Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Excerpted e-mail
Hey, it was great to talk to you tonight, Yankee! (You will notice that you have moved up in the world from bein' a DamnYankee.)
How'd you feel about GW's speech? I felt it was fairly kickass (I took the walkman) and I particularly liked the little part about (and I'm paraphrasing here) no other country would be given the opportunity to attack the US on his watch. I'm hopin' that was a (final) warning for Iran.
REPLY:
***-
Ah ahm ahned to be given meah Yankee status.
Yeah, Ol' George is a kick-ass CIC.
I'm very much afraid that the only warning that would affect the current governments of many countries would be their capitol cities disappearing in a bright flash. And we'll never do that first. Some of these fucks are just crazy enough to not care about starting a nuke war. It's pretty clear that the 1973 Yom Kippur War was on the brink of going nuclear, and we almost got sucked into an exchange with the Soviets. Part of the history I've lived. Yuck.
The Taliban claim that they executed people from the Chinook crash is more proof that they don't care. We should just stage a mass execution of everybody at Gitmo wearing an orange jumpsuit, take photos, and pass 'em around. The traitors in Congress have made it clear to the world that anyone can kick us in the nuts and we'll feed 'em good food and give 'em creature comforts, and interrogate them less rigorously than the average mom questioning teenagers late for curfew.
-me
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
None Dare Call it Treason
Amendment I - Freedom of Religion, Press, Expression. Ratified 12/15/1791.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#Am1
Treason
treason n the offense of attempting to overthrow the government of one's country or of assisting its enemies in war Source: NMW http://www.usconstitution.net/glossary.html#TREASON
Article III, Section 3 - TreasonThis is a subject that has been weighing heavily on my mind the past few years. My oath of office includes the phrase, "do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States... against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance...".
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted. http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#A3Sec3
The Bill of Rights is our safeguard against government infringement on G-d-given rights. With rights come responsibilities. You can speak freely, but you shouldn't needlessly shout "fire" in a crowded theatre. You can worship whomever and however you will, but you may not use your neighbor or his children for a human sacrifice. You can keep and bear arms, but you may not wantonly slaughter moonbats, no matter the temptation.
So we arrive at treason. At what point does political discourse become treason? When it reaches the point defined in Art. III, Sec. 3. Some of our politicians and celebrities, while not openly "adhering to their Enemies", are arguably providing "Comfort", if not direct "Aid". And we have enemies. Only a moron or a willful idiot refuses to recognize that we are engaged in a World War. Whether you call it "GWOT" or jihad, it is nothing less than a struggle for the survival of Western civilization in general; the United States of America in particular. If we lose this war we do lose everything.
Certain members of the Congress have recently made statements that are dangerously divisive, injurious to military morale and operations, and can only aid our enemies. You only have to glance at MSM coverage of the past few weeks to find many egregious examples of this. We saw this occur once before, during the war in Viet Nam. Some of the same players from then are still at it.
Two notable examples:
JG Kerry, Viet Cong war hero 1971-2005
Teddy "Bluto" Kennedy,
, the last person to see 
alive.Some call it free speech. In time of war, I dare call it treason, and I call upon the Attorney General of the United States to investigate, and determine if prosecutable offenses have been committed by Senators Kerry, Kennedy, and Durbin, among many others.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Short!
Friday, June 17, 2005
Gawwleee- them Hollyweird special effects is really sumptin'!
(I told the guys we needed to do a better job of concealing the wires and det receivers)
/do I need a tag?
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Terri's autopsy
UPDATE 17JUN05:
Here's a link to the autopsy. As soon as I finish digesting all 39 pages, I'll comment further. The first things that jumped out at me-
Cause of Death: Complications of Anoxic Encephalopathy
Manner of death: Undetermined
(italics mine)
The initial gross exam is of a female who is *gasp* dehydrated.
My initial opinion still stands.
Autopsy Report
Posted on Wed, Jun. 15, 2005
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Autopsy on Schiavo reveals massive, irreversible brain damage
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - What caused Terri Schiavo's brain damage remains a mystery, but Florida medical authorities Wednesday said the injury was "massive" and irreversible, and left her blind.
An autopsy on Schiavo, who became the focus of a nationwide debate about life and death, found that her brain had atrophied to less than half the normal size, medical examiner Jon Thogmartin said during a news conference in Largo, Fla.
"There was massive neuronal loss," said Thogmartin, chief medical examiner for Pasco and Pinellas counties, referring to brain cells. "This damage was irreversible."
