It's Not the End of the World...

To all those followers of Mr. Camping who sold all their worldly possessions, cashed in their retirement accounts to rent billboard space, and devoted the last few months to traveling around the United States to warn of the imminent second coming of Christ -only to realize last Saturday that their dear Mr. Camping was, uh, mistaken... to you poor misguided fools I give my sincerest best wishes for the future. You're obviously gonna need plenty of well wishes and luck to make up for the stunning deficiency of common sense with which you've been afflicted.

From a purely Biblical standpoint, Matthew 24:36 clearly states (depending on your version of the Bible) "But of that day and hour knoweth no [man], no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only."

Yeah, you can't get much clearer than that. To in any way buy into the notion that some loony 89 year old self-professed Holy man with a civil engineering degree has the inside scoop on the second coming of Christ is pretty ridiculous. Even more so when you take into consideration that ol' Harold's been wrong TWICE before!

And herein lies my biggest problem with any form of organized religion. I don't care if we're talking about the Roman Catholic Church or the Westboro Baptist Church, these 'organizations' tend to rally around one central figure and take all their cues from that one person. For the Catholics it's the Pope, for the Westboro idiots, it's some guy named Fred Phelps, and for all the rapture retards, its Mr. Harold Camping. Somehow, magically, when you organize a couple people into a 'religious group' they're suddenly better and holier than everyone else and they gain all sorts of special powers, abilities, and insight into what God is thinking. In the process of such enlightenment, those fools relinquish of any and all common sense in exchange for a firm belief and adherence to anything their dear leader tells them. It's sad and it's pitiful that there are so many people in this world that are unable to think and do for themselves and fall to religion as a crutch and compass.

I take no issue with believing in God or a higher power. Please, by all means, believe what you believe! But, please, make sure your beliefs are YOUR OWN and not those of someone else who claims to be closer to God or that higher power than you are. Don't let anyone with a title or a large congregation or following try to tell you what to do. It doesn't take a genius to figure out the difference between wrong and right; good and evil. I have a hard time believing there are any hard and fast rules that you must follow in order to get to heaven or the next happy level of the afterlife. I think it can be whittled down to simply doing all you can to help your fellow man and try your best to leave this world in a better condition than when you entered it. Approach all things with love and understanding and there's not much chance of you doing the wrong thing. And whether it's God or Allah or Thor you believe in, you gotta expect that this deity is giving us all a little room for error and expecting us to screw up sometimes. It's in our nature. But I believe when you die, you'll stand before God or whatever higher power you believe in and be judged on your own merits. In other words what you did with the life you were given. If you spent it stealing, lying, cheating, and killing you can't logically expect much of a break in the afterlife. But if you led a good life, tried to be truthful and honest and helped make the world a better place I really don't think you have anything to worry about. Maybe I'm wrong, but it makes a whole lot more sense to me than the majority of the nonsensical rules and regulations put forth by the majority of the organized religions out there.

Quite frankly, I don't want a heads up when the world is about to end. But if it happens in my lifetime, I'm not going to lose any sleep worrying about. I'm confident that whatever the afterlife holds, I've scored enough atta-boys to enjoy it.

Father & Son

One of the greatest parts about having kids is getting to do things with them that you never got to do as a kid. My dad died when I was 2 years old, so I missed out on all those father-son experiences. My mom did an awesome job of being there for me, but I always wondered what it would've been like to have a male role-model in my life during those early, pre-teen years. I pretty much did all the same things that other boys did, but I had to do them without dad by my side. You can't really miss what you never had, but there were a few times I was jealous of other kids having a dad to do stuff with. Like tossing a football or playing catch or even mowing the grass.

This past weekend I got the opportunity to camp with my son; just me and him -along with his Cub Scout group. It was the first time for him sleeping in a tent and really "roughing it" and it was the first time in a long time for me getting that close to nature.


Sometimes you have to "get away from it all" to really be able to take a breath, step back, and gain a clearer perspective on life. That's what I got to do this weekend. I saw my son as a smart, witty (wonder where he gets that from?), resourceful young man of 8 years; not just my little boy.


Lucas spent the majority of the weekend in non-stop play with all his Cub Scout buddies but there were some really nice me-and-him moments where we got to chat and just share each other's company. So now I get more of a feeling of what I missed by not having my dad around and I feel proud to able able to spend that kind of time with my son. I hope it's something that he'll always be able to look back on fondly; but even if he doesn't, I certainly will.

