A stream of conscious.  What does that mean?  Free flowing thoughts pour forth.  Unknown ideas and related concepts become strung together in some fomat.  If one has a train of thought, a stream of conscious must fire through the neurological pathways in the brain like a speeding, twisting and turning roller coaster ride.  When the mind pouring forth these ideas is as large as every thought expressed on every web page on the planet, just casually browsing the web can turn into a flash flood of the digital planet.

Should a comatose and pregnant mother be kept alive artificially long enough in order to deliver the baby?  I say, yes.  And, it is being done in the case of Susan Torres.  Although this seems to be a highly unusual circumstance, I don't see any moral or ethical problems with it.  As a society, we commonly prolong the life of completely brain dead patients in the hospital in order to harvest organs for transplantation.  While that is more of a scheduling issue and usually doesn't prolong death by more than a day, other suffering and terminal patients wait on long lists for donor organs that save their pathetic and ailing lives.

Practically no one from any spectrum of political or religious thinking believes organ transplantation is unethical or immoral.  Even the typically unmovable and conservative Catholic Church has weighed in on the organ transplantion issue.  Decades ago, the Vatican deemed it a blessing of modern man's technology, and hence, ethical and moral to artificially prolong life because it subsequently preserves the life of another person who is surely condemned to die without the organ transplantation.

On the face of it though, it could seem a bit creepy, especially when viewed in a vaccuum of theoretical morality or ethics.  Stories and modern mythology of third world organ harvesting for transplantion is troublesome -- even if this urban legend about harvesting internal organs actually only happened once with one person in Beijing, China.

But, despite the fact that we are a planet of six billion souls, each person is indeed a new story of tragedy and joy.  Like the Terri Shiavo case, one can't easily make law covering any given personal situation, and politics is certainly not the best boxing ring in which to fight for one side of the argument or another.  When emotions or religious zealotry weigh in on the arguments, logic and scientific facts are usually tossed out with the bath water.

For the most part, science, medicine, law and theology have agreed to pin the question of life and death upon the presence (or lack thereof) of brain activity.  Brain dead is dead.  I think most of the GOP and Evangelical activism concerning Terri Shiavo did not argue this point.  Most of the argument was specifically whether or not Schiavo, herself, was actually in a persistent vegetative state.  The general argument of the vocal Evangelical activism surrounding Shiavo had more to do with their general disdain for the judicial branch of government and its rulings in the Shiavo case, and their fixaton on other pro-life/no-choice social engineering issues. 

While this may seem like an argument that splits hairs -- or actually splits cells -- it is fairly important, when religious beliefs bleed into the arenas of law and government.  The status of the soul is as old as Plato.  The almost romantic notion that life begins at conception is the root of the argument against harvesting stem cells for medical research.  Despite the cuddly grandstanding of the so-called Snowflake Children at the White House, an embryo doesn't have even a hint of a brain until it has developed for about two weeks.

Prior to two weeks maturation, the blissful clump of cells have no brain.  If a person is dead when their previously working brain is dead, why then are a clump of cells with no brain considered to be ethically or morally alive?

Some people will twist this debate by using the potentiality argument.  But like the Snowflake Children, it doesn't answer my specific and basic ethical question concerning the granting of the 'being alive' status, when a week-old embryo can't even be properly called brain dead because it does not even have a brain yet.

The potentiality argument is described by some ethicists as the Home Depot argument.  The stuff for sale inside the Home Depot has the potential to build ten houses, but clearly, it requires some additional effort to build just one house from the building materials.  Similarly, a clump of cells dividing in an invitro fertilization clinic could become a child with a woman willing to carry them around in her belly for the next nine months. Without this additional effort, there is absolutely no potential.

Additonally, there is no conflict between the idea of adopting spare fertilized eggs to become Snowflake Children and using some of them for developing a useful population of embryonic stem cell lines.  There are enough spares to go around for everyone.  The current prohibition based upon romantic religous beliefs only does one thing: it only hobbles the biomedical research capabilities in the U.S. as the work will simply proceed on pace in other countries.

