Dawning Daunting Questions or "Thinkin about a Ma'skeeter"

As i sit here at my ancient computer, staring into my equally ancient 15" screen 3' thick 75# dinosaur of a monitor, ("upgraded" in 07' with a brand new top-o-the-line glare guard to help keep me from going blind,)....this big old ma'skeeter came flyin cross the screen and I smacked him, just like that! Squished him in a heartbeat on the first try, with a swift and sure clap of the hands struck together "in a flash," I caught him dead-smack right in mid-air. It was a perfect execution. No sooner was the deed done when it dawned on me,...."Wow," I thought to myself, "I just kilt a living thing." And I wondered, "What kind of hypocrite am i?" Here i am always mouthing off about no-kill this and no-kill that and a respect for all living things (even the tiniest of creatures) then there i go right ahead murdering this ma'skeeter without even a thought or care, like his life didnt count fer nothin.

How can i do this? How can i be this way? How can i live with myself, me who hates contradiction, conflict, and hypocrisy?

And then theres the fact that i still eat meat (and eggs and milk and cheese and other dairy products) though of course, I no longer enjoy it like i used too, before i learned of all the cruelty involved in its production. I am trying to quit, really. Raised from an infant in a long line of "meat-and-potato" eaters, I have found that there is no doubt about it, old habits are hard to break. We are after all, creatures of habit. And I do hate myself for being a slave to them, honestly i do. Though i am eating less and less of meat and dairy, i do struggle with the issue everyday when my hunger light starts flashing. The guilt and self-loathing i feel when i catch myself realizing that i am craving meat has had the effect of helping me to eat less and less of anything, and, not wanting to sound too much like Martha Stewart, I say that is a very good thing!

So, how do I cope with these contradictions? How do i justify myself? Truth is,...i dont. i know its wrong and im wrong so i dont have to defend or justify myself, to myself or to anybody else. It is what it is and I just dont think about it. I shut down my brain and just stuff it, like i have just about everything else bad in my life.

Through this method (and years and years of off and on voluntary and involuntary counseling) i have learned that this very thing, this phenomena of "stuffing things," of "turning your mind off" from unpleasantries you dont want to think about or have to deal with,...is a self-preservation thing, or so my counselors have told me, a natural, human type of "defense mechanism," or "survival instinct," they explained. Theory is, you HAVE to dummy your true thoughts and feelings down about such negative things or feelings in order TO LIVE with yourself. You HAVE to turn off your mind,...SHUT DOWN your thinkin process in order to engage in activities you know are wrong or not good for you. And that so-called human "dummying down" mechanisim, in my humble opinion, is a primary contributor to a great deal of the problems we are experiencing in society and the world today, and yes, I know. I too am part of the problem, with my still eating meat & dairy. Yes, I too am guilty of not effecting enough change in myself according to my beliefs. Most of us "common-folk" have shut our minds off to the "grander" long range issues in life in order to cope with and get through our everyday lives. As lone individuals living in our own singular work-a-day worlds, we feel powerless to change "worldly" things in any significant way. The majority of us cant spend too much time even thinking about such "esoteric" things like "perfect" or "more perfect" worlds, or waste too much time thinkin or workin towards solving important global issues like world peace, ending poverty, over-population, consumption or long-term ecological sustainability....how could we? Most Americans, that is, those lucky enough to still have jobs, are too busy making a living trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their pantries and clothes on their backs to even think about such "lofty" idealism. We cant even realistically dream about good paying steady jobs, or of being stay-at-home moms, or of being a two-car family, or vacations, or of really good educations or health care for our kids, or savings accounts or good credit ratings, or how to invest our money. Ha. What money? How can we be expected to "have confidence" in the system and the economy and "spend, baby spend," as they encourage us to do, ..let alone save or "be frugal," or "thrifty" when their isnt enough to go around to make ends meet in the first place? Things are such today that we dare not even dream of "the good life." We are too busy trying to preserve the meager ones we have. For most Americans, "the Dream" has become a nightmare, and there seems to be no real help for us from no one and no place left to turn or run.

Everyday we hear it in the news, stories about some poor jerk "going off," bizerko, whacking the whole family or shootin up people and places. The lousy stinkin sinkin economy plays a role in all of this. Think it dont? Think again. Americans are stressed, and justifiably so, and its showing. Crimes, particularly robberies, are on the rise, as are our suicide rates, especially among our youth and returning veterans of "the war on terror." Americans better wake up to the very real fact that we can not go on "stuffing" these critical issues plaguing our county and our communities forever. We must "unstupify" and confront ourselves on ourselves. At least, that is what the many counselors I have had over the years have consistently told me. I am just now starting to realize they were right. We cant go on stuffing things or "fooling ourselves" forever, acting like everything is "A-OK" when it is not. REAL changes must be made before we self-destruct, ourselves as well as the planet.