He added that "no amount of treatment" could have repaired the damage. He concluded that she was blind, a key finding because some believed she could follow objects with her eyes.
The report also found no evidence of ill treatment, either before or after her brain was damaged.
Schiavo, 41, died March 31, almost two weeks after the feeding tube keeping her alive was removed. She collapsed in 1990 and, for the following 15 years, was in what doctors testified was a "persistent vegetative state."
She was the subject of a very public, seven-year legal fight over her diagnosis and desires that pitted the Schindler family - her parents and siblings - against her husband, Michael Schiavo. He wanted to remove the feeding tube, arguing that she would not want to live after such serious brain damage.
Her family contended that she was responsive and could get better. As a Catholic, they said, she would have chosen to live, no matter what.
Ultimately, their battle drew in about 40 judges in six courts, the president, Congress and many religious groups. President Bush signed a bill, rushed through by Congress in March, in a last-ditch effort to restore her feeding tube. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday the autopsy did nothing to change Bush's position that Schiavo's feeding tube should not have been disconnected.
At the Florida news conference, Thogmartin emphasized that persistent vegetative state is a "clinical" diagnosis made only by doctors who examine a living patient.
But Stephen J. Nelson, chief medical examiner for the 10th judicial circuit of Florida, who helped perform the autopsy, said, its findings are "very consistent with persistent vegetative state."
He said Schiavo's brain weighed 615 grams, 220 grams less than that of Karen Ann Quinlan, the subject of another famous right-to-die debate. Quinlan died after 10 years in a persistent vegetative state, his report said.
Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos, said Terri's husband was "pleased to hear the hard science and evidence" that corroborated what he has been saying for years - that Terri could not be fed by mouth, that no rehabilitation or therapy could improve her condition and that she had not been abused.
Felos also noted the finding that Terri was blind, considering the "deep impact on the public" of video footage in which Terri appeared to respond to her mother and follow the movement of a balloon with her eyes.
"We have been saying for years and years and years ... that Terri's eye movement and apparent response to visual stimuli was a reflexive action.
"It's a hard fact, a scientific fact, that Terri Schiavo was blind. She couldn't see her mother," Felos said.
He also said that Michael Schiavo had decided to release to the public some of the autopsy photos, although he did not know when. He has not decided yet what to do with his wife's ashes.
Barbara Weller, an attorney who represented the Schindlers, said the family still disputed the diagnosis of a persistent vegetative state. "They know what they experienced when they were with Terri."
The central moral question, she said, remains. "Is it really moral for us to kill people because their quality of life is not what a judge thinks it should be? We still have to ask in America whether we really want people killed in that way."
Terri's family, Weller said, "didn't care what her physical condition was. They would have loved her and cared for her no matter."
The cause of Terri Schiavo's collapse has never been proven, but testimony in a 1992 civil trial indicated she probably was suffering from an eating disorder that led to a chemical imbalance and heart attack.
Thogmartin said he did not find enough evidence to prove she suffered from bulimia, and was unable to establish exactly what had caused her brain to get too little oxygen and blood in 1990.
Terri Schiavo's parents have accused Michael Schiavo of abusing her, a charge he vehemently denies.
Thogmartin said that there was no evidence immediately after Schiavo's collapse, during her care or from the autopsy itself that she had been the victim of abuse or trauma.
Schiavo, who grew up in Huntingdon Valley, Pa., and later moved to Pinellas County, Fla., died in March, he said, from dehydration, not starvation.
Brain experts who read the autopsy praised its thoroughness and agreed that it showed extensive damage from which there was no hope of recovery.
"This is horrendous, horrific and irreversible," said David Brock, a neurologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
While doctors cannot tell how well a brain is functioning from an autopsy, Ronald Cranford, a University of Minnesota neurologist who examined Schiavo when she was alive, said he believed "any reasonable person would conclude she was in a vegetative state."
In addition to the blindness, the autopsy showed that Schiavo's hippocampus, the seat of memory in the brain, was profoundly damaged, said Lawrence Kenyon, a neuropathologist at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. "If you have damage to your hippocampus, you cannot remember anything, so there is no way for you to learn or improve at all," he said. The autopsy would not rule out any higher functioning, he said.
There also was damage to her spinal cord, a sign that "any sensations she was getting below the neck would have been tremendously diminished," said Kenyon, who is director of autopsy at Jefferson. "She might not have been able to feel very much, if anything."
Pamela F. Hennessy, spokeswoman for the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation in Clearwater, Fla., an organization that fought the removal of her feeding tube, said that she was "relieved" that Thogmartin and his staff "were very painstaking and thorough."