In my humble opinion, it seems hypocritical to use a potentiality argument for Snowflake Children and then not use it concerning embryonic stem cell research by ignoring and dismissing the potentiality of that promising research.  What do you think?


[Headphones] :: Droplet - Takako Mini

I've been AWOL for the last few days here on Dark Skies.  While I didn't experience any direct hit from Hurricane Dennis this year, some of its outflow bands of tornadoes and thunderstorms were worrisome in central Florida.  Personally, I had no inconvenience or trauma from this hurricane, unlike last year's quadruple fun show, but I did get stuck waiting at the grocery store for a nasty feeder band from Dennis to finish its horizontal rains, so I could walk home on Saturday.  I'd gone to the Winn Dixie to buy food just in case the power went out like last year, so at least I could make some sandwiches.

Since I've been having ISP issues, I had post-dated the "blogs" entry when I was not digitally deprived.  So, I haven't really been online since before the London terrorist bombings.  Terrorists suck.  Today, I heard Tom Friedman opine on the "Imus in the morning" show that he is weary of even contemplating "why they hate us" anymore.

I tend to agree with Friedman.  Really, who the fuck cares why the various terrorists hate the western world anymore?  There is nothing we can do to make these people who bring terror upon the planet to stop the activities by the sleeper cells of their religious death cult on any continent.

The only brake upon Islamic-based terrorists' lunacy will come only when the leaders of Islam start discreditting the actions of these mass murderers.  The U.S. military can efficiently capture, kill, or detain one terrorist, but then, two more killers spring up from where the initial one came.  That is not a solution.

Friedman made a salient point.  I'm just going to paraphrase it and put it into my own words.  A generation ago, novelist Salman Rushdie authored a book called "The Satanic Verses," which didn't characterize the Islamic prophet in a way that the Iranian mullahs would have preferred.  Back in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued an official fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for his blasphemy.  I read that book -- I found it to be tedious and boring -- but not so bad as to demand the author be killed for it.

But, Rushdie just wrote a book.  To date, except for some minor league Islamic cleric in Spain, no major league Islamic cleric has issued a fatwa condemning the actions of Osama bin Laden, or al Qaeda for their terrorist acts and the deaths of thousands of people.  Until the leaders of Islam actively take back their own religion, blood will continue to be spilled all over the planet, in my humble opinion.  Suicide bombers don't go to heaven, they are instantly incinerated into a fiery hell of their own making. Duh.

Well, anyway, tomorrow afternoon, I plan to wander aimlessly out into a field where I might catch a glimpse of the Space Shuttle blasting off into space again.  That might give me some hope for the future of mankind.

Oh, and on Friday, I certainly will be checking out Sci-Fi channel's new season of Battlestar Galactica, StarGate, and Atlantis.  I watched a behind-the-scenes show on Monday.  There are a few characters coming onto SG1 that were big on other SF shows.  Mitch Pileggi, Fox Mulder's boss at the FBI on the X-Files is one actor.  Two more actors on Sci-Fi Friday are from the popular show, Farscape.  It really looks very cool.


[Headphones] :: Hurricane Jeanne is Gone - JfZ

According to the Miriam-Webster online dictionary web site, the word "blog" was the number one most looked-up word in 2004.  I feel this might have marked a crucial point in the evolution of cyberspace.  Suddenly, the tipping point happened.  Previously residing safely in the domain of techno-savvy geeks of all stripes and ages, blogs suddenly fell over the cliff of obscurity and into the domain of popular culture with a thud, last year.  Politicians even followed the traditional news media which had been struggling to come to terms with the power of online publishing.

Not Good

Howard Dean raised millions of dollars from thousands of small donations in the primary election season using his online presense which was made hip and current by his campaign's frequently updated blog.  After Dean, the Bush and Kerry campaigns followed his lead, and reached thousands of volunteers, and raised millions of dollars by leveraging this emerging idea in the new digital media.

Now only a year later, blog authors and group blog owner/editors are now frequently used as informed guests on any number of cable news shows.  They talk about blogs and with blog authors on C-Span, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC.  Now, MSNBC even has its twice daily magazine news show called "Connected: Coast to Coast" with hosts Ron Reagan and Monica Crowley airing at 12 and 5 pm.

