My wife is a special-ed teacher. Not all of "her kids" are autistic or suffer severe disorders. Some are just having a hard time because they have mild learning disabilities. One of her students, lets call him Rudy, is such a child. Rudy is a rambunctious, fun loving kid that gets into trouble a lot but has a such good heart that he quickly became one of the children my wife grew fond of.

Normally an outgoing, playful child, my wife noticed one day that Rudy, who is in the third grade, wasn't out playing with his friends at recess. This went on for a few days, with Rudy even offering to stay in the classroom and help my wife with some cleaning tasks. My wife got concerned and asked Rudy why he wanted to stay indoors instead of going out to recess like he always does.

"My feet hurt," he said. "I can't run around like I used to."

My wife asked to see Rudy's feet and found they were blistered and in fact bleeding from wearing shoes that were way too small for him. Rudy's family is very poor, and could not afford to buy him new shoes..or would not. Most likely the later given what my wife knows of Rudy's parents. For instance, there is plenty of money for other recreational pursuits.

Appalled, my wife took Rudy to the nurse's office where they tended to his feet, but of course could do nothing about the shoes.

My wife happens to know that Rudy's favorite super hero is Spider Man. Rudy loves to run around at recess shooting imaginary webs from his wrists and "catching" his friends who like to play the villians. Rudy's enthusiasm for this past time is contagious, and he is so well liked that kids often vie for a position to play as a villian with Rudy the Spider Man.

The next morning Rudy showed up promptly for class as always, talking too much as always, and in general just being Rudy. Seeing an opportunity, my wife spoke quietly to Rudy after handing them their classroom work assignments for the morning.

"Rudy," she said. "You need to go the principle's office. You're not in trouble. But the principle wants to see you."

"But I'm not in trouble?" he asked.

"No sweetie, but you need to go there now."

Uncertain, Rudy accompanied my wife to the Principle's office while her aid continued class. Once inside the principle's office, Rudy sat down while my wife waited by the door. From behind his desk the principle produced a box and handed it to Rudy, who was not used to receiving boxes of any kind. Opening the box Rudy let out a whooping "oh boy!" as he beheld brand new Spider Man shoes...the kind with flashing lights embedded in the soles, and laces with a web pattern on them. Putting them on they were a bit large, but not too bad.

"Can I wear them now?" he asked my wife. The look on his face was priceless. Absolute glee.

"They are yours to wear as much as you want sweetie," she replied.

Before putting them on though, Rudy wanted to know who bought these for him so he could thank them and "give them a hug."

"We don't know," said the Principle. "They just showed up here. Someone's watching over you. That's what happens to good kids. They get watched over. And you're a good kid Rudy."

My wife tells me that Rudy didn't really know how to respond to this. Rudy gets so little validation at home of the positive kind that she says he seems uncomfortable with compliments when he does well on classroom assignments or gets rewarded for good behavior. The kid is a handful...but my wife just says the kid has spirit.

So, Rudy quickly put on his shoes and with the Principle's permission ran out of the office and down the hall back to the classroom. Rudy doesn't get new things...ever. So he was really excited to show his shoes to his friends. But what's really amazing is what happened next. He wanted to SHARE his shoes with his friends. He let his friends with feet that fit the shoes wear them and be the Spider Man for a change while he ran around wearing their shoes, playing the villain.

My wife believes it's the best $45.00 she's ever spent. I concur.

 Just reflecting on conversations I've had over the past month with Christian friends. Apparently we are living in the last days of the world before Christ's second coming. As a Christian myself I have to wonder; what does it matter? Should a Christian behave any differently from dawn to dusk if these are end times? Obviously I look forward to Christ's return...but even if it doesn't happen here on Earth I will meet him heaven. Why the fixation on believing the end is near? Why not focus on the promise each day brings, growing in our walk with God and becoming more impervious to the opinions of those around us. Only God's judgment matters.

If these are end times, then lets be honest about our motivations to be Christians. Is it because we love God and Jesus, or is it because we just don't want to be cast into damnation for all eternity? And by the way, what sort of a choice is that anyway? Hmmmm. Seems to me human minds have been "creatively" at work on this aspect of Christianity for a thousand years now at least. God grants us free will, but then leaves us with this "choice". Smacks of manipulations planned by an ancient organized religion bent on dominating the illiterate masses while they harvest cereal grains for their Barons and pay off "noble" knights for "protection". Defy the King and you defy God. It's brilliant in its crass simplicity.