There is an old saying from the group-home that I think is perhaps applicable here;

"If you keep on doin what you always did you will always get what you always got," ...which in my life experiences, was a whole lot of nothin for a long long time. Ive still got some real changes to make in myself to be true to myself and my beliefs.

Its never too late for change in ourselves, but the planet wont wait for us to make the call. It will go right on deteriorating until some drastic preventative measures are taken.

There is another self-help saying from the group-home, used to motivate us into change;

"Drastic times call for drastic measures"

Is there any doubt about it? Are we not now living now in drastic times?

In this view, the dawning questions are ..how do we define "drastic" times? By which standards do we measure? Or should I say, by whoms? Certainly not the 1%ers' who rule the world now, I would hope. By their standards we would be considered a heck of a long way off from "drastic times." Despite claims of lost profits, they are all still doing "really well." It is times like these when they profit the most. Recession is good for their economies. Every red blooded American knows that, rich or porr..

This "business" of planned recession and/or depression is nothing new. They do it every now and agin to remind us all of how much we need them and how beholdin we should be to them for making it possible for us to have all the good things in life, right? Wrong.

Can you imagine what we would do without them running I mean ruining the world for us? Arent we lucky to have them around, ya think? Not. I for one would be happy to be free of the current powers-that-be (PTB) that bind us to servitude, debt & and poverty.

Another Black Mark upon the Capital District, NY

Local Man Robs Indian School

Schenectady Co.;
SCCC Grad Robs Mid-Western Indian School of $1.38M!
Click on title above to read article;
http://greedybastardsclub.blogspot.com/2009/06/ex-minneapolis-charter-school-director.html

This, in addition to the previously posted black-marks upon the Capital District, listed below, all of which have made National and International News; Sorry, you will have to cut and paste these links below into your web-browser to get them to work.

Politics, Campaigns, Elections;

Rensselaer Co.;
"Ballot Boo Boo"
08' Presidential Election ballots go out naming "Osama" Oboma as Dem choice
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=729729

War / Military;

Rensselaer Co.;
First Fraggin Case;
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/22/iraq/main4537952.shtml

Environmental;
Albany Co,;
First Bat Die-Offs;

White-nose syndrome was first observed near Albany, New York in 2006.
communicated by:
Tabitha Viner, DVM DACVP
Associate Pathologist
Smithsonian Institution
National Zoological Park
Department of Pathology
PO Box 37012 MRC 5501
Washington, DC 20560
USA


--------

The Animals;

Rensselaer Co.;
Animal Control Officer Accused of Stealing Pet Dogs;
http://www.cbs6albany.com/news/dogs_1262047___article.html/control_animal.html
later found to be buring dead animals in his backyard

Rens. Co.;
Horse Murdered (Stabbed to Death) During Hoosic Falls Robbery;http://www.thepetitionsite.com/83/justice-for-horse-murdered-during-robbery

Food;

Albany Co.;
Man Finds Snake Head in Restaurant Food;
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2009/05/08/Watercooler-Stories/UPI-15561241778600

Sexual Perverts; Nursing Home Abuse
Albany Co.;
Nursing Home Abuse at Two Facilities by Same Offender;
http://www.aboutlawsuits.com/nursing-home-sexual-abuse-at-two-facilities-3821/?c\
femail=posted#cforms3form

Pacos Mask Ruined & No Good Deed

Above is a picture of Pacos brand new new custom made donkey-fly mask after our new rescue dog got ahold of it last night. The dog DID NOT get repremanded as it was my fault my fault my fault (Mea culpa) for leaving it out where she could get at it.

Nevertheless I am thinking, about that particular rescue,....maybe this is what mother meant when she said, "No good deed goes unpunished."

Nice dog she is though, and looking for a home. To learn more about her and see a pic, click on the title above

Last Survivor of Titanic Dies on Anniversary of Sinking

Last Survivor of Titanic Dies on 98th Anniversary of Ships Sinking
Millvina Dean, last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic, has died at 97

By MEERA SELVA and JILL LAWLESS Associated Press Writers
LONDON May 31, 2009 (AP)

Titanic Survivor Millvina Dean, shown in this May 19, 2003, the last living survivor of the Titanic disaster, has died at age 97, according to sources. Miss Dean was just nine weeks old when the historic liner sank in 1912.