Not Bad

Almost a year ago, during the Republican National Convention in New York City, I actually felt very connected, even though I could not leave my house.  I was following the unreported gossip via an IRC chat room at [plastic.com] with dozens of other fellow phreeks, some literally transcribing their experiences at convention after-parties on laptops and blackberries via wireless.

I thought it was great fun.  Although I could flip through my cable TV channels and watch live coverage of the convention, many people in other countries could not.  Like BlogDrive, Plastic also has users from every time zone on the planet.  People had to rely on reports and impressions from people on the ground in NYC.  And then, there were also people watching each cable network for pundit spin and propaganda.  The digirati were scooping the stories before the corporate media could make sense of any of them.  Unlike blogs, corporate media only dedicated cupcake reporting about the days of massive protest or the 500,000 protestors in NYC during the Republican National Convention -- or even worse, as Fox so commonly does with news, they simply minimalized its importance by making fun of it.

And, before I continue into my next point, I remember watching Ron Reagan last year and being surprisingly impressed that he had a very quick mind.  He would ask some very astute and pointed questions from his guests in his role as only a stand-in host.  I had a sneaking suspicion that the good impression he made during the convention wasn't just my own and commented that we would see him again on TV.  Now, we do.

So anyway, next and back.  Blogs are no doubt here to stay for a while.  While I have a number of philosophical topics after which I could continue this entry, I just wanted to touch on the recent history of the blog and then give you some web surfing homework.

So Ugly

Half of the people in North America already know this tragic new story, but just last week, little 8-year-old Shasta Groene was rescued from her apparent kidnapper around 2:00 am at a Denny's restaurant in Idaho.  She and her brother, Dylan, had been missing for about six weeks, since local police discovered the rest of her family brutally murdered at their home.  Three people were found in that blood splattered home.

Everyone searched for the two youngest members of the household to no avail.  Nothing.  Then, suddenly after weeks, but only miles away from the original crime scene, the little girl is identified by a waitress and is then miraculously rescued.  It is now feared from the little girl's statements, and likely to be confirmed, that her brother is dead.

The man with whom little Shasta was found is a convicted pedophile, Joseph Duncan.  Police and FBI are investigating everything.  The most very odd thing to me about all of this is that you, too, can obtain some insight into the mind of this monster.  The alleged spree murderer, kidnapper, and child sexual predator, Joe, maintained a blog called Fifth Nail.

His last blog entry dates correspond with the dates of the beginning of the horrific crime.  Tell me what you think.  Do you think this is clearly the private revelations and ponderings of someone who was delusional or psychotic?  Was he a schizophrenic time bomb?  There are phrases in his entries that makes me think that he could be schizophrenic and delusional, but you tell me.  And just a warning: his last entry, "Still Confused," has more than one thousand comments, so read it at your own risk.

Viewed through the disturbing hindsight of his alleged crimes, reading this man's blog might make your skin crawl.  Is it a typical blog in which people reveal things in couched language or does the cynic in you think he was sane and lucid enough to fake all of it as an affirmative defense, such as to document insanity, against his sick premeditated criminal acts?  Again, you decide.


[Headphones] :: Crazy - Gruntruck

I was awake the other night in my normal vampiric fashion when that magic time of television came to pass that I call the Dead Zone.  I happen to be awake because my cat kept waking me up with her annoying "I'm in heat" disgruntled yowling.  Depending on the channel, the Dead Zone usually occurs around three or four o'clock in the morning.  Despite hours of re-runs available to them, many stations simply broadcast those infomercials for various stuff.  Informercial hour (or hours) must happen for a reason, but I just don't know what it could be.

I'm not asking you to admit that you've watched the Dead Zone hour of infotainment because you were on some sort of deleterious and prolonged crack or meth binge -- your reasons for being awake at that unholy hour are your own -- but sometimes I do wonder if some of you have ever even seen these infomercial shows.  And, if you have, do you have any favorite infomercials?

