How To Have Fun & Purpose In Your Old Age

The new health care bill that is being debated includes many promises. All of them expensive. One of the ways to keep the costs under control is to ration medical care to the aged. This includes counseling older folks about ending their lives when they are chronically ill. There is also the provision that precludes aged, sick people from paying for their own life sustaining procedures. This tantamont to a death sentence issued by the government. 

How much of all this talk and proposals are real or taken out of context is unknown to me at this time. But if the government really means to get proactive about eliminating old people from health care. Then "old age"has opened up some new and exciting vistas that will certainly shake off boredom.

Forget the new set of golf clubs or the extra martini. It's time for a gun and target practice.

Israel Embraces America: What's Wrong With This Picture?

Our moron president is in Israel celebrating the so-called 60th anniversary of Israel's land swindle of Palestine and the slow-motion genocide of its indigenous people. One photo has the Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Olmert gleefully and possessively hugging Bush. Pictures are worth a thousand words. It's a truism that the proximity of a Zionist-in this scene, Olmert- is directly proportional to the exploitability of the targeted person -in this scene Bush and by extension the U.S. America is Israel's only friend. Boy are we doing something wrong! The U.S. stands between Israel and its world of enemies. If we went away, Israel would disappear quickly.

While in Israel Bush will visit the ancient mountain fortress of Masada. It is a monument to Israeli nationalism. It was here that in 70 A.D. app. 1000 Israeli zealots holed up in the face of advancing Roman legions. And what did the zealots do to earn this commemoration? They commited suicide by jumping from Masada heights. What's brave about that? The zealots were cowards.

I get the feeling that the Masada event will play again in modern times. Israel sometime in the not to distant future will be faced with destruction from one or many of its many enemies. And so it will use its nukes before it is finally annihilated. It will be a kind of suicide and final gesture. Israel won't be missed.

Diana, Princess Of Wales, Killed Herself

After six months of hearings and testimony from 278 witnesses, a British jury found Diana's car-crash death " was caused or contributed to by the speed and manner of the driver of [Diana's] Mercedes and the speed and manner of the following [Papparazzi's] vehicles".

Maybe if Diana was more attentive to her chauffeur's performance rather than the performance of boyfriend Dodi al Fayed's groping etc. she would be still alive. Character is fate.

Why Prevent Golden Gate Bridge Suicides?

" To be or not to be...", starts the soliloquy from Hamlet. The question has a timely application to the recurring debate on whether to construct a suicide prevention barrier on the Bridge.

According to todays San Francisco Chronicle, there were 23 suicides from the span in 2005. That number was less than 4% of the total of all suicides in the Bay Area during the period. Yet the meager percentage is the basis of arguments for constructing a barrier. The barriers cost to the public is estimated in the tens of millions. Some of the proponents have humane motivations. Others have monetary or political reasons.

But the public doesn't know the reasons of the jumpers. Since the public is paying, they have the right to know what personal decisions of the jumpers they are interfering with. Maybe suicide was a reasonable and appropriate response to the jumpers problems. Maybe if the public knew what these jumpers were avoiding in real life they would have assisted the jumpers.

Ergo. Without full disclosure of jumper's circumstances, fuding of a barrier would be made on insufficient data.