Archives for September 2005

There are moments in your life when you feel as if you have narrowly avoided being part of or involved in something that is dangerous to your health. I have several of these stories each with varying degree of danger.

This post was prompted by the JetBlue incident that took place yesterday. I have been planning a business trip to New York for quite some time now. For a number of different reasons I have had to reschedule it three times, but at one point in time I had been looking at this week and had intended to fly JetBlue out of Burbank.

None of this really means that I would have been on that flight yesterday, but it is still closer to home than I like. Some of that is because I am not real fond of flying anymore. I used to love it, but now I simply tolerate it as a necessary evil in my life.

Along the lines of being a part of a dangerous situation there was an incident that took place a little more than four years ago. I remember it very well because of what happened and because it took place a week before September 11.

Here is the skinny on that. The family had flown out to Chicago for a family celebration. My son was just short of being nine months old and it was his first flight. If I close my eyes I can still see him looking around the plane, his face rapt with attention.

Due to limited vacation I had to come home a few days earlier than everyone else. And that is how I found myself on the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend waiting to pick everyone up at LAX and I do mean waiting because the flight was supposed to arrive at around 6 PM but didn’t actually land until after 1 AM.

For several hours I paced through the terminal with limited information about what caused the delay. All I knew was that the plane had had some minor mechanical difficulty. Around 4 hours or so into the delay I found out more about what caused the delay.

The person sitting next to me answered a ringing cellphone where they learned from their son who was a passenger on the plane that they had almost been forced to make an emergency landing and that the minor mechanical difficulty was far more serious than United had told those of us waiting for the flight to arrive.

I was both somewhat relieved and more upset to learn that. The moment also taught me more about the incredible love and fear you can have as a parent.

On a side note that can be filed under weird happenings I can also relate that during the waiting at one point in time we were confined to a section of the terminal because the L.A.P.D. were trying to apprehend a suspicious person. I never found out why they wanted this person but I can tell you that in the aftermath of September 11 I wondered from time to time if there was any relationship to that incident or if it was just an odd moment.

I think that this it for now, back later.

My thanks to Jewish Atheist for tipping me off this story in the Washington Post.

“The FBI is joining the Bush administration’s War on Porn. And it’s looking for a few good agents.

Early last month, the bureau’s Washington Field Office began recruiting for a new anti-obscenity squad. Attached to the job posting was a July 29 Electronic Communication from FBI headquarters to all 56 field offices, describing the initiative as “one of the top priorities” of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and, by extension, of “the Director.” That would be FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.”

I am more than a little aggravated by this, but before I mention why let’s take a look at some more of the story.

“The new squad will divert eight agents, a supervisor and assorted support staff to gather evidence against “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography — not the kind exploiting children, but the kind that depicts, and is marketed to, consenting adults.”

Ok, now we are going after consenting adults because we have no other priorities, nothing else is going on. Fortunately I am not the only one who feels this way.

“I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,” said one exasperated FBI agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity because poking fun at headquarters is not regarded as career-enhancing. “We must not need any more resources for espionage.”

Among friends and trusted colleagues, an experienced national security analyst said, “it’s a running joke for us.”

A few of the printable samples:

“Things I Don’t Want On My Resume, Volume Four.”

“I already gave at home.”

“Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves.”

Federal obscenity prosecutions, which have been out of style since Attorney General Edwin Meese III in the Reagan administration made pornography a signature issue in the 1980s, do “encounter many legal issues, including First Amendment claims,” the FBI headquarters memo noted.“

Some of you are probably looking for more details on what this means, allow me to share some more information with you.

“Applicants for the porn squad should therefore have a stomach for the kind of material that tends to be most offensive to local juries. Community standards — along with a prurient purpose and absence of artistic merit — define criminal obscenity under current Supreme Court doctrine.

“Based on a review of past successful cases in a variety of jurisdictions,” the memo said, the best odds of conviction come with pornography that “includes bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior.” No word on the universe of other kinks that helps make porn a multibillion-dollar industry.”

I haven’t seen anything here that makes me think that the gov’t has any business looking at any of this. If consenting adults want to engage in this behavior then that is there perogative. I don’t understand what is sexy about bestiality or some of these other categories, but I don’t have to. Unless you can show me how this is hurting people there is no reason for the gov’t to do this.

Here is another selection for your review in which you see that Gonzales subscribes to the Meese philosophy.

“But Gonzales endorses the rationale of predecessor Meese: that adult pornography is a threat to families and children. Christian conservatives, long skeptical of Gonzales, greeted the pornography initiative with what the Family Research Council called “a growing sense of confidence in our new attorney general.”