At three or four in morning, there are the usual suspects lurking (loitering) or participating over on the main blogdrive tagboard.  Some of the most hilarious and memorable tagboard chat sessions have happened during the TV Dead Zone.  I can't even imagine living in the United Kingdom, waking up in the morning and while drinking coffee (or likely tea), reading the drunken nonsense taking place on the tagboard at that hour.  Poor Andy.

Recently, the informercials I would have normally flipped past with my remote control have caused me to pause and actually watch them.  Several have invoked memories of past chapters in my life and compelled my attention.  Discounting conspiracy theories of subliminal message persuasion, perhaps one is simply vulnerable to certain things during this hour of marketing to fellow insomniacs.

One unlikely infomercial that grabbed my attention recently is hosted by Kevin Trudeau.  Besides Ron Popeil, Kevin Trudeau is one of the old school daddies of the infomercial.  I happen to have met him on a free Carnival Cruise to the Bahamas one year.  Kevin first made himself into a multi-millionaire by developing and marketing his "Mega Memory" system.  "Mega Memory" is a great educational tool.  It works.  I tried it years ago, and actually still use some of the mnemonic methods in it to this day. I also do remember that my friend, Dances with Stumps, still has my copy of it.  Give it back, dude.

The other informercial that brought back a flood of memories for me was for the Time Life "Legends" rock CD collection.  It is hosted by some Dead Zone hottie whose name escapes me and Roger Daltrey, the lead singer of The Who.  While half of the songs previewed in the seven CD set were before my time, I still remember hearing most of them on the radio.

So, imagine this ridiculous scenario: It's three in the morning and I'm turning up the volume on my TV in order to sing along with half of these friggin' songs.  As my close friends could tell you, I don't sing and I don't dance in public.  But, once in a while in rare spells of ungrumpiness, I'll feel absolutely compelled to sing along to music in private. I'm not one to sing in the shower, but I will occasionally sing along with the radio in the car.

More astonishing to me is the Dead Zone epiphany that I somehow must still have some working neurons somewhere in my brain that have obviously stored the lyrics to these obscure hits of classic rock.  It really made wonder why this trivial knowledge had not been deleted from the wet file storage between my ears.  Even more troubling -- not only do I know the words to sing, but also I'm having flashbacks of teenage proportions remembering girlfriends and insane high school parties that would certainly scare Wayne and Garth.

Jump-starting memories of my own Spicoli high school daze was compelling enough for me to put that product of that particular informercial on my 'someday' list of cash expenditures.  I wrote down the toll free phone number and noted their URL for future reference.  While I think twenty bucks is a bit steep for a CD of old songs, it did bring back all those memories of care-free teenage exhuberance and insanity.  It booted up and defragged some fond memories of wonderful girlfriends.

The memory for every woman for whom I've ever had any true affection can be recalled in my memory by some song that marked that time and place.  Apparently, everyone has some song associated with a past relationship.  I thought perhaps one day I would burn a CD of "our songs." But, before I reveal my own list of Ball Busters on Parade and the songs that nonetheless remind me most pleasantly of those women, I would rather solicit your list from you, first.  You can comment anonymously, after all.

If I get some thoughtful and participatory comments on this topic, I will give you my list in the comments, also.  You show me yours, and I'll show you mine.  And ladies, you're invited to make a song list, too.

[Headphones] :: Jessica: Pleasure Club Mix - JfZ

Happy Independence Day!  Despite the obvious germane opportunity today's U.S. holiday provides me to get hyper-political, I thought I'd just make some general observations.  Today is a day of remembrance.  I acknowledge the ultimate sacrifices my fellow Americans have made in the past to secure my freedom and liberty.  I am also acutely aware of the sacrifices being made by others on my behalf at this very hour.  In addition, I'm aware of people working toward independence from other forces.  Here's one declaration of independence that got us all of us thinking almost a decade ago.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind.  On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.  You are not welcome among us.  You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks.  I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.  You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  You have neither solicited nor received ours.  We did not invite you.  You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.  Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project.  You cannot.  It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.  You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve.  You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts.  Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means.  We are forming our own Social Contract.  This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours.  Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications.  Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.  We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge.  Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule.  We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis.  But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis.  These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.  Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves.  In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits.  We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace.  These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world.  These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron.  In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost.  The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers.  We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies.  We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.  May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

