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| Michael Jackson |
| 11.29.03 (8:13 pm) [edit] |
To adapt a quote from an Elton John song that I'm listening to right now, "Don't let your son go down on me..."
We've all seen the news lately. You'd have to be blind and deaf both to have missed the coverage of Michael Jackson's recent arrest, subsequent $3 million bond, and the pursuant media circus with its own coverage and sub-controversies. Yes, that's right, the King of Pop has once again been arrested on charges of improper conduct with children.
Particularly one child, and this child [i]is[/i] willing to testify against him (unlike the last child who was the center of a case against Jackson and who refused to testify). You know, I almost went along with the crowd to crucify the dirty bastard who would do this sort of misconduct with innocent children. Then I got more facts, and I started to change my mind.
Yes, Michael is a creepy form of life who has had so much plastic surgery that he has almost acheived his goal of looking like a sheet-white copy of Diana Ross. Yes, he's weird and reclusive. Yes, he did build a private theme park at his home in California that is a miniature copy of DisneyWorld (without obtaining the building permits, I might add). Yes, his conduct with children and his own child-like behavior is "disturbed" at best.
But is he guilty of these particular charges? I'm not so sure. Consider the preliminary statement of one of the Neverland Ranch's ranchhands. He stated publically that the mother of the child in question had attempted to blackmail Jackson. She had said before all this occurred that if he didn't "take care of her" all she would have to do is go to the media.
And that is true, that is all a person would have to do. The media is ready to eat up anything connected to Jackson. Why? Well, probably because John Q. Public is just as willing to devour any controversy surrounding any major star. But if you think about it, anyone whose children had been a special guest at the Neverland Ranch could just allege there was some sexual misconduct, and then wheeee! we all hop on the media merry-go-round. Even if there is no criminal guilt found in the case, a settlement from Jackson would mean instant retirement for the parent and a solid college fund for Junior.
Neighbors of the "victim" state the family were regulars of the ranch, and they never seemed troubled by the trips. Jackson accused the police of timing his arrest with the release of his new album (ironically his last arrest coincided with an album release). I don't believe this is the case, but I believe the "victim's" mother timed the charges with the release in order to increase the chance of a quick settlement.
The weight of the facts may be in favor of the prosecution, but the burden of proof required in a criminal case is "beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty". I don't believe there is that much air-tight proof, and the defense will be quick to point this out.
But even if the state doesn't win the criminal case, we all know the settlement check will be hefty in the civil trial that is sure to follow (where the burden of proof is a mere "preponderance of the evidence"). :roll:
[b]
UPDATE![/b] This just in from the International Observer (via Google News):
"It has emerged that the alleged victim went to see a therapist - whom he told that he had been abused - only after his family had already contacted a lawyer linked to the 1993 case. The lawyer helped put them in touch with police.
Perhaps most damaging of all are reports of an audio tape on which the child and his relatives praise Jackson and say he never 'acted inappropriately' towards the boy.
Jackson's side has played a skilful media game, letting only Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, a CNN legal pundit, hear the tape.
Newsom said that on the tape the alleged victim, his brother and their mother all praise the singer effusively as a father figure, saying they were blessed to have him in their lives. The tape was recorded last February after the alleged abuse.
Ugly details have emerged of the home life of the boy, a 12-year-old cancer sufferer. His family pursued two abuse-related lawsuits in the past, once winning more than $137,000 in damages."
Geez....my position only gains more strength.
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| Live longer! Smoke a pipe... |
| 11.29.03 (12:20 am) [edit] |
Well, somehow it's 1:40 in the morning and I'm still here on this computer. I think I need either a sleeping pill or some alcohol. I have to be at work in six hours! And I'm really not looking forward to negotiating with all the people in North America whose Maytag ovens broke over the holiday while cooking turkeys. "What, you say it set your house on fire? Well, let me tell you what I can do for you..."
So instead of sleeping, here I sit, smoking another bowl of C.C. Cavendish pipe tobacco (a local blend) out of my Savinelli briarwood pipe. I'm taken away to another time (long ago) and another side of the world (Italy) where Achille Savinelli began harvesting by hand the most select Sardinian briarwood to begin his wonderful pipemaking tradition. Now, here I sit enjoying the fruits of his genius and commitment to quality.
Clinical studies indicate that pipe smokers live on average 3-4 years longer than the average [i]non-smoker[/i] and 7-8 years longer than the typical cigarette smoker. :shock: Why, you ask? Well, my theory says there are a couple of reasons. Number one, you have to sit and relax to smoke a pipe. Smoking a pipe is often a two-handed operation and takes the better part of an hour. Talk about a great stress-reliever. Number two, you don't inhale a pipe. You sort of play with it, tasting the smoke, much in the same way you smoke a cigar. Picture sucking Coke through a straw, swirling it around, and then spewing it all over the room. That's pipe smoking in a nutshell!
But dawn is drawing nigh, dear friends, and I suspect perhaps I should crawl off to bed and turn off this accursed monitor...
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| Sex and blogs. |
| 11.28.03 (9:54 pm) [edit] |
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Face it, sex sells. Watchfulguardian and Wickedlame are both right. How sad! But that doesn't mean I'm not going to make a totally cheap attempt at exploiting how visually and mentally appealing the word is. :wink:
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| America the Obese |
| 11.28.03 (6:33 pm) [edit] |
[b]We live in a society where intervention is favored over prevention.[/b] One prime example: America the Obese.
