jjclackey's Blog

I'd like to add that I'm rather annoyed by the poll question on this website. Rather, I'm annoyed by the answers. Neither "Yes, it's a safety issue" nor "No, it's a violation of privacy" is the answer I would pick. This is not about privacy, as residents are being asked if the police can search their homes. This is about the policy being both ineffective and a waste of law enforcement's time.

All this is is a way for criminals to unload unlawfully-owned guns with the police's help without going to jail. It solves nothing.

I think that's all I have to say on the matter.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

It's all about knowing what to tell people. Tell them that it's all about counterterrorism, and they're up in arms about setting up cameras in public places. Tell them it's about keeping guns out of kids' hands, and of course they'll allow an unwarranted search in their homes.

There are so many problems with this idea, but I'll examine on only one. If an adult with a child keeps an illegal gun in his home and the police come knocking, all he has to do is toss the gun into the kid's room and allow the search. "What? Johnny has a gun? Believe me, officer, I'll be sure to have a long talk with him about the dangers of weapons." One friendly hand-wave goodbye and no arrests later, the homeowner runs out to the guy who sold him the first gun and buys another.

Problem solved, right? Another illegal gun off the streets (sort of).

All right, just one more. Let's say the gun really belonged to the kid. "Now, Billy, you know that guns are bad. We're taking this one, but don't go right back to the guy who sold you this one and buy another, 'K? Bye now and take care."

This is just another useless tactic to be employed that looks like it'll change something. Will crime rates drop? No. Will kids be safer? No. Nothing will happen, and police will be kept busy at someone's house while real crimes are taking place. It's a horrible idea that I hope is overruled by the more sensible members of our society.

--JJCL

I'm sure we're all aware of the incident, so I'll not retell it here. But something needs to be said about all this.

We need to get away from the whole terrorism and 9-11 thing for a moment and look at it without letting those things influence this particular case.

 Had the WTC attacks never happened, the girl would still end up in jail with the same bail. The reason is simple: She violated the First Amendment.

 Back in grammar school, we learned about the First Amendment and what it meant. We were taught that we absolutely have the right to freedom of expression under the condition that we not use it to incite panic. For example, we do not have the right to incite others to violence or scream "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater.

What this girl did was incite panic with her art. She walked into an airport with a fake bomb attached to her chest. She did not have the right to do this, and there is no justification for it. As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse.

 Her intent in doing it becomes irrelevent at this point. She caused panic. That's what happened. It was wrong, it was illegal, and panic was a direct result of her actions.

It is because of this reason that I believe we should throw the book at her.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

I've already commented on this issue ("Our Freedom At Risk"), but it's pretty obvious that no one has been considering what all of this means.

This is not a "slight annoyance" or a "health issue." This is treading dangerous waters. This is banning a common ingredient because it's "bad for you." This is taking away the right to decide what we eat.

Trans fats are perfectly legal in the UK, in Japan, and in quite a few other places where the percentage of overweight people is lower than it is here, yet they're not facing obesity as an epidemic as we are.

Obviously trans fats are not the problem. Banning them will solve nothing, and it will open the floodgates for lawmakers to find excuses to take away all kinds of other rights. We need to fight this with everything we have NOW before it gets out of hand.

You may think that I'm getting paranoid about this, but trust me: this is how it starts. They take away something stupid to see how we react. Then they start making other rights sound bad to get our support and they take them away until, surprise, we have no rights, the Constitution is null and void, and the government runs our lives.

WE CANNOT ALLOW THIS. We have the RIGHT to eat what we want, when we want to. While I understand this right should not be abused, I do not agree that an abused right should be taken away simply because it's abused. We need to rethink our entire lifestyles, not ban ingredients and hope everything gets better.

Call me what you will, but I know I'm right.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

This statement may surprise a lot of Pro-Choicers out there:

Conservatives will fight to the death to preserve a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a child.

Let me explain this statement by giving an example.

Let's say a woman heads out to Atlantic City for a night of old-fashioned gambling fun. She walks up to the blackjack table and sits down. She places her bet on the table and is dealt her first two cards. They come up a five and a one. She hits, and gets a ten. Her score is now sixteen, so she decides to be a little risky and hit again. But the next card that comes up is a seven. Twenty-three. She loses.

She then decides to excercise her Constitutional right to not gamble. She picks up the money she had put on the table and begins to walk out. But wait, security has stopped her at the door and wants her to pay her bet. But why should she give her money to a complete stranger? Doesn't the security guard understand that she has the right to choose to not gamble?

The point of the story is that every woman, every person, has the right to choose whether or not to have a child. What Pro-Choicers fail to realize is that they are not fighting for that right. They are fighting for the "right" to choose whether or not to lose after they've clearly lost.