John Perry Barlow
[barlow@eff.org]
Davos, Switzerland
February 8, 1996

[Headphones] :: Bush and Brando Debate - JfZ

Perhaps because I've had some troublesome issues with my Direcway satellite internet service this past month which resulted in me becoming digitally-deprived to some degree, I noticed I had failed to make any entry addressing the familiar hallmark holiday of Father's Day.  Apparently, Father's Day is important to many people, regardless of their personal situation, simply because most of the entire planet lives under the notion of a paternal order for the sake of their gods, governments, and annual gift-giving.

Santa Claus is a man and so is God, according to many traditions.  That's why he's called God, the father.  Mankind's savior in many religious traditions is his son, not his daughter.  Even the devil himself is historically described as a hot-tempered man with pointy horns and bad hair.  Donald Trump might actually qualify under that depiction.  However, anyone who has been married, and then subsequently divorced might argue the gender of Satan based upon their own experience.

I'm not trying to argue some male lesbian point of view that would advocate God, Satan, or Christ should be a girl.  I'm just pointing out a societal given, and how deeply ingrained it is.  We all seem to accept that God is a man, Bush is the anti-christ, and despite religious and political leanings, no one really knows what is up with the Holy Ghost.

Perhaps the Holy Ghost is asexual, like the Easter Bunny.  No one has actually come out and told me that the Easter Bunny is a man or a woman.  If the Easter Bunny is a man though, he's obviously gay.

Some people think the religious concept of the Holy Ghost is simply your innate conscious.  I tend to agree.  1800 years ago, Marcus Aurelius described his conscious as a daemon, whose appetites are both ultimately good or evil.  It's a bit like that modern cartoon characterization of the devil on one shoulder whispering into one ear and an angel guiding you in the other ear.  Despite all the best interventive and profitable measures from the pharmaceutical industry shoving any number of anti-psychotic drugs onto the majority of the world, we still have some concepts of being normal and abnormal.

Even people that don't take any drugs can be a little crazy.  For example, I think Tom Cruise has been brain-washed about any number of things, including any of his beliefs about Brooke Shields.  I won't specifically mention the name of his religion because his church's leaders seem to be able to scan all the documents on the internet even better than the National Security Agency.  Then, they religiously sue people in court.

In addition to my fear of civil litigation in this matter, I am also keenly aware that John Travolta owns a house just a few miles away and I wouldn't want to make him angry.  I just saw Pulp Fiction again the other night.  Besides getting medieval on my ass, he could just accidently flip some switch in the cockpit of his airplane and dump his toilet on my house as he prepared to land at the airfield adjacent to his house.  I certainly wouldn't want to own a house that is stained blue with airplane toilet water.

As far as Tom Cruise, however, I feel he should try some Xanax or Valium to take the edge off his mid-life crisis.  Not to be glib about his career, but after his meltdown interview with Matt Lauer, I see something similar to Howard Hughes' fate for Mr. Top Gun.  Tom's career could be spiraling down and flaming out.  He needs to hit that [eject] button, fast.

Tom's already made a hundred million dollars being the heart throb for teenage girls and Mr. Apple Pie for years, now.  But, all of a sudden, he decides to have a cause-celeb and then be bitchy about it?  Puh-lease.  Go away now, Tom.  Go be that reclusive millionaire who washes his hands after he shuts the bathroom faucet off, after washing his hands.  I beg you.

But, having forgot about Father's Day, I thought I should take stock of my own male role models.  I never met my own father, so I've always had to surrealistically adopt my own male role models.  That might partially explain my own craziness, or not.  I'll leave that up to you to decide.  I do imagine that may be the reason why I completely forgot about the holiday last month, though.

I do have a number of personal and general favorites who could fill the shoes for my own picks for Father's Day role models.  I hesitate to mention my personal favorites by name, though.  I think I should save them the trouble of possibly being added to any federal law enforcement dossier by being associated with me.  Welcome to BushWorld, guys.  I'm so thankful and glad you guys went to WWII, Korea and Vietnam to defend the principles of free speech and privacy laid out in the U.S. constitution only to witness those cherished freedoms eroded away by your peers in the White House, Congress and Supreme Court nowadays.

