Stand your ground.

Music to loud?  Shoot a carload of teens. If one of them dies, too bad for him.)

Guy in a theater texting?  Shoot him.

You're a rookie cop and you barge into the wrong house without a search warrant and homeowner meets you with a gun in the middle of the night.  Shoot him.  Seven times.

Teenager going home after visiting friends crosses your yard.  Shoot him.  He looks like he’s going to kill you for sure. Oh yes, he was visiting those friends at a church service.

And so it goes.  Stand your ground is not only a joke, it is a deadly idea that needs to be wiped off the books in every state. And I can think of no state it needs to come off the ledger more than in Florida, because the juries there are not smart enough to understand the difference between true self defense and cold-blooded murder.

Stand your ground  is stupid.  It is the very mentality of the NRA's attack on reason.

Repeal it now.

When is enough enough?

About a year ago I purchased a new camera for myself. It was a birthday present, or so I rationalized.  I didn’t really need it for I had two other good cameras. But there was something about this model that struck my fancy, so I laid down the greenbacks and walked away with what I believe to be the best camera I have ever owned.

Then a few days ago the emails started. “Are you using old technology?”  New advances in photography await you.”  "Your old camera can be replaced for pennies on the dollar. Hurry.”  And so on and so forth.

Promises of even greater photographic reproduction awaited me. All I had to do was trade in my less-than-a-year-old camera and get the company’s newest rendition. They told me I needed it to capture my pictures in the most vivid colors and the most accurate sharpness yet devised by man and God. It made it sound as if my failure to act would make every photograph I took from this moment forward a blurry image with barely discernible features of the subjects I studied.

And to think, my camera wasn’t even a year old, yet.

This company’s engineers had been working tirelessly through the nights and on weekends, no doubt, to insure the quality of the new camera was even better than the one I currently owned. Their claims were so exaggerated I would have expected they would issue a recall of my current model any day in order to replace it with this life-changing box and its lenses. But alas, no such offer came.  What did come was a coupon: 10% off for trade in before sixty days.

This is called marketing.

It is what drives commerce these days. Make them unsatisfied with what they have and make them want more, more, and still more.  Fast, lighter, thinner and better.  Must have. Gotta Have. Can’t live without it. And so it goes.

It is the very essence that drives the numbers on Wall Street. There is never such a thing as enough. There has to be more, more and more to come.  And it has to be purchased now.

Even my new car, which just turned a year old yesterday is already being sought by dealers in an offer to put me into the very best sedan the company has ever manufactured. Ever!

When will it end?  Where will it end?

I guess in my office.  I like my current camera.  I am keeping it.  And my car?  It isn’t even broken in yet.  May drive it to 300,000 miles. Take that Madison Avenue and Wall Street. I am satisfied.

Suddenly, I feel quite good. In my small way, I have fought back. Screw ‘em.

Evangelicals and the Taliban: cut from the same cloth.

The right wing radical movements of Christianity and Islam are very similar.

Now that lead-in sentence is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable, but it is very true. Both groups denounce those who do not bend to their beliefs as infidels and traitors.  They base all their actions on some order of a “holy scripture” which they are the sole arbitrator of interpretation.

Both the Christian right and the Islamic fundamentalist believe that women are inferior. They believe in a “Bible/Koran” based law. They believe they are persecuted. They believe in some form of paranoid reactionary obligation to strike out at anything that is not like them.

They both try and stir up the “undereducated and uneducated masses with rhetoric that will inflame passions and get them to march for their causes: even riot when necessary.

They both believe in an archaic system of laws and rules that are unbendable in their interpretation. They both want to limit the access to polls to those of their persuasion. I love this one, they both point to President Obama as the cause of the problems.  (He must be doing something right, then.)

Contraception and women’s health are of little to no concern to either side. Education and science are of little use to them either, as are rational thinking and the analytical process. On the other hand, taking their beliefs at face value, following their pack in root formula is considered to be obedience to a higher calling.

Things they cannot answer they shrug off to “God’s will.”  They want to look no further than that. In fact if you do wish to dig past their veneer, it is a sin against their religious beliefs. Faith, after all, doesn’t have to be proved — only practiced.

Both sides are hell bent on making everyone they can find, fall under their regime.  Both sides want power.  Both sides seek ultimate control of society. And both sides peace peace and love, except to those who are different from them. And then their hatred boils over and their venom spews forth.

The Taliban is evil. But so too is the emerging Christian Fundamentalist on the far right. They are no different than the terrorists who would bring us to our knees from without…only their practices will try and do it from within.

"Ladies and gentlemen...the Beatles..."

This past weekend we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show.  The Fab Four rocking America for the first time. 

Many of us were there. Sitting in front of our parent's black and white television sets and seeing how wonderful the change in generation was going to be.  We could feel the energy. We could sense the revolution. And it had harmony and melody with it.  And guitars. Glorious guitars.

On the following Monday we raced out to record stores and demanded they hand over 45's of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Yeah Yeah Yeah."