"His report, however, does leave a lot of unanswered questions," she said. "It doesn't really offer much in the way of closure, as far as what happened to her. ... There is still no explanation why this healthy, sober, energetic 26-year-old woman fell into this respiratory arrest and ensuing heart failure."
She said that Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, were unavailable for comment because of a prior commitment.
However, "I don't know if the Schindler family will ever have closure on this. At the end of the day, (in effect,) a judge told them to sit down, shut up and let their kid die."
The Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, who as director of the Christian Defense Coalition organized protests outside the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo was being cared for, said the autopsy only energized his cause.
"I think it actually brings more passion and energy into those advocates who worked diligently to save Terri's life," he said.
"It affirms the fundamental position of why we got involved in this case to begin with. ... Terri Schiavo was not terminally ill. Terri Schiavo did not have a sickness. Terri Schiavo was simply disabled, and so a disabled person was dehydrated before our very eyes."
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© 2005, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Visit Philadelphia Online, the Inquirer's World Wide Web site, at http://www.philly.com
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
Link to my previous posts on Terri:
http://herbertsobel.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_herbertsobel_archive.html
Flag Day/U.S. Army's Birthday
June 14th is Flag Day. It is also the Army's birthday- 230 this year. I didn't have any parties to go to, but I did visit the Marines.
The local Marine Corps League graciously allows me to be a 'social member', that I may take meals and drink there. They even address me as 'L-T'. Yesterday they had a very moving flag retirement ceremony. No mention of the Army's birthday, but I'm OK with that. They're Marines, after all. There was a small crowd there, and the local TV news people did a decent take on the ceremony.
I was saluted by the local Marine unit's 1SGT, an imposing figure in Dress Blues with a wall of decorations, including a .50 cal marksmanship badge-very cool. I am always humbled when people of that accomplishment follow me or show respect. This time around, I've encountered very few soldiers, Marines, sailors, or airmen that I wouldn't want at my side or watching my back. Those few- you know who you are.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
HTML follies
Update: fixed.
Idiotarians, the Rising Tide, and My Civil War Index
This morning I logged on and found the article below referenced by LGF. The general level of moonbattery seems to be rising at an accelerated pace. TNTC, and generating personal unease. To use the Skywalker family expression, "I've got a bad feeling about this". So the clock (civil war index: ) gets nudged again. Not much time left. I believe that there are a great many people who want the unthinkable to happen, and many others who will justify their actions by helping generate self-fulfilling prophecy.
From the Wall Street Journal Online (hat tip:LGF):
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The Great Ground Zero Heist By DEBRA BURLINGAME On Memorial Day weekend, three Marines from the 24th Expeditionary Unit who had been wounded in Iraq were joined by 300 other service members for a wreath-laying ceremony at the empty pit of Ground Zero. The broken pieces of the Twin Towers have long ago been cleared away. There are no faded flags or hand-painted signs of national unity, no simple tokens of remembrance. So why do they come? What do they hope to see? The World Trade Center Memorial will break ground this year. When those Marines return in 2010, the year it is scheduled to open, no doubt they will expect to see the artifacts that bring those memories to life. They'll want a vantage point that allows them to take in the sheer scope of the destruction, to see the footage and the photographs and hear the personal stories of unbearable heartbreak and unimaginable courage. They will want the memorial to take them back to who they were on that brutal September morning. Instead, they will get a memorial that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the yearning to return to that day. Rather than a respectful tribute to our individual and collective loss, they will get a slanted history lesson, a didactic lecture on the meaning of liberty in a post-9/11 world. They will be served up a heaping foreign policy discussion over the greater meaning of Abu Ghraib and what it portends for the country and the rest of the world. * * *The World Trade Center Memorial Cultural Complex will be an imposing edifice wedged in the place where the Twin Towers once stood. It will serve as the primary "gateway" to the underground area where the names of the lost are chiseled into concrete. The organizers of its principal tenant, the International Freedom Center (IFC), have stated that they intend to take us on "a journey through the history of freedom" -- but do not be fooled into thinking that their idea of freedom is the same as that of those Marines. To the IFC's organizers, it is not only history's triumphs that illuminate, but also its failures. The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona. The public will be confused at first, and then feel hoodwinked and betrayed. Where, they will ask, do we go to see the September 11 Memorial? The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation will have erected a building whose only connection to September 11 is a strained, intellectual one. While the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground. Most of the cherished objects which were salvaged from Ground Zero in those first traumatic months will never return to the site. There is simply no room. But the International Freedom Center will have ample space to present us with exhibits about Chinese dissidents and Chilean refugees. These are important subjects, but for somewhere -- anywhere -- else, not the site of the worst attack on American