So instead, I will just name some of my older male role models, heroes, or mentors that are already in the public eye.  In no particular order, they are: John Perry Barlow, George Carlin, Don Imus, George Lucas, and Steve Wozniak.  Hunter S. Thompson has been recently elevated to Holy Ghost status and his mortal remains will be shot out of a cannon.


[Fullscreen] :: Drive Up Experience - Zero Hour

A stream of conscious.  What does that mean?  Free flowing thoughts pour forth.  Unknown ideas and related concepts become strung together in some fomat.  If one has a train of thought, a stream of conscious must fire through the neurological pathways in the brain like a speeding, twisting and turning roller coaster ride.  When the mind pouring forth these ideas is as large as every thought expressed on every web page on the planet, just casually browsing the web can turn into a flash flood of the digital planet.

Last night, I had the opportunity to watch the 2004 International Emmy award-winning documentary by Patrick Collerton about Jonny Kennedy, "The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off," on the TLC/Discovery cable channel.  In my humble opinion, it is an amazing story of courage and strength that will inspire and bring a tear to the eyes of anyone who sees it.  Here is the TLC description of the documentary:

Thirty-six-year-old Jonny Kennedy was born with a terrible genetic condition called dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (EB), which meant that his skin literally fell off at the slightest touch, leaving his body covered in agonizing sores and leading to his final fight against terminal skin cancer.

In his last months, Jonny decided to work with a filmmaker to document his life and death.  The result is a film that tells the uplifting, confounding and provocatively humorous story of an amazing man on a mission to make his final days on earth memorable.  Even at his very final moments, Jonny was still working desperately to raise awareness of this debilitating condition and to help find a cure.  Jonny was also frank about his feelings on his upcoming death and practical about the arrangements. We join him as he chooses his coffin and has the symbols of his life etched into it.  Not shying away from the grim reality of a terminal condition, this film is a celebration of a life lived to the very brim.

The film starts with Jonny picking out his coffin.  He is very matter of fact about his own death.  He feels death is a part of life.  Because of his condition though, his life has been a continuous 24/7 stream of constant and excrutiating pain.  Jonny believes that "Earth is a classroom" and hopes he doesn't have to come back in the next life to learn the lesson he hopes he has learned this time around.

One need only to look first hand at Jonny's hands as he attempts to simply put his own hat on his head -- where his skin has fallen off and regrown so many painful times on his hands that they are literally fused into useless clumps.  His body is entirely covered in bandages, as if he had survived a surely fatal fire.  He can barely ever sleep, as his raw skinless flesh and sores stick to everything and his pain is never ending.

And yet, despite all of it, he has found the courage of a tiger to live on and even help raise funds for the DebRA organization.  He found strength to make his way to the British Prime Minister and was able to secure a pledge from Mrs. Blair to also help DebRA by attending fundraising events.  Jonny literally died the next day.  Mission accomplished, so to speak.

The final scenes of the movie bring us back to beginning.  It is Johnny Kennedy's funeral.  His brother and mother speak a few words, and as Johnny wished, the church is filled with the sounds of his favorite song, Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now."

TLC teamed up with the non-profit organization, DebRA, to air this documentary and brought some awareness to this debilitating medical condition through Jonny Kennedy's own personal narrative.  I'm not sure when TLC may show this again, but even the 30-second preview available at TLC may motivate you to want the DVD, available through debra.org.


[Headphones] :: Hypnophonic - ghost

What the heck is going on in the Bush administration lately?  Despite President Bush's assertions that he and his administration, "don't pay attention to public opinion polls," clearly they are paying attention to the eroding support of the Iraq War by the American people.  The Democrusader can use all the good ole boy, down home euphemisms he can remember to deny it, like "dogs chasing their tails," but something is going on in North Crawford, D.C.  Otherwise, why would Bush be getting TV time this Tuesday to remake his Iraq case using bleacherfuls of soldiers at Ft. Bragg as his backdrop?