I am sure our parents were wondering just what in the world this craziness was about.  After all they had suffered silently as big band jazz was replaced with atonal, rhythmic  be bob and dry and lifeless crooners were replaced with Elvis.

But these guys, these four kids from Liverpool, were different.  Fresh faces, floppy hair and music that caught us and moved us.  Simple songs, but orchestrated right at our core.  We had to get it up and dance.  We had to twist and shout.  We had to.  The music made us.

And the music made a generation.

To be sure, there were The Dave Clark Five, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Who and many other talented British groups, as well as our own Beach Boys and Byrds…but the lion’s share of the credit for awakening an entire generation belongs to George, Paul, John and Ringo…not to mention George Martin. Yes, The Beatles turned the world on to pop music like never before.

Over the top. Into space and beyond. The Fab Four’s music is still great even to this day. (I wonder if we will be humming any Nirvana tunes in 2052?)

The Beatles had a special quality all their own.  And timing was a major part of it.  They filled a void that was huge and hungry for a new sound, a new spirit and new expression. 

And the Beatles delivered.  Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.  They delivered.  And still do.  50 years later, they still do.

Money buys justice in Texas

State District judge, Jean Boyd ruled yesterday that a sixteen-year old DUI driver who killed four would get no jail time. Instead, his parent could pay for treatment and he would have a ten-year probation. The Dallas Morning News reports that the treatment may well come in Newport Beach, California at the parents’ expense, reported to be $450,000 a year.

You might remember this case when a psychologist for the defense said that Ethan Couch was suffering from a malady called “affluenza” when his car struck and killed four people on the side of a dark highway. That illness is described as a dysfunctional relationship with family, due to being coddled by wealthy parents to the point of not knowing right from wrong.

The real culprit in this injustice is the judge.  Jean Boyd just a few weeks before sentenced a fourteen-year old black youth to juvenile detention for hitting (one punch according to court records). The punch killed his friend.

The difference in these cases is that Couch had prior DUI run-ins with the law.  He was traveling at 75 MPH in a 40 MPH zone and he took four innocent lives.  And he is from a rich family.  The black youth, on the other hand,  had no priors and his family did not have money.

So it seems, at least on the surface that Judge Boyd was swayed with the glitter of the wealthy.  It is so bad that a recall petition has been started and is winding its way toward Governor Rick Perry.  That would probably do no good, since Boyd represents the very people who placed Perry into power.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as “affulenza” of not.  It sounds specious to me.  But even if there is such, to kill four people and to basically walk away from the crime with little more than a monetary slap on the wrist is a crime in itself. A crime against justice in Texas.

Coke got it right.

My family came from Italy and England.

My wife's ancestors came from England and Germany.

My neighbors came from Peru and Guam.

The people who live behind us came from Finland and Scotland. There is also a Puerto Rican and Colombian couple as well. And we all live in the center of lily-white, conservative, Dallas, Texas. Not one of us is Navajo or Cherokee or Creek or Sioux. Not a Native American among us; yet we are all proud, patriotic Americans who love this country and what it stands for.

And that is what the Coke commercial said so loudly and so eloquently. 

The United States is a melting pot: a country that was founded on diversity. A land that was built by immigrants from all corners of the globe. And to hear the small-minded brains rail about the commercial which ran in the Super Bowl, reminds me of how far we have slid back into the throws of the darkness of evil, mistrust and bigotry. If you listen to them, you would think that America was a white, Christian nation founded on the principles of Fox News. It was not and is not.

America is a land of opportunity for all. Regardless of color, creed, religion and sexual orientation. It is a land that was taken from the Indians by our forefathers. It is a land that we have settled and claimed now as out own.  But we — the people who live here now are not white only. Not Christian only. Not all Republican, right-wing only.  Some of us are even gay and lesbian. We are a nation of a mixed lot.

But we are a nation. And regardless of our differences, we are one people.  We are Americans.

Coke got it right.  Drink up. And shut up.

Heroin wins. Again.

Another celebrity is down.  Drugs.  Out of rehab and down.

Heroin.

Talent wasted.

It must be so very hard to break the cycle.  It must be next to impossible.  And that doesn't take away any of the tragedy in this, but the reality is, Hoffman made a decision and died because of it.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman decided he could handle heroin. He could not. And it killed him. His decision. His actions. His miscalculations killed him and took a wonderful talent away from us.

Regardless of how and where you stand on this matter, this actor died because of a very dangerous drug that is now in epidemic proportions in some areas of our country. It is not something to be played with, tried and toyed with. Heroin is a killer. It grips you and tightens its grip around your life until there is no life.

OD. Too much sauce. Popped a vein. Be as smug as you wish.  Hoffman died because he lost the fight with heroin. And his loss is all of ours, too. And that is what is so damn sad in this. We will never get a chance to see that talent work its magic on the screen again.

All because heroin won.

But never forget...Hoffman decided to play the game. It was his call.  His fault.