Of course, that's certainly not to say that conceiving a child is like losing a bet. Of course not. What I'm saying is that, when you perform the action of sexual intercourse when you don't want a child or when you're not financially or emotionally ready for a child, you still risk conceiving. If you take that gamble and the outcome goes against what you want or what you're ready for, you've essentially "lost." Pro-Choicers are fighting for the "right" to not have to lose once they've already lost.

Of course, the counter-argument would be that that's what contraception is for. However, every form of contraception except for abstinence has a chance of failure. Essentially, the counter-argument is that putting a little hat on a snowball makes it last a long time in Hell. Obviously, the counter-argument holds very little water.

Therefore, the statement I made at the beginning of this blog is true: Conservatives will indeed fight to the death to preserve a woman's right to choose whether or not to have a child. However, we will not even begin to entertain the notion of a "right" to change her mind when the outcome of her original choice goes against what she wanted.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

Watching the news nowadays is getting me angrier and angrier because of the misuse of terms, names, and expressions.

My first example refers to something that actually occurred not five minutes ago. The claim was made that The Divine Comedy is "also known as Dante's Inferno." This is NOT TRUE. Dante's Inferno is the name of the section of The Divine Comedy that refers to Hell. There are two other parts, one describing Purgatory and the other (Dante's Paradise)  describing heaven.

Also, it is quite often that a helpful passerby will be called a "good Samaritan" on the news. This grates on my ears every time. The point of the entire parable is not that a nice guy helped out. The Samaritans were a race of people who were descended from marriages between the Israelites and the Babylonian occupiers of the Exile. They had their own country to the north of Judah called Samaria because they were seen as the SCUM OF THE EARTH and were kicked out. The entire point of the parable is that, while the people who were supposedly all about God and His teachings (the scribe and the Pharisee) did nothing to help the man robbed, beaten and left for dead, the member of the race that the Israelites of the time HATED THE MOST was the only one of the three who did God's will. He was not just a "nice guy" or a "helpful passerby." He was Jesus' example of why judging a person by his race is futile.

I'm done for now, but I'm sure there'll be more to come.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

I would just like to point out something to the readers here. We may be witnessing a slow downfall of our rights.

This may sound paranoid, but if you think about it you see I may have a point.

Take a look at the arguments against the Second Amendment. They make the Amendment seem out-of-date and worthless, don't they? Yes, it was put in effect "to keep the king of England off your back" and "before they had semi-automatics."  But, the fact of the matter is, before the Revolutionary War no one had the right to bear arms. If the British guards wanted to come in, throw your family onto the street, and kill them for their involvement in the revolutionary movement, you had no way to stop them.

Apply that mindset to the rest of the Bill of Rights. You see that the whole thing is written to protect the citizens in case the government got too strong. There are a lot of safeguards like that. For example, the President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces so they're led by a civilian. In this instance, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, if led by a corrupt leader, can't use thier power to take over the country because the leader of all the other leaders, the person on top, is a civilian.

We seem far too reluctant as a country to give up our right to bear arms. After all, only dictators have ever had any success disarming the citizens of their countries -- and they did it by force. Because of this, it would seem that our lawmakers have decided to try to ban something that isn't mantioned in the Constitution at all.

Trans fat. Yes, this horrible-for-you little variant on the fat we all need to survive is what I've been working towards. But keep in mind, I'm serious about this.

This is the top of a slippery slope. Don't think of it as a way to keep us healthy. Think of it as a restriction on our freedom to choose what to eat. If they take that away, who knows what other rights they can make sound "bad?" I could right now make an argument that makes the Fifth Amendment seem like the worst thing to happen to this country.

The point is, we have a right to choose what to eat and when to eat it. We have a responsibility to try to stay healthy, yes -- but should the government be telling us what we can and can't eat? I think that's a decision we need to learn to make on our own. More government restrictions on our rights isn't what we need right now. I honestly think that, if we allow this to continue, it will end up just like Animal Farm -- our rights will disappear at a slow but steady pace until we have nothing. See it for what it is and stop it now before it gets out of hand.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

If I might give some advice, I would like to address the Christians in this forum (but certainly not excluding anyone of any other faith).

 We cannot try to use God to make our arguments. This is not to say, however, that we should not be proud of our faith and shout it from the mountaintops. I simply mean that, since not everyone believes in our God, we cannot hope to make arguments using God as a reference and get good or desirable effects. God cannot be proven (as the old saying goes, "for those with faith no proof is necessary; for those without no proof is possible"). Therefore, we toss our credibility out the window when we even mention God. We can quote the Bible till the cows come home; the reaction will be the same. We need to stick to provable facts.