End times, indeed. God is bigger than this. Somebody botched a translation somewhere. I was recently told "Thou Shalt Not Kill" really means "Thou Shalt not Murder", a distinction necessary to allow for killing someone in battle. That's all I need to hear. Obviously if the Top 10 can't be transcribed correctly, the rest is suspect for sure. One word, one single word...the simplest of all.  "Kill" vs. "murder" and they cannot even get that one dead on. Pretty huge concept to mangle.

Perhaps I need to learn Hebrew to get the real story. Maybe a good scan of the Torah is order? The book I'm reading is making less sense with every chapter given the nature of Christ and the Holy Father as I've experienced it first hand in my life. Despite it's serious shortcomings, I have managed to get a somewhat coherent picture of the Father and this Bible I'm reading has not shaken my faith despite its best attempts to do so. That in itself may be a miracle worth pondering.

Three hours ago I called my bank because I had been "warm carded", which means my bank put a hold on my card because of some unusual bank activity. I discovered hundreds of dollars billed to my card for an online purchase. I filed the claim with my bank and so that is in process. What happened next has me very worried for the people involved.

Right after I got off the phone my wife informs me of the following:

1. She logged into our online banking, copied the line item description of the transaction in question, and pasted it into the Google search field. She did this to see if she could determine where the charge originated from. Just trying to do a little sleuthing on her own.

2. The 3rd search result in Google listed a bank account link with the names of the account holders. She clicked on the link.

3. The link led her straight into the detailed account register of another banking institution's customer. Yes. You read that correctly. She wasn't really convinced that she was actually looking at someone else's online banking account, thinking perhaps the page was a spoof of some kind or a joke, or perhaps linked to the identity theif.

4. She clicked on one the check numbers listed in the online register, thinking that this wasn't a real page, perhaps just a JPEG of some kind. But the check link opened a pop-up window of a scanned-in, canceled check. Some banks scan in all the checks you write to other people. Allowing you to drill down through your online registry and open a window to see the exact check you wrote just in case you don't remember having written the check.

5. Alarmed, my wife picked up the phone. Using the number that she saw on the canceled check she got the people immediately on the phone and told them who she was and what she had just discovered. They were doubtful and so she proceeded to read them the details of many transactions, their bank account number, their daily transaction balances, and a variety of other information that proved she was not joking around.

I am in shock. The number of Sarbanes-Oxley violations committed by this financial institution should be enough to keep this family wealthy by way of lawsuit for the rest of their lives. They were beyond shocked. I don't knokw if there is even a word for the way they felt once they realized the ramifications of what my wife had discovered. After a brief period of silence, the man of the house went...well.. ballistic. Not toward my wife of course, but toward the bank. Tomorrow morning will be a very tense day at the office for the local branch of his banking institution.

I could, right now, tell you what to search on in Google and where to click, and you too would have deep access to the confidential financial records of this family. Obviously, I am not going to expose that information. But consider this: Google takes a minimum of 6 weeks to index a web page. This means that the information has been exposed at least that long (the dates of the register we were looking at match up with this).

Recently I had a client come to me wanting me to build a website marketing campaign that would allow his startup to compete with the likes of match.com, e-harmony and others. He allowed me to login to another service he uses a lot and observe how the various features of one of the competing websites operates, and from this I gleaned social mass behaviors that I could then use to predict behavior (somewhat) in the open market place of other websites such as Myspace, Xanga, Digg, and even some of the social bookmarking sites, as well as the all-important (in fact more critical) social venues offline that such websites are likely to attract clients from.  This is the third time I've been through this exercise, but it was the first time I was given such unfettered access to someone's online dating habits. Though my conclusions were extremely discouraging for his startup ambitions ($100K to build the site to his exacting specs, 10K a month for marketing and advertising was a bit much for him to bear, not to mention the $10K /month overhead of running this sort of website) I formed a particularly disturbing conclusion of an opinion I had formed based on the research. This opinion is based on monitoring the interaction between over 70 people for a period of no less than two weeks, plus my previous stints researching this particular market space, and that is about as scientific as it got...so take it for what it is worth.

