Dangerous Blogger

This is a bit old, but check out this article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. File this under “weirdness.”

The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.

Since when did free speech become a threat to national security? Big Brother is not only watching, he’s getting weirder and more paranoid.

Losing the Dog

I’m a big advocate for “doing the right thing.” Whatever that is. As a parent it’s even more important to me to instill this kind of thinking in my children. I want them to follow moral principles. I want them to live just lives. I want them to treat others with consideration and mercy.

Sometimes doing the right thing sucks.

Three months ago my wife called me on the phone and told me that we had a new dog, little Pekinese named Abbey that she had gotten from someone outside the local department store. Apparently it was a beloved dog, but they just had too many and needed to get rid of a few. Knowing that the price was right (free is good price), my wife snatched up the dog. It was an older dog and had already been housebroken. Bonus!

Now, I wasn’t too keen on the idea at first. My wife’s relationships with previous pets have been less than longstanding, for one reason or another. I didn’t want a repeat of “isn’t this a great pet” only to be followed by “we can’t take care of this cat anymore (my youngest and I are allergic)” or some other thing. I do think having a pet is good for my kids, though, so I went along quietly.

The other day we got a phone call from the Abbey’s original owner. It turns out that the original owner is not the person we got the dog from. She had raised Abbey from a pup (her mother owned Abbey’s mother) along with at least one of Abbey’s “sisters” from a previous litter. She and her husband had gotten divorced, but she couldn’t keep the dogs, so he did. For about a year she would go and visit the dogs. On one visit she finds that, unbeknownst to her, he ex has gotten rid of them and won’t tell her where they went. Doing her best to track the dogs down (they went through a couple of owners after her ex, it turns out) led her to us. We live in a small town so I doubt it was too hard.

Long story not quite so long, she wants her dog back.

My wife and I discussed the issue, and we decided that she was telling the truth. We also thought it would be the “right thing” to give the dog back. How would we want to be treated if the situation was reversed?

The trouble was the kids. They loved her. My wife loved her. Even I had gotten a bit fond of her. How do we help them “do the right thing,” and also help them deal with the loss of a beloved pet?

A sensible person would lie. We decided to tell the truth. Shows you how much we know.

Talking on the phone with the woman for a second time, my wife arranged for them to come and pick her up the following day. Trying to push the subject they wanted to “just come and see her” that evening. My wife is not good at confrontation and I started to hear her say “Well, I guess it would be okay to just come and visit with her tonight.”

I am not a subtle person when my children are involved. In order to stop my wife from rolling over and playing dead to this request, I yelled “NO WAY” across the room at her. “They can come tomorrow and pick her up like we arranged, and that’s it.” I’m not sure if the woman on the other end of the phone backed up as fast as my wife did, but it had the desired affect.

Try to understand. I wanted my kids to have one more night to say their goodbyes and deal with the issue at hand. I didn’t want them to have to deal with someone snatching a dog they loved out of their hands without notice. I also didn’t want this lady to further manipulate my wife during a “visit” and try and taker her dog home earlier. We would do the right thing and return the dog, but it would be on our terms, not hers.

Sunday came and the expected tears and cries of loss did not disappoint us by failing to show up. My middle daughter had the hardest time with it, but even our youngest is still asking where the dog is, and she can’t really talk yet.

I’d like to think that the dog wasn’t happy about leaving us, although she didn’t fight too much I admit. I’m probably just hoping they’ll have problems and bring her back. Abbey did seem angry at the dog they introduced as her “sister,” though. When she barked and growled at her (after being sniffed way too long and then finally being picked up), there was a part of me that was pleased. I thought to myself, “Yeah, you’ve got your dog back. But it you won’t be happy about it.”

Assisted Suicide in Oregon

There's been some talk on the net about the Oregon state assisted suicide law. The Supreme Court seems to have upheld it, but it still bothers me. Mostly I'm concerned for the situation it may put Oregon doctors in.

What happens to a doctor in Oregon that personally opposes assisting a patient in committing suicide? Can he refuse to help the patient kill themselves? I have heard of court cases involving abortion where a doctor was forced, by the courts, to perform a procedure (an abortion) he was personally opposed to, even though the patient could have gone to another doctor for treatment. Are doctors now going to find themselves in situations where, by law, they have to violate the oaths they took when they first became doctors?  Some doctors seem happy to push that oath aside, as if it doesn't matter. I'm not sure I want to go to a doctor that takes his oaths so lightly, but that's another matter. Here's one comment posted in a blog I found interesting.

