The Legal Angle

Amy already beat me to the punch on this whole Terri Schiavo issue with a couple good postings. Rather than dillute what she's said by adding my own poorly written two cents on the euthenasia issue, I'd rather talk about the whole legal/political quagmire that's been created by this politically driven fiesta.

First of all, I'd like to give a big '%$&@ you!' to the media for helping to make sure this became a polarizing issue. If this story had not been so overly stuffed down our throats, the politics of the situation would have never materialized. I'm sure this is probably not the first time a disagreement over euthenasia has ended up in the courts, but the publicity on this specific case has helped to even further polarize are already fractured nation.

Now here's my biggest issue with the whole damn affair: why did the legislatures (both state and federal) get involved in the first place? The case had properly wound itself through the existing legal system and come to a final conclusion that there was significant enough evidence that Terri would not want to be kept alive in her current state AND that her husband had the final right in determing what to do. Unfortunately, the conservatives in the legislature were unhappy with this, and decided to try to circumvent the whole judicial branch by making a new law, which was eventually struck down as unconstitutional. Then the federal legislature tried to force the issue again by moving the case to federal courts, where it has once again been affirmed that the original decision is sound.

First of all, since when did Republicans start to think that shifting power from the states to the federal government was a good thing? I thought that was supposed to be a key value, if not THE key value of the party. Then again, so was fiscal conservativism, reduced government roles in public life, and decentralized power. I don't think any of those have fared well in the modern era.

The whole situation makes the religious right come off as the little kid who would keep asking everyone he could for permission to do something until he finally got it. Of course, what happens when the courts continue to uphold the law as it is written? Start calling the judges and members of the system "activists" and attempt as much as possible to villify them in the court of public opinion. This, of course, is the peak of hypocrisy. If a similar judge were to overturn Roe vs. Wade for example, he/she would be made out to be a hero by the same people who are currently indicating that a judge doing his/her job is an "activist".

I see a very concering trend growing where the conservative elements in the legislative and executive branch are trying to erode the judicial branch. In other words, there seems to be a concerted effort to erode the balance of power, and the potential reasoning seems downright frightening to me. I think the conservatives are trying to take a two pronged approach: (A) Weaken the judicial system and it's credibility as much as possible, and (B) Probe for ways to bypass the system. It all seems part of a bigger plan to start passing social agenda based bills/laws, and having them slip their way through the system unscathed. I think our current governing majority has a significant interest in "legislating morals" and they're trying to get the ball rolling.

I also think that conservatives were hoping to use Terri as a way to shoe horn their way out of Roe vs. Wade. Any judgement that attempted to place the right to life (Terri's life) over the right to liberty (her choice of how to live/die, and her husband's choice for the same) would start a snow ball which would ultimately consume Roe vs. Wade. I honestly think the vast majority of these politicians don't give one iota of a care about poor Terri, but they're drooling over themselves at the potential impacts they can withdraw from the case.

Articles like this one only further validate the vast majority of my opinions (and get my blood boiling). I could spend the next several hours writing all the contrary thoughts that come up from reading things like this, but I think the vast majority of you have the same kind of responses.

Everyone always talks about life being the most important right, but without liberty, what's the point (New Hampshire's got that right). The conservatives are currently trying to steal Terri's right to liberty, but all they can talk about is protecting her "right to life". Maybe they should try to remember that the government is supposed to provide for all rights, not just the ones most politically convenient.

Honestly, I find myself stuck somewhere between fury and worry. I really hope this ends soon, for both Terri's sake, and for the nation's.

Green Liquid

Let this be a lesson to you all. . . never complain about how bad things are, because they can always get worse. It's now even earlier in the AM, I've had even less sleep, my feet have even bigger blisters, and I have even more reports to write. Guess this is just fate punishing me for wasting time putting an entry in my blog. . . wait a minute, I did it again!

On a side note, while my present predicament primarily precludes (yay alliteration!) the consumption of green brewskis (as in the beverage Ted Kennedy would consume, not Ted the linebacker), I was able to find myself a green beverage with which to celebrate St. Patrick's day. It just so happens that my beverage of choice (especially when trying to stay awake at 3AM) happens to be green: good ol' Mt. Dew.

The "green" of Mt. Dew is of such a fundamentally artificial and bright color that it invokes thoughts of those animals in nature who sport bright and obnoxious colors as a warning that consuming them is dangerous to one's health. It's as if the makers of the product are saying: "This product is dangerous, we strongly recommend you do not consume it," a view even further reinforced by the "Do the Dew" commercials which sport people doing unbelievably dangerous things all while holding said beverage.

Regardless, it is a green beverage. If I cannot damage my liver tonight by consuming vast quantities of alcohol, the least I can do is give myself Diabetes through the consumption of vast quantities of caffiene and sugar. After all, isn't self destructive behavior what St. Patty's day is all about?