I have concluded that online dating sites are similar to fortune tellers, or that area of fortune telling such as numerology and astrology, in terms of the psychological disposition of those that are members. Though I don't subscribe to numerology or astrology as credible, I do believe that they evoke specific psychological responses in their believers. Not all those who frequent dating sites , to be sure, would fall into this view, but for the most part, the following seems to apply: They are ready to get into a relationship, feel protected by the anonymity of the internet, and therefor are willing "put themselves out there" in way they would not otherwise do. This readiness and willingness is something they are either incapable of offline or unwilling to attempt. Therefor, in the offline world, they are not meeting the right people. In the online world, however, their membership has an expiration date. Some will find that the expiration date adds a sense of urgency, some will not. Either way, all of these factors converge to make them more receptive to the overtures of an online prospect, than to the same offline. Extremely introverted people "putting themselves out there" might look like a rather subdued approach, while extremely extroverted people will say things and upload photos that border on shocking. The upshot of which is like meets like, same meets same, and opposites still attract....all the other online profile matching "science" is simply bogus. It is the act of filling out their online profile, rather than the matching up of profiles, that begins the process of preparing their minds for the real possibility of romance...most likely NOT true love...but perhaps some sort of interesting romance.  It forces them to be more honest than they might normally be, but of course some lie.  This is where the "science" (such as it is really not, which is why it is opinion...not even the stuff of hypothesis) really falls apart because I have no real idea who is telling the truth or is not, but judging from my own biases that I bring to this experience, there are more that are telling the truth than are not. Anyway, the entire premise of a "compatibility matrix" (which practically every one of these sites contains) is, in my opinion, a moot point and just a marketing ploy to exact more dollars for an ineffective differentiating feature.

My 72 year old mother-in-law has destroyed my preconceptions about aging. She has struggled with her weight and severe anxiety since age 32. Her cholesterol levels, for the past 15 years, have held steady at an astonishing 1500. That is not a typo, and I have the documentation (and shocked doctors) to prove it. This is a woman who would cry at the drop of a hat and get sick to her stomach with nerves at the thought of going out of the house for even a little while to do something as simple as grocery shopping. Sweet, caring, but severely unstable. Last year we began exploring options for in-home care or a retirement / assisted living facility to put her in because she couldn't remember which way was up. Add to this a severe case of Fibromyalgia (if you don't believe this disease exists, you probably have never met anyone that had a very bad case of it. It is NOT subtle), and dangerously severe depressions to top it all off. Absolutely awful way to go through life.

But she never gave up.

In my uneducated opinion the root cause of just about all her problems has been chronic anxiety. I believe it has been taxing her body and brain to the breaking point. Every medication they gave her for anxiety actually made it worse. Imagine Xanax instilling paranoid delusions and amping you up out of your mind. Imagine Klonipin giving you nightmares, causing insomnia, and making you feel like you just drank six cups of coffee. Imagine Ativan causing Restless Leg Syndrome...a drug which I understand is sometimes prescribed to treat that very condition. Imagine a host of other meds, each taking 6 weeks to run their course, and all of them hitting you with every adverse reaction in the book. Sometimes even resulting in hospitalization. Imagine that by this point your nerves are so fried that you cannot even watch the news without practically having a heart attack. I am not joking. Severe anxiety of this magnitude is not humorous in the least. It is devastating to watch someone you love suffer with this.

Now imagine that on top of all this, you have a son who is a heroine addict, who shows up at your door, guilting you into letting him stay with you, only to have all the chaos that goes with it enter into your house so that your other Son and son-in-law (that would be me) have to intervene and put him on a bus back from whence he came...with a firm word about not returning in the same manner ever again.

But she never gave up. She continued to make dietary changes, continued to pursue a relationship with Christ, continued to demand that her doctor not give up too. This from a woman who required me or my wife to call the doctor for her because she was too nervous to ask him to try another medication.

Her dietary changes were the first thing to bring her dramatic results. At 68 years old, she was 200lbs. Today at 72 she is 130lbs and highly mobile. Her Fibromyalgia was so severe she could barely walk. Now she works in her garden and takes her dog for walks. But it gets better.

Her cholesterol dropped from 1500, to 930, and is now down to the low 400's. All this she did while still suffering from horrendous anxiety attacks and adverse psychological reactions to the psych meds they kept trying on her. Amazing. Small and frail my arse! This woman comes from what we in America know as "The Greatest Generation". Sweet as pie, tough as nails. Rare by any standard, but a paradox to be sure. Crying from anxiety, but refusing to give into it is something I cannot imagine. It sounds like the ultimate head game to me. A mirror within a mirror...