Rather than educate the masses about proper eating habits and develop a culture of health-minded individuals, we spend our money on researching how to build mechanical hearts in order to save the man who had a cholesterol-triggered heart attack. This is failed logic to me. Why spend all your resources fixing what could have been prevented?
And why is it so difficult for Americans to eat right? I'm counting myself among the guilty. I'm 5'11", and I went from 140 pounds to 182 in about seven months this year. Why? I got a desk job and started sitting on my ass through the 8-5. And the culture of my work environment is to eat all day long, every day.
Don't get me wrong, food is enjoyable and is not intrisically dangerous to our health. I love food, and enjoy it at least three times a day. :) But without being coupled with (counteracted by?) proper exercise, even the most healthy diet can have ill health effects. Let me step off my soapbox and address the underlying issue.
More and more Americans are being stressed beyond a human's normal limits by the fast-paced life technology has enabled us to have, or rather has cursed us with. We have no time to work out, no time for the family, no time to enjoy life. We seem to think now that if we're not multitasking, we're not being productive. I'm chained to my computer, cell phone, laptop, PDA, etc. And we wonder why we're a nation of fat-asses...
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| Precognition? I knew you would say that... |
| 11.28.03 (3:48 pm) [edit] |
Well, I retreated to my friend Ethan's house yesterday for Thanksgiving. He lives about 15 miles beyond civilization's line of scrimmage, out in the area that God has forgotten was created. The only residents of this area appear to be strange mountain-type folk and a swarm of ladybugs.
Ethan's house has become my "Fortress of Solitude". It's an imposing 3-story house set back about 1/4 mile from the road, well behind a small forest of trees. I stayed overnight last night, beyond the range of cell phone reception and in the land of satellite-only internet.
It was there in that environment so conducive to deep thought that Ethan and I watched a strange movie from 1990 called "MindWalk". It's based on the book [i]The Turning Point[/i], and it consists entirely of a conversation between a physicist, a politician, and a poet. Does it sound incredibly boring? Well, it's not actually. It's more like a Jane Fonda workout for your synapses than the film equivalent of Nytol.
One interesting bit of the movie was a trailer for Stephen Hawking's film adaptation of [i]A Brief History of Time[/i]. That pretty much set the mood for what was to follow, namely a deep discussion of the nature of matter and energy and science's affect on the human race and our society. Interconnections, probabilities...Lots of food for thought.
But that brought Ethan and and me to an interesting discussion point. Stephen Hawking asserts that (and I may be misunderstanding him here) time is a plane of existence so to speak, and he has raised questions about why we can remember the past but not the future. After all, if time is one continuum, why could you not believe that precognition is possible? He does make an interesting point, and it makes you doubt the impossibility of precognition, at least to a degree.
Ethan had an interesting take on this: The history of human culture and society is not cyclical, and is not linear. It's more like concentric circles. There are definate patterns to our behavior, but each succesive generation builds on the foundations of the last. What if precognition is just the subconcious mind's [b]recognition of a pattern of history[/b] communicating its message to the concious mind via dreams or visions? That would mean the vision would not be 100% accurate because it's merely an assumption and imagination of what could happen, rather than a memory of what has already taken place. Seems like a plausible explanation of people with "apparent" powers of forknowledge.
And here is a personal struggle of mine: Sir Isaac Newton set forth certain laws pertaining to matter and the properties thereof. Equal and oppposite reactions and what have you. Albert Einstein then came along about 250 years later and undermined those theories with a concept known as relativity. Both men's work has been useful to our society (after all, we likely wouldn't have been to the moon without Newton). But since Einstein's theories have supposedly been disproved in recent years, who carries the torch of scientific knowledge for us now? Is it Stephen Hawking? A man in a wheelchair with no actual ability to speak with his own voice or write with his hands is the brains behind our current theories of existence...And most of his theories are so deep that the average human could not grasp them. After all, how many theories of Hawking can you name and subsequently explain?
Here we are, sailing our scientific (and perhaps even our metaphysical) ship through the sands of time, skippered by a man whose commands we don't understand. Where are we headed? What practical applications will time theory have in our daily lives?
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| Customizable? You don't say! |
| 11.27.03 (12:06 am) [edit] |
Well! What is this about not being able to add your own header to your blog? Apparently you have to select from a little list of "approved" headers. And you have to have a lot more tBucks than this little newbie rascal has in his pockets...
And here I thought my days of being destitute poor ended with college, but apparently the internet is yet another social ladder I must climb. What choice do I have? None. So, as Jim Carrey said in [i]Liar Liar[/i], "I'm just going to bend over and take it up the tailpipe". :roll:
This day has gone most slowly. How are you supposed to spend days off when you don't have anything in particular to do? Yes, true, I'm moving to a new home this weekend and I could be packing, but I'd rather procrastinate. Eating and doing nothing is the goal of the Thanksgiving holiday, and I intend to pursue that quest with vim and vigor.
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| I've conformed... |
| 11.26.03 (11:22 pm) [edit] |
After endless hours of watching the hosts on TechTV talk about blogging, I have given in. I've begun a blog. How seriously I actually take this remains to be seen.
I'm usually extremely analytical and look for hours before choosing anything, but I settled on tBlog pretty quickly. A good choice? How would I know? This is my first attempt at a blog...
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