are nursed to health by Satan.

Yes, Satan.

The devil himself, apparently lives in the same town as the dad. And he seems like a nice guy. In fact nothing makes you think this might in fact be the motherfucking devil, except for what clearly seems to be the psychiatric delusions of the 12 year old, until almost the very end of the film. Lance goes about his business in every way trying to help the boy recover from his psychiatric trauma, the father continue his recovery from bad marriage, even provides the father and son with a place to live, and gives the father a job, when the US Federal government condemns dads farm due to toxic pesticide cleanup being necessary, such a pesticide presence might actually explain why the boy is having delusions and seizures to begin with, but hey, somehow the movie has to have a twist right....

Well, can we lead into the twist, make it make sense?

Nah...

Why bother.

In the middle of the devil being a nice guy and everyone else being a douche bag, lets just let the devil come out and say sure, its all part of my plan.

And he still goes on being a nice guy to the father and son. We never know for sure if he really killed anyone? Why

BECAUSE WE SEE THEM ALL AT THE END OF THE FILM SEEMINGLY ALIVE. POSSIBLY BECAUSE THE DELUSIONAL 12 YEAR OLD IS HAVING ANOTHER DELUSION AFTER HE DROVE A SWORD INTO LANCE HENRIKSONS CHEST.

Yes, that's right.

Basically, short summary of this film...

Boy has delusion
Boy has delusion
Boy causes car accident
Devil nurses boy and dad back to health
Devil is a nice guy
Boy has delusion
Devil is a nice guy
Boy has delusion
Devil is a nice guy
Boy has delusion
Devil out of nowhere declares his evil plot but still goes on being a nice guy
Boy has delusion
Boy stabs Lance Henriksen in chest with Sword
Boy has delusion.

The end


I took one for the team. Don't watch this, I did. That's one more than enough.

Reborn

Well, I decided to give this blogging thing another go. Let's see how long this lasts....

Anyway, I movie review or in this case, a horror show up first.

What is a right? Why does the government have the right to rule?

Well, I wrote this little piece a while back and thought that someone reading this might find it interesting. It concerns the nature of what a right is, and why government has the right to rule

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Interesting debate... I will not (yet) drill down to philosophical minutiae but I will start my premise here.

There are two types of "things". Foundational things and non foundational things (I forgot the big philosobabel word for the second one). A foundational thing is something which cannot be broken down into simpler things and still be reassembled into only the original thing. A non foundational thing is something which can be broken down in the above manner and completely reassembled. If something is non foundational, then it must be evaluated for any purposes first by breaking it down and analyzing what results, determining if one has yet to reach such a foundational thing. A foundational thing must be analyzed from the premise that it is either true or false for reasons of its own.

How then can one analyze such a foundational thing? From Aristotle, one can apply the notion of the teleological purpose in order to analyze a foundational thing. The teleological purpose of a thing is the end purpose/end goal/end reason for that thing to exist, for it to perform its function. This idea is useful in analysis of the foundational thing because in cannot be broken down in a meaningful manner. It is, in essence, a beginning.

Also key to my analysis is the idea of objects and properties (familar to computer coders of all sorts no doubt).

What is an object? An object is something which exists and possess properties, each of which themselves possibly being objects. What is a property. A property is some aspect of an object which limits or helps to define its existence.

To the analysis of a right.

I postulate that a right, being a property of something, is a foundational thing in and of itself, which has the purpose of defining the limits at which an object, possessing that property, can be said to exist for legal purposes.

The objects covered by law have various properties, among them rights, duties, obligations, powers, functions etc.

Why is a right a foundational thing?

The answer starts with the presupposition that a right might not be a foundational thing. Therefore a right must have components which upon reassembly become a right again. What are the components of a right. Well let's hypothesize that the components of a right are an object, the thing possessing the right, and a property, which property though? Is it the property of life. Does this mean that only living things have rights. Possibly but upon reassembly, the idea that land has rights goes out the window (this disappoints the radical environmentalist no doubt and makes large sections of out law illogical). Also a government is not a living thing, wherein does it get the rights to tax and kill or authorize its agents to kill. Where do corporations get their rights. From the government of course... wait...? Hmmm...

Well, life is out the window so to speak. What other properties does an individual have which can be a unique component of a right. Height, weight, girth, no... A... Age... no. What about intelligence (don't we all wish). If intelligence is the critical compenent this quickly and easily takes away the rights of all registered Democrats. Hmmm. I kind of like this one but I can see flaws. Damn! We have assigned rights to various animals including some very dumb ones, to things which have no inherent intelligence (land, water, corporations, governments) and to the dead. Unless we as a society are willing to remove all of these "rights" there goes this one.

I think that I could go on in this manner analyzing various properties of individual objects, disqualifying them as I go.I think that I can find a reason to disqualify any and all such properties as being a unique component of a right and therefore define a right as a foundational object.

Since a right is a foundational object, following my line of analysis, I proceed to the end purpose of the right, the cause for a rights existence. As stated above, right, being a property of something, is a foundational thing in and of itself, which has the purpose of defining the limits at which an object, possessing that property, can be said to exist for legal purposes.

...A word on limits. Those of you familiar with pre-calculus are familiar with the sense I intended the word. A limit in mathematical is used to evaluate how a number behaves at extremes. My definition can be restated as "A right, being a property of something, is a foundational thing in and of itself, which has the purpose of defining how any object, possessing that property, exists in the entire range of circumstances covered by law"...