One day my wife is doing some research on the internet and comes across a drug called Emsam (www.emsam.com). It belongs to a class of drugs known as MAOI inhibitors and for this reason her doctors were reluctant to try it. There are a lot of foods that are incompatible with this drug, and by this I mean really really bad reactions can occur. However, she had made a science out of modifying her diet and understanding nutrition over the past 4 years. She insisted she could take it and be OK. She wanted to try it, and why not? Nothing else was working.  Her memory was still poor, her anxiety still severe, and we weren't so sure this was a good idea after all. Like a lot of our honorable seniors, she had a pharmacy above her fridge and a lot of those meds were also incompatible with Emsam (and of course some with each other as well). My mother-in-law became near hysterical at the thought of discarding these drugs, even though they could potentially kill her if she took them with Emsam. So my wife marked all the bottles with a huge red magic marker X, stuck them a plastic bag, taped it shut and put them in a drawer with a note that said "If you think you need something in this bag, you must call me first and here is my phone number..."

It worked. She began taking Emsam about 8 months ago. Today she is not only anxiety free, she is happy. We are stunned.

Last week she even had a group of people over to her house so she could begin giving a course on nutrition!  She continues her life of dedicated Christian worship, and credits God for giving her the strength to continue and the insight to turn her energy on better nutrition. Her memory is clear, she is vitally alive, and she is at peace with herself and those around her. She is the healthiest I have ever seen her, and I have known her for 17 years. Whether you believe God had a hand in this or not, the fact is she never gave up in face of mental instability and physical challenges. Her Fibromyalgia is now only a minor irritant to her. Unreal.

Never Give Up.

Starting to smoke is a choice. Continuing to smoke...with a substance proven as addictive as heroine for some people...is often not a choice all the way to the last rasping breath.  

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Doing something kind for someone you despise, and expecting nothing in return.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Some Christians believe that in order to obtain salvation it is required to accept the Bible in its literal form. The loss of meaning through translation is part of my resistance to this idea. The loss of context, however, is the larger hurdle for me. More meaning for me is derived if I take as allegory the narrative that describes Original Sin.  The literal acceptance otherwise forces me to conclude that God is simply cruel. I don't look down my nose on Christians who do take the Bible literally. On the contrary, some of the best minds I know, some of the best friends I have, are insightful Christians that take the Bible literally. For them this is the only way it can be understood. For me, however, it's just not so. I cannot accept their arguments to the contrary and they challenge me to define where the allegory ends and the literal begins. What's odd to me is that such a distinction matters to a proper life with God.

It seems quite clear to me that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is allegory.  A literal acceptance of this unambiguous command tells me that America should not put "under God" in its Pledge of Allegiance.We have a military and covert ops and a number of murderous, government sanctioned campaigns at work on a given day. Such is the life of the empire. How many times a second do individuals who are Christians fighting in a war violate this command under the literal view of it?

What gets lost to me with the literal view is context. There is a lot of killing in the Bible, and a lot of it is done at the command of God. Without the whole picture I lose context, and without context the Word loses its meaning for me. God has reasons for commanding humans to kill each other. I have to take into account the scope of the situation...get the full picture...so that I can then put his command to kill in context. If I am still unable to build context from what I'm reading, then I switch my assumption from literal to allegorical.

When there is insufficient information to build a consistent picture from which to derive context using a literal approach, I switch to a allegorical interpretation of what I'm reading in the Bible. This is why I feel that taken literally the Book of Genesis (and Revelation) is one of the greatest works of Science Fiction ever conceived. It is also why I feel that, taken as allegory, it is one of the most thought-provoking, spiritually moving communiques to come down to us from God.

I will use Genesis 1:3 - 5 as an example, of which I take to be allegory :
³ Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light "day" and the darkness "night."

We know that darkness is simply the absence of light (photons hitting your eyeball), so why the need to separate anything? It's a weird thing to be so specific about and throws a wrench into my literal train of thought. So what's the point of this bizarre act of separating that which needs no separating?  When I switch to viewing this as allegory I get a more consistent understanding of what's going on here, and therefor the context becomes clear. Those who wrote this did not know the world was round, and apparently God did not think they needed to know about it in order to get the point across:  God created the earth, the solar system, and in fact the very physical laws responsible for fusion, why time slows down at the bottom of a gravity well, and the fact that the earth rotates (thus the day and night cycle).

So there it is.

America has a standing assumption: God is on our side. The Jews, His chosen people, are the only ones, as far as I know, that can truly claim this. As a Christian my understanding is that God has a special place for the Jews and that his work through them is not yet complete. 