Millvina Dean, who as a baby was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat in the frigid North Atlantic, died Sunday, having been the last survivor of 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic.

She was 97 years old, and she died where she had lived — in Southampton, England, the city her family had tried to leave behind when it took the ship's ill-fated maiden voyage, bound for America.

She died in her sleep early Sunday, her friend Gunter Babler told the Associated Press. It was the 98th anniversary of the launch of the ship that was billed as "practically unsinkable."

Babler said Dean's longtime companion, Bruno Nordmanis, called him in Switzerland to say staff at Woodlands Ridge Nursing Home in Southampton discovered Dean in her room Sunday morning. He said she had been hospitalized with pneumonia last week but she had recovered and returned to the home.

A staff nurse at the nursing home said late Sunday that no one would comment until administrators came on duty Monday morning.

Dean just over 2 months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912. The ship sank in less than three hours.

Dean was one of 706 people — mostly women and children — who survived. Her father was among the 1,517 who died.

Babler, who is head of the Switzerland Titanic Society, said Dean was a "very good friend of very many years."

"I met her through the Titanic society but she became a friend and I went to see very every month or so," he said.

The pride of the White Star line, the Titanic had a mahogany-paneled smoking room, a swimming pool and a squash court. But it did not have enough lifeboats for all of its 2,200 passengers and crew.

Dean's family were steerage passengers setting out from the English port of Southampton for a new life in the United States. Her father had sold his pub and hoped to open a tobacconists' shop in Kansas City, Missouri, where his wife had relatives.

Initially scheduled to travel on another ship, the family was transferred to the Titanic because of a coal strike. Four days out of port and about 600 kilometers (380 miles) southeast of Newfoundland, the ship hit an iceberg. The impact buckled the Titanic's hull and sent sea water pouring into six of its supposedly watertight compartments.

The Titanic International Society says Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the sinking of the Titanic has died in her sleep. The society's president Charles Haas told the Associated Press Millvina Dean died Sunday. He said she had suffered from slight pneumonia last week. Dean was just over two months old when the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, sinking less than three hours later.

Dean said her father's quick actions saved his family. He felt the ship scrape the iceberg and hustled the family out of its third-class quarters and toward the lifeboat that would take them to safety. "That's partly what saved us — because he was so quick. Some people thought the ship was unsinkable," Dean told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 1998.

Wrapped in a sack against the Atlantic chill, Dean was lowered into a lifeboat. Her 2-year-old brother Bertram and her mother Georgette also survived.

"She said goodbye to my father and he said he'd be along later," Dean said in 2002. "I was put into lifeboat 13. It was a bitterly cold night and eventually we were picked up by the Carpathia."

The family was taken to New York, then returned to England with other survivors aboard the rescue ship Adriatic. Dean did not know she had been aboard the Titanic until she was 8 years old, when her mother, about to remarry, told her about her father's death. Her mother, always reticent about the tragedy, died in 1975 at age 95.

Born in London on Feb. 2, 1912, Elizabeth Gladys "Millvina" Dean spent most of her life in the English seaside town of Southampton, Titanic's home port. She never married, and worked as a secretary, retiring in 1972 from an engineering firm.

She moved into a nursing home after breaking her hip about three years ago. She had to sell several Titanic mementoes to raise funds, prompting her friends to set up a fund to subsidize her nursing home fees. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, the stars of the film "Titanic," pledged their support to the fund last month.

For most of her life Dean had no contact with Titanic enthusiasts and rarely spoke about the disaster. Dean said she had seen the 1958 film "A Night to Remember" with other survivors, but found it so upsetting that she declined to watch any other attempts to put the disaster on celluloid, including the 1997 blockbuster "Titanic."

She began to take part in Titanic-related activities in the 1980s, after the discovery of the ship's wreck in 1985 sparked renewed interest in the disaster. At a memorial service in England, Dean met a group of American Titanic enthusiasts who invited her to a meeting in the U.S.

She visited Belfast to see where the ship was built, attended Titanic conventions around the world — where she was mobbed by autograph seekers — and participated in radio and television documentaries about the sinking.

Charles Haas, president of the New-Jersey based Titanic International Society, said Dean was happy to talk to children about the Titanic. "She had a soft spot for children," he said. "I remember watching was little tiny children came over clutching pieces of paper for her to sign. She was very good with them, very warm."

In 1997, Dean crossed the Atlantic by boat for the first time, on the QEII luxury liner, and finally visited Kansas City, declaring it "so lovely I could stay here five years." She was active well into her 90s, but missed the commemoration of the 95th anniversary of the disaster in 2007 after breaking her hip.