soil in the history of the republic. More disturbing, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is handing over millions of federal dollars and the keys to that building to some of the very same people who consider the post-9/11 provisions of the Patriot Act more dangerous than the terrorists that they were enacted to apprehend -- people whose inflammatory claims of a deliberate torture policy at Guantanamo Bay are undermining this country's efforts to foster freedom elsewhere in the world. * * *The driving force behind the IFC is Tom Bernstein, the dynamic co-founder of the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment Complex who made a fortune financing Hollywood movies. But his capital ventures appear to have funded his true calling, the pro bono work he has done his entire adult life -- as an activist lawyer in the human rights movement. He has been a proud member of Human Rights First since it was founded -- as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights -- 27 years ago, and has served as its president for the last 12. The public has a right to know that it was Mr. Bernstein's organization, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union, that filed a lawsuit three months ago against Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was Human Rights First that filed an amicus brief on behalf of alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla, an American citizen who the Justice Department believes is an al Qaeda recruit. It was Human Rights First that has called for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the alleged torture of detainees, complete with budget authority, subpoena power and the ability to demand that witnesses testify under oath. In fact, the IFC's list of those who are shaping or influencing the content and programming for their Ground Zero exhibit includes a Who's Who of the human rights, Guantanamo-obsessed world: • Michael Posner, executive director at Human Rights First who is leading the world-wide "Stop Torture Now" campaign focused entirely on the U.S. military. He has stated that Mr. Rumsfeld's refusal to resign in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal is "irresponsible and dishonorable."• Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, who is pushing IFC organizers for exhibits that showcase how civil liberties in this country have been curtailed since September 11. • Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University who, even as the bodies were being pulled out of a smoldering Ground Zero, wrote, "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House." This is the same man who participated in a "teach-in" at Columbia to protest the Iraq war, during which a colleague exhorted students with, "The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military," and called for "a million Mogadishus." The IFC website has posted Mr. Foner's statement warning that future discussions should not be "overwhelmed" by the IFC's location at the World Trade Center site itself. • George Soros, billionaire founder of Open Society Institute, the nonprofit foundation that helps fund Human Rights First and is an early contributor to the IFC. Mr. Soros has stated that the pictures of Abu Ghraib "hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself." While Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and LMDC are focusing their attention on the economic revival of lower Manhattan, there has been no meaningful oversight with respect to the "cash cow of Ground Zero." Meanwhile, the Freedom Center's organizers are quickly lining up individuals, institutions and university provosts with this arrogant appeal: "The memorial to the victims will be the heart of the site, the IFC will be the brain." Indeed, they have declared the World Trade Center Memorial the perfect "magnet" for the world's "great leaders, thinkers and activists" to participate in lectures and symposiums that examine the "foundations of free and open societies." Put less grandly, these activists and academics are salivating at the prospect of holding forth on the "perfect platform" where the domestic and foreign policy they despise was born. Less welcome to the Freedom Center are the actual beneficiaries of that policy. According to the New York Times, early renderings of the center's exhibit area created by its Norwegian architectural firm depicted a large mural of an Iraqi voter. That image was replaced by a photograph of Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson when the designs were made public. What does it mean that the "story of humankind's quest for freedom" doesn't include the kind that is fought for with the blood and tears of patriots? It means, I fear, that this is a freedom center which will not use the word "patriot" the way our Founding Fathers did. * * *The so-called lessons of September 11 should not be force-fed by ideologues hoping to use the memorial site as nothing more than a powerful visual aid to promote their agenda. Instead of exhibits and symposiums about Internationalism and Global Policy we should hear the story of the courageous young firefighter whose body, cut in half, was found with his legs entwined around the body of a woman. Recovery personnel concluded that because of their positions, the young firefighter was carrying her. The people who visit Ground Zero in five years will come because they want to pay their respects at the place where heroes died. They will come because they want to remember what they saw that day, because they want a personal connection, to touch the place that touched them, the place that rallied the nation and changed their lives forever. I would wager that, if given a choice, they would rather walk through that dusty hanger at JFK Airport where 1,000 World Trade Center artifacts are stored than be herded through the International Freedom Center's multi-million dollar insult. Ground Zero has been stolen, right from under our noses. How do we get it back? Ms. Burlingame is a member of the board of directors of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines fight 77, which was crashed at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
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