Congress began funding the obscenity initiative in fiscal 2005 and specified that the FBI must devote 10 agents to adult pornography. The bureau decided to create a dedicated squad only in the Washington Field Office. “All other field offices may investigate obscenity cases pursuant to this initiative if resources are available,” the directive from headquarters said. “Field offices should not, however, divert resources from higher priority matters, such as public corruption.”

Public corruption, officially, is fourth on the FBI’s priority list, after protecting the United States from terrorist attack, foreign espionage and cyber-based attacks. Just below those priorities are civil rights, organized crime, white-collar crime and “significant violent crime.” The guidance from headquarters does not mention where pornography fits in.”

This just makes me shake my head and if you forgive me for being crude some of these men are in desperate need of a blow job or some other release. In the midst of war there is no reason that I can see that warrants this kind of attention to pornography that is provided by consenting adults fo consenting adults.

How about focusing on the schools and healthcare.

Tags: News and politics, Sex,Terrorism

I received an email from someone who wants to know my goals/objectives are for this blog. Here they are in no particular order.

This is a place where I can air out my thoughts about life and the experiences I have had and will have. It is a place where I expect at some point in the future my children, grandchildren and beyond will be able to learn more about who I am/was and see that there is much more to me than the guy who put food on the table and played games with them.

The blog offers me an opportunity to continually practice my writing so that I can work upon honing my skills and take steps to try and improve them.

It also offers an opportunity to potentially be discovered, that is, maybe someone will love my writing and hire me to write a book. If this doesn’t happen I will be fine because the initial goals/objectives are being met.

And in some respects the most important thing that this blog allows me to do is that it offers me the opportunity to interact with people I might not ever meet.

That is it for now.

I began writing this on a whim this past August. If you haven’t read the first part I recommend that you click here and then click here and you can rejoin us afterwards. FWIW, I am not real happy with the quality of this so it is entirely possible that I will junk it or rework it several times.

Baby, Now That I’ve Found You By Gary Jules

refrain:
“Baby, now that I’ve found you
I can’t let you go
I’ll build my world around you
I need you so
Baby, even though you don’t need me
You don’t need me.

refrain

Baby, baby, since first we met (doot-doot)
I knew in this heart of mine (I wanna tell you, doot-doot)
The love we had could not be bad (doot-doot)
Play it right and bide my time

Spent a lifetime looking for somebody
To give me love like you
Now you’ve told me that you wanna leave me
Darling, I just can’t let you.

refrain
refrain

Spent a lifetime looking for somebody
To give me love like you
Now you’ve told me that you wanna leave me
Darling, I just can’t let you.”

She was a grown woman but falling for Daniel had been like falling in love for the first time again. Anne played the song over and over again. Her heart ached, there was no other way to put it. It was a physical pain, she missed Daniel so much that she couldn’t breathe. Everywhere she went she looked for him, listened for his voice but he was never there.

At night she lay in bed fantasizing about him, wondering what building a life with him would be like. It was all consuming and she was easily lost in her reverie. For hours she would lie there making plans for the future and then her husband would reach for her and the reality of her situation would come crashing down upon her head.

She tried to be present, she tried to be attentive and to tend to his needs and for a while that effort was enough to assuage her guilt but she soon began to find that it was becoming harder and harder to fool herself into believing the tales she told.

So she spoke to Daniel and she talked about ending things. They agreed that they should focus on their current spouses and that if they worked on the relationships that they were in they could salvage them. It made so much more sense and so they tried several times to end it

I say that they tried to end it because they never quite managed to do so. Each time that they agreed to walk away was among the most heartwrenching experiences that they could imagine.

Daniel said that walking away from Anne was like trying to hold his breath for eternity. Daniel was a tough guy who was used to just sucking it up because sometimes that is just what you do but this was the kind of pain that he couldn’t escape. There was no running away to be done because he couldn’t get away from himself and he couldn’t get drunk enough to forget her let alone he was unwilling to take that out.

He had too many responsibilities and whatever the cost he would suffer it to protect his children.

Anne lost 10 pounds the first time that they tried to split up. Her husband was oblivious to her suffering and so when he complimented her on how she looked it was sincere but without any understanding as to why she had stopped eating.

Neither one of them could say who called who or how they ended up speaking again they just knew that they had and if you had seen them the day that they had resumed communicating you would have thought that they had just won the lottery.

The feeling of joy that emanated from the two of them was palpable. What they had learned was the reality that sometimes the heart wants what the heart wants and logic and reason play no part in this.

There are souls that are connected on such a deep and intimate level that once they meet they cannot bear to be separated nor can they reach their full potential without each other. There is a need that they fill in each other in a way that cannot be explained nor understood, just accepted.

Could You Cross The US on $5 a Day? Well Leon is busy making the attempt. I suppose that I am going to have to check in on him periodically and see how he is doing. It has potential.

Tag:random