Promotions

Being promoted is supposed to be a good thing right? Because it's currently 1AM (that means the one right after midnight), my feet are blistered, I still have a report to write, and I am still at work. It's a good thing I'm a group leader now. . . .

Badger Brew

Coffee and I have a somewhat troubled relationship. I've never been a huge coffee fan, and I am certainly not an addict. I like to drink it every now and then, but preferably with a large amount of the beverage containing things that are NOT coffee. While this is partially due to the fact that I don't find the taste of coffee anywhere near as compelling as its smell, my ambivalence is mainly predicated on the fact that my digestive system and coffee will randomly have "disagreements".

Now it's not like these disagreements occur every time I drink some brew, it's a partially random occurrence. I say partially, because the probabiliy of having "problems" is inversely proportional to the amount of food I have eaten prior to drinking coffee. An empty stomach has about an 80% probability of issues. Otherwise, any small meal is enough to drop my chances of a problem to around 25%. I really should do a complete statistical analysis, but I'm not so sure I want to do the data collection.

Generally, as a result of the general "disagreement", my digestive system will generally cramp up as a complaint. It's not debilitating, but it certainly is uncomfortable. At the same time. . . in an attempt to escape the argument, the coffee will rush through my digestive tract as quickly as possible, I do not think I need to elaborate on the results. Regardless, I am generally only mildy inconvienced by the whole ordeal, which is why I still take the risk of drinking coffee from time to time.

But then today happened.

So one of the Japanese engineers who's been working at my company for as long as I have is getting sent back to Japan to work on other projects. This morning he brought in a jug of Starbuck's coffee (he's a bit of a coffee snob) to share with the group as a sign of thanks. I think this was also intended to help the people who might have hangovers from his going away party the prior evening (I know several people who definitely should have hangovers). Without thinking, I made myself a cup of coffee (extra/extra of course) and proceeded to down it within the next few minutes. It wasn't until I finished the cup that I realized I had eaten nothing yet that morning.

Aware of the high probability of impending discomfort, I made sure my schedule was free for the next couple of hours, and prepared to wait it out. I was in the middle of talking to one of my coworkers when it hit me. . .

Now I was expecting the usual mild discomfort, followed by a trip to the men's room. Instead I was greeted with excruciating pain. It felt like somehow someone had managed to hide a badger in my coffee, a badger who had finally become fed up with the moist confines of my intestinal tract, and had decided to claw his way out through my abdomen. The pain was so bad my vision actually dimmed, and I had to support myself with my arm against the desk to keep from toppling over. My coworker, who had been chatting away stopped to ask me if I was ok.

"Definitely not," I told him, "I'll be back in a while. . . . . maybe."

It was a long and horrible walk to the restroom, and the source of my pain turned out to be nothing much more than gas, but dear lord did it ever hurt. I only experienced the one instance, no aftershocks of any kind.

I can say one thing for certain. . . I don't think I will ever drink coffee again on an empty stomach, it's simply not worth the risk. I also think I'll stay away from any Starbuck's boxes o' coffee, because I'm convinced they hide badgers in there.

Accordions

Random incident for the day:

As those of you in the New England area might be aware, we got hit with a pretty nasty storm this evening. You know, the usual. Rain, that turns to sleet, that turns to hail, that turns to snow, winds in the 30mph range, and a temperature swing from 40 down to 15.

Lucky me, I had the joy of trying to drive Kerri and myself home (with Freya) after the roads had been covered in the slippery mess. After negotiating the lovely highway between our houses at an astounding 25 mph, while dodging the SUV's that rocketed past as if 4 wheel drive somehow provides invincibility, we turned off at the exit to the state route that leads to my house. While winding our way through the horribly designed exit (seriously, who uses an S-curve as an exit ramp?. . . never mind, I live in Rhode Island) we found ourselves stuck behind a slowly moving car, who was stuck behind an even slower moving Tractor-Trailer.

Now, RI has a truck stop. . . that's right A truck stop, it advertises proudly how it is in fact the only one (or at least, the only 24 hour one). However, due to a significant design flaw, said truck stop requires that the drivers make a sharp turn of the state route in the middle of a rather steep hill.

As I mentioned before, the truck in front of the car in front of me was travelling rather slow. As anyone with a basic knowledge of physics can tell you, this does not provide for a significant amount of momentum when you have to drive up a hill. Needless to say, the driver got a lesson in physics, at the expense of those of us stuck behind him.

About half way up the hill to the truck stop, the truck appeared to stop, which resulted in me exclaiming "What the (expletive) is he doing?". Then, like the boulder of Sisyphus, the truck began to slide back down the hill towards the long line of cars, stacked behind like a potential set of dominos. At first I thought it was an optical illusion, at least I did until he collided with a dull "thud" against the front of the unfortunate care before me.