What Victory?!

I want to know what half-witted moron came up with this STUPID Facebook post that seems to be appearing everywhere the last day or two. It reads as follows:

"Let's be clear on this: OBAMA did NOT kill Bin Laden. An American Military Service Member, who Obama just a few weeks ago was debating on whether or not to PAY, did. Obama just happened to be the one in office when our soldiers finally found OBL and took him out. This is NOT an Obama victory, but an AMERICAN victory!! REPOST IF YOU AGREE!!!"

Now before I tear this utterly ridiculous piece-of-crap statement apart using nothing more than logic, let me go on record as saying I'm a proud supporter of our military and a veteran myself.

Now, let's get started, shall we?

First off, who in their right mind would ever come to the conclusion that President Obama can or would claim sole credit for the killing of Osama Bin Laden? He never made that claim. How could he? Anyone with even a half ounce of gray matter in their head has to come to the conclusion that this operation was a team effort and this team was HUGE... players we don't even know about and never will.

Next, identifying President Obama as the one person who was debating whether or not to pay our service men and women during the budget dilemma is just senseless on so many levels. The blame for budget problems and the resulting threat of a Government shutdown can be placed equally among all members of Congress -both Republicans and Democrats- as well as the president and his administration. I guess I'm the only one who can clearly see we're being governed by a bunch of incompetent,childish, greedy bureaucrats. The only way to fix that is to clear them all out, revise the constitution and update the way our Government is run. Nobody gets that and I don't understand why.

The other thing I don't understand is how folks immediately started arguing over who should get the credit for killing Osama Bin Laden. Sorry guys, that should be the LEAST of your worries. My immediate reaction was "Wow! We got him!" followed very quickly by "Uh-oh, now what?!". While everyone's running around celebrating the "victory", you can be assured that Al Qaida is planning a response -on a grand level. They need to show that the death of Bin Laden does not spell the death of Al Qaida. Osama Bin Laden was a crazy sinister guy but he was also smart -and always surrounded by smart people. Why do you think it took us -with all our military and Intelligence resources- nearly TEN years to catch the dude?! Don't you think Osama saw the day coming when he would be found and killed? Don't you think he and all of Al Qaida already planned what to do when it did happen?

Remember this kiddies, killing doesn't bring about peace, it brings about more killing. The only exception to this rule would have to be the nuking of Japan during WWII, but that was a unique situation in an era where our enemies where contained within strict borders and victory wasn't based on the idea of annihilating an entire religious population like Al Qaida wants to do.

Am I happy Osama Bin Laden is dead? Hell yeah! It is indeed a small moral victory for all Americans who witnessed the events of 9/11 first-hand. We humans are programmed with a need for revenge (we call it justice, but let's not split hairs here) so to hear that the guy who was behind the entire plot -as well as hundreds of other terrorist operations in the last decade- was finally killed by American operatives gave most of us -me included- a small sense of closure and satisfaction; but if you think this is somehow going to kill the entire Al Qaida organization, you're sadly mistaken. We should all be looking over our shoulder because Al Qaida will answer this in a big way. They'll be around long after all the Republican and Democratic finger-pointers have turned blue in the face trying to lay blame or take credit for Bin Laden's death.

C'mon. Give the president credit where credit is due: he had the balls to say "go ahead and do it, boys!" -a hundred things could've gone wrong with this operation; the biggest being that Osama Bin Laden wasn't even there! And while we're handing out pats on the back, let's give one to the previous Bush administration. W and his boys started all this forward progress -despite more than a few innocent people being waterboarded- so the Obama administration had a good headstart from the get-go. But neither president nor their administrations get to claim credit for this. Neither have tried. But yet some MORON came up with that STUPID Facebook post and a bunch of people jumped on board. It was -no doubt- put out there by some Republican dipshit who's all worried now that the killing of Osama Bin Laden will guarantee Mr. Obama another term as president. I am neither Republican nor Democrat and I'm not particularly worried about who wins the presidency because NOTHING WILL CHANGE MUCH - it never does! Nothing will change until the ENTIRE Government is reformed. So instead of trying to shift the blame or take the credit of this so-called "AMERICAN victory", I'll be looking over my shoulder for Al Qaida's response.

God Bless Our Military
God Bless Our Country
And God Bless all the Morons that live here and have Facebook accounts.
Too bad Facebook can't come up with some sort of "common sense" filter for posts.