So we are either lying to our children, ourselves or both. George Bush ("Capital G" to all you NIN fans) has declared on several occasions that God is on our side.

So where did we get the notion that God is condoning our overall approach to international relations? We've employed some pretty hideous means to justify some dubious end. Is it because we are a Christian nation that we are above reproach? That's a laugh. How many people do you know that go to Church, and go to Church truly out of devotion to Jesus Christ and not just for the business contacts? Perhaps it is because we have Christian culture, but not necessarily a Christian religion? What does that mean? If you live here, you know. If you don't, I am not adept enough to explain it clearly. It's somewhere between prayer on Sunday and being a Goodfella Monday through Saturday.

America has enemies, and I would rather fight on their soil than ours. But if I hear one more person tell me this is a matter of our survival as a nation or as a civilization I am going to go stick my head in a bucket of water. It is really confusing. If that is really the case then invoke the draft, gear up a true military machine and over run the enemy immediately, lukewarm allies be damned. If that is really what is at stake, I will join a logistics team in the morning. My back would only make me a liability in field, though I would welcome the opportunity if this is truly a fight for civilization. I will even buy my own weaponry, body armor and pay for the plane ticket myself to get into the desert sand and conquer the enemy or die trying. But only if total destruction of their way of life and assimilation into our way of life is the goal, including confiscation of the required resources from the conquest needed to pay for the campaign and rebuild the fallen country in OUR image. I repeat, if civilization itself is truly what is at stake, then this must be the approach we take at all costs.

But we have not done this, and we have not committed to doing this, and we are not going to do this. Could it be that, perhaps, someone is lying about how dire the situation is? Either that, or the man who signs his name with capital G is clueless about how to run a war (more likely) when civilization is truly at stake and we are all in grave danger, on both sides of the Atlantic, from an inept President who does not know the meaning of the words he is speaking. Since I don't believe my government ever tells its people the truth about the things that actually matter, I will choose to believe that both are possible, and that my country is being run into the ground by ineptitude mixed religious hubris, and it is getting a lot of people killed.

My wife works with a vice principle who we will simply call JAN. If you scan my blog for other VP reports you'll see why JAN gets picked on. JAN makes about $95K a year as a vice principle, and has won space on my blog for saying such things as wondering if Osama Bin Laden will beat Hillary Clinton, tells kids to keep the school clean only to be seen spitting wherever he goes, and most recently had to rush to the hospital for his brother's stem cell transplant. Yes, you heard me, stem cell transplant. But now JAN's idiocy has infected the entire school, or rather his libido has, and the six teachers who have all now found out they were sleeping with this married individual are having a hard time coping at work. I've seen more social intelligence from red necks at a kissing cousin booth.  Great job teach.  Way to set a prime example for the 12 and under crowd. Don't just violate the marriage vows, make sure to cry about it in earshot of students and other faculty. Then maybe to burden everyone else around you a little more you can openly weep at the next teacher parent conference...oh wait, you already did that. No wonder people don't want their kids in a public school. At least in a private school such antics can result in someone getting fired. But here in America they have to convene a board of something or other, file a complaint of some kind, sign it in triplicate, get "sensitivity training", hire a mediator, leak the story to the press, and sue unnamed individuals for unspecified damages until someone finally resigns, quits, or gets promoted.

In the case of JAN, a promotion was apparently in order. Next year JAN will be a principal. Imagine, JAN's own ship to run aground. If I spent taxpayer money selling used Spanish schoolbooks to blind children in Tibet I'd be making a more honest use of our dollar than what is going here. You see,  JAN is only the tip of a very ugly and decidedly toxic iceberg.

The fact that this particular school district would provide a career path for this individual to fail upward upon only confirms to me that I got into the wrong line of work. I should have been a psychologist with specifically two types of patients; the public school administrator and the teams of emotionally hobbled, professional victim-players that follow them around. If you've worked at one of these places, you can spot both types five dodge-ball courts away. Most school administrators die within 10 years of retiring. I think in JANs case the opposite will be true, since JAN will have sucked so much life out of everyone else by retirement age that outliving the sun (and possibly white bread as well) is a distinct a possibility.

I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that once you're tenured it costs $250K for the district to fire you? Well, that's what the the school's union rep told me when I asked what would cost more: firing JAN and a few others or hiring my company to handle the PR crises I would cause by exposing some of the more insidious things that are occurring on this campus thanks to JAN and "friends" ?

This whole thing is like bad Aaron Spelling production...like 90210 for example...without the mercy of a commercial break.