I'm wondering how many times in Dubya's upcoming speech, he will have to invoke 9/11.  A little foreshadowing to this theme was given by Karl 'Herman Goring' Rove last week in a speech to conservatives in New York.  In his speech, Rove proclaimed, "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.  Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

"Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country"

-- Hermann Goring, founder of the Nazi Gestapo

Perhaps the President's upcoming speech will speak to the detainee issues at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo.  I seriously doubt it, though.  Unlike the enlisted personnel swept up into the Abu Ghraib abuse slidehow of shame who are being prosecuted, the general officer in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time of the abuse is actually being promoted.

As far as Gitmo is concerned, we need only to listen to Vice President Dick Cheney's recent remarks.  He declared, "They’re living in the tropics. They’re well fed. They’ve got everything they could possibly want."  And old Porkchop Butt should know, too.  His buddies at the Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, were just recently awarded a contract to build more facilities in Guantanamo Bay worth $30 million.

And nearly everyone has heard Cheney's recent assertions that the Iraq insurgency is in its "last throes."  However, last week, in congressional testimony, General John Abizaid, the commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, told members of the committee that he believed "more foreign fighters (are) coming into Iraq than there were six months ago."

Here's my idea: Maybe George Bush should stop holding hands with the Saudi royal family on his Crawford ranch and instead insist their government start arresting some of the hundreds of suicide bombers streaming into Iraq before these terrorists even leave the kingdom?  That might be helpful.  What do you think, good plan, or no?

While I personally think both Bush and Cheney are actually in the last throes of their credibility, I can't wait to hear what comes out of the Democrusader's mouth on Tuesday.  It should be entertaining, in some sort of surreal way.


[Headphones] :: Democrusader - JfZ

Republicans complain that NPR and PBS need fairness or balance to their liberal bias in public broadcasting.  Social conservatives don't feel they should fund television programs that don't project their right-wing political world view.  Whining about political bias in PBS television programming is about as lame an excuse to slash funding as can be imagined.  The fact is that from 6am to 6pm, PBS broadcasts children's programming.


[snark] Maybe I missed the episodes of Sesame Street that outraged the socially conservative right-wing nutbags in America where Bert and Ernie must have revealed their homosexuality and promoted gay marriage, or when Miss Piggy got knocked up by living in sin with Kermit the Frog and promoted abortion, or when the Cookie Monster or Oscar the Grouch promoted drug use to toddlers. [/snark]

I must have might have missed those controversial Sesame Street episodes that surely must be behind the "not with my tax dollars!" mantra of these compassionate conservative nutbags.  I admit I haven't watched daytime PBS television shows since Kimba and Speed Racer were new cartoons.  I'm an adult now.  I thought I'd check out what the right-wing nutbags want to abolish. I use the term abolish because $100 million cut is just the start of their funding cuts, if they get their way with it.  The "not with my tax dollars!" mantra does not mean "not with some of my tax dollars."

Switching over to my local PBS station in Central Florida (WMFE) as I write this, I realize why I don't watch daytime PBS programming.  Children's television programming is like some over the crib auditory and visual stimulation for toddlers that can only be enjoyed by adults who still drop hits of acid.   To the murbled objections of my cat -- I had to turn it off -- after only ten minutes of persual.  I don't feel there is any need to stimulate a psychodelic flash back by watching Teletubbies, today -- thank you very much.  Besides, everyone knows that Tinky Winky is an agent of the vast gay agenda.  I wouldn't want to be brainwashed and I certainly don't need to deal with a brainwashed gay cat.

PBS television shows that I do enjoy in the evening are things like Nova, Frontline, and the News Hour.  Perhaps it is the professional investigative news journalism or science programming that somehow offends right-wing social conservatives.  Go figure.  Nutbags wouldn't want to help fund anything that disagrees with their political or pulpit propaganda, I guess.

At the end of the day, however, my Libertarian medulla oblongata makes me think it might be a great idea to slowly wean the federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the non-profit corporation that then helps fund PBS and NPR.  Despite my fondness for Mister Roger's Neighborhood, I think CPB will find other sources of funding.