Proceding now to that teleological cause for a rights existence, each of us is an individual who exists in a common continuity with a unique perspective upon that continuity. We notice others around us and for various, inherent reasons (sexual desire, hunger, fear of death, etc) associate with others. The range of behaviors of and for these relationships can be said to exist with the following domain [absolute chaos, absolute order]. Both absolutes are undesirable circumstances. Hell, much of that middle ground is undesirable. To avoid this argument spinning vastly out of control, I will resolve the state of these behaviors with a simple question.

How many solutions are there to every problem?

Ans- One, whatever solution is chosen that also solves the problem. [this does not mean that this is a moral or ethical solution. It just resolves the issue of current law and morality by saying ok here we are. Let's analyze the subject at hand with our current state as presupposition]. In essence, this ensuing teleological definition presupposes that the current state exists. The citizens of the US have chosen their "status quo" via the electoral process. It is what it is, regardless of where inside the previously mention domain of order and chaos it is.

Since the population residing here has chosen to associate with one another, and choice includes not moving elsewhere ie to another nation or and not making an effort to kill those with whom you do not wish to associate (the quaint European term for this practice is ethnic cleansing), it is functional to have a set of rules in order to regulate how we live together. As mentioned previously objects covered by law possess many properties, rights foremost among them.

If such rights were not codified, in future events, it becomes possible to violate them, but, following this effect without a cause, since the right was not encoded, it could not have been violated. Only the future and the present can be altered, it is a waste of energy to make law attempting to change the past (I mean everything that this last statement says on its face). Without the end purpose cause, one could not justify a right. Put differently, only the goal of avoiding rights violations provides the cause or reason for defining the right.

Why, for example can you sue someone who tried to murder you? Because he violated your right not to be murdered, this issue being addressed before you were endangered. Some will say that wise men observed the past and therefore made law in response to that. The problem, as the empiricists point out, is that the fact that something occurred is no guarantee that it may or will occur again.

A government's right to rule with the above definition in mind can be said to be a limit upon what the government actually does. Expanding the previous sentence...

The US government is a thing of the people. The first question to ask is "which people?" The answer is all of those who have provided input into the US polity. This answer is less obvious than it seems. The input mentioned is not just voting, or encoding law, paying taxes or running for office. Everyone drop of blood spilled for the American nation, Reverend King, John Basilone, those who died on 9/11, Patrick Henry, Pres. McKinley, etc, has contributed. Every baby born, every bill paid, every check cashed, every store that is robbed, every bulding that is blown up and every one that dies, every American citizen and resident plus a few others (except for those damn Canadians and the French, oh hell just the modern French).

The core of this polity is the Constitution, a static object. This object binds the dynamic populace together across time. The government arises in the union between the populace as bound together by the Constitution. In this sense, since the Constitution is an expression how the complete range of this populace must interrelate, and such relationships may occur in extremes or be driven to extremes, it becomes not just prudent but necessary to define such limits. One particular limit is itself, the rulership. These limits are usually expressed as rights under that Constitution and by extension through various local constitutions rights through each state.

In short, what gives the government the right to rule? The consent by some part of the rulees expressed via the Constitution to enforce that rulership.

Questions, Comments, Suggestions?...

I just thought that I would share this with anyone reading this blog. Its pretty funny... I came up with it on one of my favorite forums.

Background- I read comic books, in fact I have recently returned to them. One of my favorites so far is the Ultimates...

Now this bit of mine is spoilerish but not surprising. As anyone who reads the Ultimates knows Bruce Banner was executed for the murders he commited as the Hulk a while back or at least they tried to. Now in Ultimates 2 #11 Bruce Banner is back.

oh btw, Ultimate Nick Fury is modeled on Samuel L Jackson
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This is an excerpt from Congressional testimoney into the Hulk execution incident.

Senator xxxxxxx "General Fury, it is patently obvious that SHIELD and the Ultimates perpertrated a fraud upon the American people. Bruce Banner, the so-called Hulk, was sentenced to death, a sentence that you General Fury assured the President and the Attorney General as well as the American people that you could carry out. Now in light of this new evidence, the only conclu.....

Fury, "New Evidence my big black ass. The only conclusion that we could reach based on any evidence is the the so-mother fucking called Hulk is one tough mother fucker.... We droped a nuclear bomb on his ass. You dig that? A mother fucking, fuckity god damned nuclear fucking bomb. And the mother fucker lived. Now suck on that evidence Senator."

Astronomy Domine...

Wow, I am glad that I found this torrent. This is a huge torrent, over 1GB, of assorted NASA, JPL and other images. The link is down below with some samples linked to.

If you don't know what a torrent is, email me and I will explain. I don't think torrenting is something that someone should just install Azureus and go for gold.

Note, all of these images in the torrent are FREE, and none are adult. This is an entirely legal torrent here in the US, and to be frank a dl link this is one of the great things about the bittorent technology.

the link
http://isohunt.com/download.php?mode=bt&id=10983625

Samples

The Andromeda Galaxy

the Circinus Galaxy

The Horsehead Nebula

Io, a moon of Jupiter

Craters on Venus

the Viking 1 probe launch from 1975

Some of the better ones are gigantic hi res images, which are over the free Imageshack limit. This is truly worth the download.

A neat thought I had a while back, just thought that I would share it

Up until recently I have considered my life to be a gigantic mistake of epic proportions. Now I perceive my life to be a gigantic mistake of someone else's, a mistake that I intend to take full advantage of.