At this point, time slowed down. Kerri began yelling "They're coming right for us! They're coming right for us!" I began looking for options. Couldn't back up because there was an SUV (who had been ever so politely tailgaiting me since the exit ramp) parked directly behind me. Couldn't get to the side because there wasn't enough room between me and the slowly descending train of destruction. At this point in time, Freya took advantage of all the commotion and jumped into Kerri's lap.

The only thing to do was to trust that the brakes and the wheels on my trusty little civic could work in tandem to stop the lumbering behemoth. Otherwise, I had images of being crushed like a tin can between a large column of destruction. So I gritted my teeth, pressed even more firmly on the brakes, and hoped.

There was a "bang!" as the car that had become the truck's trolley collided with my front bumper, sending Freya into a frenzied panic of jumping back and forth between Kerri's lap and mine, then silence. Somehow my car had become "The little Civic that could" and had stopped the backward motion. The truck somehow managed to gain footing, and pulled away, disappearing into the blowing snow as he drove into the truck stop, never stopping to ensure that everyone was ok. The driver of the other car and I pulled over to the side of the road to survey the damage. The truck had snapped off her license plate holder and bent in the top of her hood a little, however the rear of her car and the front of mine showed no observable damage.

We quickly exchanged numbers, then she chased off after the truck to try and find it in the sea of trucks already parked at the truck stop, hoping to call the cops with the truck's information. We drove home the rest of the way without incident.

I have no clue if the poor woman ever tracked down the truck responsible for the problem. I hopefully will get a call sometime in the next couple of days from a police man asking for my version of the story. Something needs to happen to the truck driver who would simply run away from an accident like that.

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In other news, a big thanks to Kristen and her family for being such pleasant hosts to a couple of complete strangers, and a thanks to Amy for inviting us along in the first place. Playing "snow golf" on a frozen lake in Maine in the middle of March was not something I would have originally forseen taking place.

The Infinite Loop

When I posted before about how I was rather disgusted by the whole Everquest II /Pizza function, I figured the whole thing was going to be a relatively small blip on the radar. Now the whole issue has developed into a bit of a furor, and I've noticed opinions on the piece popping up all over the place. What frightened me most was this piece over on CNN Money and how it interpreted the whole system and it's implication.

The basic idea is that video games are going to start employing more and more marketing internal to the game. The biggest issue for this newly expaning advertising venue is to find a way to put product into the game without directly offending the consumer. In other words, they aren't concerned about whether or not this kind of thing belongs in the games to begin with, they just want to make sure to do it in a fashion that pisses the least number of people off.

It's a win win situation for the game publishers and the advertisers. The publishers get an additional revenue stream (because apparently the money they get off the game itself, plus the subscription fees that are becoming more common, aren't enough), and the advertisers get repeated exposure. Unlike in most other media, where you can merely turn the page, flip the channel, fast forward, etc. and still get the content you're interested in, proper penetration into a video game is impossible to bypass, you have to put up with it to get the content that you want.

My frustration level with advertisements is at an all time high. When I try to listen to WEEI, I end up needing to spend almost half my time listening to advertisements if I want to enjoy any of the sports talk. I now pay $10 to go to a movie, where I am forced to sit through advertisements before I can even watch the film itself. Marketing as a whole seems to be taking the overall shotgun approach: we don't care if our product is on target for you, we'll just throw as much stuff out there as we can and hope that some of it hits.

Now the ideal solution I'm sure some people would like to point out is to simply boycott all of these heavily marketed products. However, I know this is not a feasible solution. First of all, I am a happy consumer. I like consuming things. Give a product cool abilities, neat functions, or lots of sugar and I'm there. Second, I'm also well aware that no matter how pointed and full of ire I am when it comes to boycotting a product, none of the people doing this marketing are going to give a damn if I don't buy their product. Persuasive I may be (not), but I can't convince everyone out there "Hey, stop using product X because they advertise too much." Hell, if rumors of child labor and other such 'Big Business' atrocities/negative publicity aren't enough to significantly dent sales, how can "too much advertising" have any effect on the bottom line.

Maybe that's really the problem. We keep talking about a "consumer backlash" if advertising ever gets too intrusive, but other than the Spiderman 2 bases in baseball last season, there's been very little real backlash (it's not as if Spiderman 2 did poorly at the theaters). I'm convinced that marketing has become insidious enough that we've literally come to accept it as a normal part of everyday life, and therefore there is almost no limit to how far marketing can go. Personally I wish we could go back a couple of steps to where I could easily ignore much of it if I wanted to, but I think the snowball has gotten way too big for any such reversal at this point.