We will not get positive results if our opponents think we're trying to push our faith on them. In many cases (especially abortion), our opponents will be giving some intangible evidence themselves (such as feelings; not that this is wrong, but consider both sides) and they may even fall back on statements that may not make a lot of sense that are unprovable (such as the claim that a fetus is not a human being). Our best tactic is certainly not to counter their unprovable beliefs with our own. We must make arguments based on facts that can be researched. That way, we have some hope of getting the truth out without risking being ignored because of the word "God."

In short, KEEP RELIGION OUT OF YOUR ARGUMENTS. It's the best way to get results.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

I've been watching a little Monty Python's Flying Circus recently, and I've noticed something rather interesting. In their skit "Election Night Special" they make a few jokes about the "silly" and the "sensible" parties. In an effort to make jokes without singling out any actual political parties, they use these names in place of real names. Of course, the politicians' names are things like Mr. Elsie Zzzzzzz and Tarquin-Fim-Tim-Lim-Bim-Bus-Stop-F'tang-F'tang-Ole-Bisc
uitbarrel, but it does hold a nugget of truth.

Ever since we elected Deval Patrick, we've made it painfully clear that we have a certain affinity for electing members of the Silly Party. Not to mention, of course, our insistance on re-electing our beloved big, fat white woman-killer friend Kennedy. Thanks to him, I can't get a full-time job because of his "brilliant" idea of forcing businesses to give full benefits to full-time workers. Now no one is hiring full-time. Then there's the whole thing about killing innocents (abortion), killing those who inconvenience us (euthanasia), giving free money to people who have done little to earn it and taking it away if there's even a chance they might not need all the help anymore (welfare), and the fact that they just don't care about anyone's future at all (opposition to social security reform). Their gross inability to see two years in the future would be laughable if it didn't scr*w so many people over.

For this reason, I refer to Democrats as both "Demmies" (note the resemblance to the word "Commies") and "the Silly Party."  I'm a proud member of the Grand Old Party (yes, I actually know what GOP stands for) and I intend to stay this way until I'm old (and someone wants to "put me down" for it through euthanasia).

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

I was just looking over the blogs here and I realized that I felt really good about the whole thing. reading through the blogs, I saw opinions on both sides of every argument. Some people even held a third view, and stated it clearly.

This is freedom of speech, right here. This is what it means, the free exchange of ideas. While I disagree with a lot of people here, I cannot be happier that I have the opportunity to see your opinions and learn from them.

If only I could get my older brother to stop taking cheap shots at me...

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

I've noticed a certain amount of outrage against the ruling against the owners of the Station night club in Rhode Island. I would like to take this opportunity to give my own opinion on the subject.

The actual crime committed was nonconformity to fire prevention codes. It's more or less cut-and-dry. The sentences passed on the owners were in direct proportion to the crime committed. Yes, it led to the deaths of over one hundred people and the injuring of two hundred. However, as far as crime and punishment are concerned, justice was served.

What wasn't quenched was the thirst for vengeance, for blood, held by the victims' survivors. That was left unsatisfied. Unfortunately for them, the people responsible will not be crucified. This is the cause of the outrage. However, though anger is natural, wanting to see the owners suffer more than their crime deserves at the hands of the law is neither possible nor warranted. I understand the pain and suffering that those involved in the fire and those who lost someone due to it are feeling, but it does not justify life sentences.

Something our Constitution and the state constitutions allow is plea bargains. People who have murdered deliberately benefit from such bargains. We have no reason to be so much against them when the neglectful decisions of a group of people use them to assist in the investigations of crimes. The point of plea bargains is to offer leniency in exchange for cooperation. It's the only way to appeal to those responsible.

My point is that justice was served but vengeance was not satisfied. That is why so many people were outraged. While I acknowledge that these people are far from the example set by the Anointed One, I do not condone those who shout "Crucify them!" I also do not believe such a demand is called for or reasonable.

--Jonathan Joseph Christopher Lackey

I saw this coming. I knew there would be a huge discrepancy between what Patrick said during his campaign and what he would actually do in office. If this is the example he's going to set for the state, I'm glad I didn't vote for him.

This just proves what I've been saying: Democrats are hypocrites. Republicans will at least admit that they're rich and that they've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle. Patrick wants us all to believe that he's all for reducing unnecessary government spending, but he's driving along in a shiny new Cadillac. Funny; the old car was good enough for the Republican. If this is how Deval is going to spend government money, how can we possibly expect him to make any changes whatsoever in public school or human services funding?

This is why I never vote Democrat.