There was a time in my younger years when I would have objected strenuously and in horror to assisted death. Our duty was to preserve life, not take it. But years of experience caused me to change my mind. ... I have seen my patients welcome death, beg for death. I came to believe that they had a right to be spared the long, drawn out degrading and dehumanizing experience if they so desired. They had a right to die in dignity and peace. ... .One of the best experiences I had with a dying patient came about 3 A.M. when an elderly lady coded and the usual emergency protocol was instituted. We would get her pumped up, then she die off again, over and over. One last time we managed to get her vital signs reinstated and we stood around her, watching her intently in case she coded again. We assumed she was in a coma, unaware of her condition. To our vast astonishment she suddenly opened her eyes, glared at the young attending physician and sternly admonished him, "Young man, why don't you leave me alone and let me die in peace!!" She then coded again but that time we were unable to revive her. She had escaped our well meaning ministrations and died as she wished. To her, death came as a friend.

The example given in the article of a doctor "changing his mind" on assisted suicide doesn't hold water for me. If the woman described in the article would have signed a "Do Not Resuscitate" (DNR) order then, when she first coded, she would not have been worked on and would have been allowed to die. Why was this not brought up to her as an option? The quoted doctor doesn't say. The problem in this case may not be assisted suicide so much as in self-serving doctors and hospital staffers not enforcing a DNR order to ease there own consciences and egos (I've seen that happen as well).

When I first went to college I worked in a nursing home. There I saw people die very painful deaths because of cancer, and yes it is horrible. Many of them just need to know that someone is listening to them, instead of ignoring them, even as they are dying. I worked with one elderly man who had a very sever stroke on his way out. When I went in to see him he kept saying over and over, "I'm dying! I'm dying!" When I held his hand and quietly said, "I know," he calmed down and was able to approach his death with dignity. He just needed someone to validate his experience, instead of lie to him about how he'd "be just fine."

Ending a dying patient's suffering is important, and an aggressive pain management strategy can assist in that. There are problems with balancing dosages of the meds, though. Doctors want to give enough of a drug to relieve suffering, but not enough to kill the patient. Tragically, in the most extreme cases, that isn't always possible.

The problem I see is not in allowing a patient to die, if that is their wish, the problem is in creating laws that makes a doctor become an accessory to their patient's suicide. Allowing a patient to die, because they have consciously chosen it, is very different from forcing a doctor into helping a patient kill themselves.

Bipartisanism = Playground Cliques?

Remember back in grade school when kids would segregate themselves into groups or cliques? You didn’t play with kids in the other cliques because they had some other horrible and indefinable “wrongness” about them. They just weren’t “cool.” Maybe they even had (gasp) cooties.

Looking back at those times we can see how silly they really were. I mean, we all just wanted to go play and have fun, right? Just because this kid wore a Star Wars t-shirt (that was me, by the way), and that kid wore a western shirt (that was my brother) didn’t mean they were bad kids, to be shunned as the devil incarnate. They were just kids with different tastes and backgrounds. Isn’t it nice that as adults we don’t participate in such juvenile discrimination any more?

Yeah, right.

They certainly seem to be participating in that kind of juvenile nonsense in Washington D.C. these days. Just look at the process of appointing our new Supreme Court Justice, Judge (now Justice) Alito. This vote was a perfect example of bipartisan politics in action. Only five senators out of 100 “crossed party lines” with one Republican voting against the nomination and four democrats voting for it. That’s 95% voting a strict party line.

Listening to the hearings prior to the vote I was left with the impression that even though Judge Alito was supposedly the man of interest here, the real man of interest was George W. Bush. I honestly don’t think that any of the senators that voted for or against Alito even bothered to base there judgment on the man himself. Oh, they back-pedal and claim any number of insane things to justify their decisions, but let’s face it, the majority of these folks voted for or against Alito only because Bush nominated him. It had less to do with whether he was the right man for the job than it did that a Republican president nominated him. The right side of the aisle wants to support and praise everything that Bush does, and the left side of the aisle wants to hinder everything he does. It doesn’t matter what it is, or whether it’s good for the country, or even if it’s legal. It’s just playground politics.

Of course I’ve never actually met Justice Alito. Maybe he has cooties.