Dean had no memories of the sinking and said she preferred it that way. "I wouldn't want to remember, really," she told The Associated Press in 1997. She opposed attempts to raise the wreck 4,000 meters (13,000 feet) from the sea bed.

"I don't want them to raise it, I think the other survivors would say exactly the same," she said in 1997. "That would be horrible."

The last survivor with memories of the sinking — and the last American survivor — was Lillian Asplund, who was 5 at the time. She died in May 2006 at the age of 99. The second-last survivor, Barbara Joyce West Dainton of Truro, England, died in October 2007 aged 96.

Related; Survivors Memorbelia on Sale
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=7720350

Their Fathers Ashes

A Poem, by ShadowPrisonPerson

Ash to Ash to Dust to Stone


Within the pages of a recent magazine interview,
Keith Richards finally admitted to snorting
a line of his dead father’s ashes. Upon hearing
this news, Robert Downey Jr.
Lindsay Lohan, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss
immediately begged to have their fathers cremated.

Founding Stones guitarist Brian Jones
used to take his father’s ashes swimming. Charlie Watts
uses two pencils to tap on the urn
that holds his father’s ashes and he’s been tapping
the same damn beat for forty years.

Keith Richards had the audacity to charge $175
for a back-row balcony-seat glimpse
of his father’s ashes during the first
of many farewell tours. Critics claim
that the ashes of Keith Richards’ father are merely evaporated
leftovers of muddy waters and are kept
in the same old urn that was stolen
from the ashes of Howling Wolf’s father.

The ashes of Keith Richards father can’t get no satisfaction.
They once sat on an Altamont stage, dumbfounded in the urn
while Keith launched into a guitar solo, as the Hell’s Angels
stabbed a man to death.

The ashes of Bill Wyman’s father spend each night
inside a barely-legal urn, an urn so young
that it’s often mistaken for his daughter’s ashes.

Tina Turner knows that the ashes of Mick Jagger’s father
have been laced with brown sugar and are kept
in an urn that’s painted, painted, painted,
painted black. The ashes of Mick Jagger’s father have allegedly
been mixed in the same urn as the ashes of David Bowie’s father
but no one will confirm or deny this rumour.

To this day, Mel Gibson’s dad denies
that Keith Richards’ father
was ever cremated, in the first place.

ShadowPrison

http://shadowprison.livejournal.com/73681.html

Humane Society Cover Up?

The nonprofit Center for Consumer Freedom has been working to expose the hypocrisy and fundraising deceptions of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). This is the group that many donors THINK is their local animal shelter. It’s really a $100-million-dollar animal rights lobbying group. Think PETA with a fancier pair of plastic shoes.

You may have recently seen WSB-TV’s exposé on this radical animal rights organization. (WSB is Atlanta’s ABC affiliate.) The Center for Consumer Freedom was featured in the piece, which aired last Thursday. It was hugely popular, attracting more than 50,000 viewers on YouTube in addition to WSB’s regular TV audience and resulting print coverage.

Since the report first aired, HSUS has been working feverishly to silence it. The group bullied the TV station into removing the video and the text of the story from its website. HSUS even convinced the station to contact YouTube with copyright claims to have the news segment removed from public view. The video is no longer available anywhere on the Internet. All because HSUS is afraid of the truth.

WSB-TV called HSUS “an organization actively misleading donors to get money.” We added that most of the proceeds from HSUS’s massive fundraising operations don’t benefit homeless cats and dogs: “It’s very deceptive … [the money] goes to lobbying, it goes to political contributions, it goes to pay huge staff salaries and benefits.” This was a great piece of journalism on a subject most news outlets are too intimidated or biased to cover.

Click on title above to read “The Seven Things You Didn’t Know About HSUS”

To say we struck a nerve would be an understatement. HSUS’s aggressive response is a testament to our strategy and effective messaging. HSUS’s biggest vulnerability is the public discovering that it is not a pet shelter. If we can bring that message to the public, we can seriously undercut HSUS’s credibility and expose them as the radical animal rights group that they really are.

In addition, the Louisiana Attorney General's office has been receiving a deluge of questions about one of the WSB-TV report's claims: That HSUS misused money it promised to spend helping reunite Hurricane Katrina victims with their pets. Louisiana A.G. Buddy Caldwell is considering whether to re-open a full-scale investigation into this. if you feel as strongly about it as we do, PLEASE CALL his office’s Consumer Protection Section at 800-351-4889 and let them know.

Go here to read an in-depth “ActivistCash.com” report about the Humane Society of the United States at: http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/136

Homeless Dog Risks Life to Save Dog Hit by Car

Click on title above for full story and video