But, fair is fair. If the government cuts the funding for PBS and NPR by 25% -- something that all people enjoy -- I think we should cut other federal budgets by the same amount.  For example: let's take a broad budget axe to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and other useless federal law enforcement and social engineering bureaucracies, whose annual federal budgets suck down billions (not millions) of tax payer dollars faster than a cop on crack.

If you were in charge, what program or agency would you eliminate in your government?

[Headphones] :: Boys and Girls (lo-fi stream) - RX

If about 60 million Americans voted for George Bush last November, why do people think that the 'After Downing Street' activism in the news will make some difference?  First, the Downing Street Memo is unlike catching the BushCo cohorts and syncophants in lies or conflicting statements given to the U.S. press.  If the Democrusader, or his boss Dick Cheney, gave (or continue to give) conflicting statements over time, they can simply claim that they are privvy to classified information of which the press has little access.

Similarly, if Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, or Condi Rice knew they had to lie for the benefit of their neo-conservative greater good -- they also knew they could get away with the lies -- by citing national security issues, or claiming that the intelligence they were given has now changed or was faulty, or simply invoking the phrase, "We're at war with terrorists, now."

The true value of the so-called Downing Street Memo, which are actually minutes of meetings between cabinet level officials of the U.S. and U.K. governments, is that they are outside source collaborative documents which more fully verify, in a legal sense, what we knew all along about the Democrusader to be true.

BushCo lied to everyone in the United States, the planet, and to humanity in order to invade Iraq.

The often distasteful analogy between Bush and Hitler has some valid ties to the similarity of the history of the German Weimar Republic.  Much of Hitler's rise to power was legal.  The German parliament gave Hitler emergency powers, just as the U.S. Congress gave Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq, despite their current hand-wringing and much clearer hindsight now.

The Downing Street Memo means that no longer do Bush detractors and his political opponents need to rely on just Bushworld disgruntled employees who write a best-selling scathing account of Dubya's predisposition to right his father's wrongs, Dick Cheney's fixation on the second largest crude oil source on the planet that can only be compared to Cortez's maniacal search for the City of Gold in South America, or even the simple Karl Rovian fact that the powerful Israeli political lobby and the socially-conservative Evangelicals would do a Snoopy dance if we could do some remodelling in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein is a bad man. To my way of thinking, he ruled Iraq like Al Capone ruled prohibition-era Chicago.  However, he did keep the country intact for decades, all sectarian factions, the same way that Al Capone lead the mafia -- by fear of death -- and he kept the booze (oil) flowing.

My attitude toward the politicians holding office now at U.S. federal level can be quantified into the simple question, "What are you going to do, now that you know?" I don't care if they are Republican or Democrat.  Both parties seem to steal the best Libertarian ideas in moments of clarity, anyway. I just hope they aren't so partisan, or jingoistic, to rubber stamp the next pre-emptive strike, after Poland. (cough) I mean, Iraq.

If the United States plays its cards wrong in Iraq, it is entirely possible that the blue-stained fingers of Iraqi democracy could live in a hell worse than Saddam Hussein provided over the last several decades.  Here's my way of explaining it:

In many U.S. cities, it is the law that every dog owner who takes their dog for a walk around the block is required to pick up the dog shit that their dog does leave on the public sidewalk.  The U.S. is already in Iraq.  We can't go back in time.  We're there now.  Since the U.S. voted the Democrusader into office, it's our dog, and our dog shit to clean up in Iraq.

While BushCo may have put the U.S. in this growing foreign policy nightmare, it is up to the American people to show the same courage and belief in democracy that the Iraqi people showed by voting and make the situation right.  If BushCo lied and his underbosses in the Senate or his consiglieries in the House don't have the courage or will to show some integrity and devotion to duty to the constitution and the American people, it's time for them to go.  It's time for them to go at the next available opportunity, in 2006.

Of course for that to take place, you need to get off your ass and register to vote.  If you want the world you live in to change, you have to help.  Sorry about the inconvenience, but that's how the game is played.


[Headphones] :: Dick is a Killer (lo-fi stream) - RX