When Does Persistence Turn to Stalking?

When the contact is unwanted.

As most of you who read this blog know, I play a game called Second Life. It is a virtual world in which you can do pretty much anything you do in this world, and then some. It is basically a chat program with a visual element in the form of a physical manifestation of you....you can have a home, a husband/wife, a baby even, and the players pair up and break up at a dizzying rate. The average romantic relationship in Second Life lasts 4 or so weeks, however, a week in Second Life should be measured like dog years, because the nature of the medium accelerates everything and the mind to mind communication allows for rampant emotionalism.

It also can be an incubator for stalkers.....folks who can't take "I don't want to see you anymore" for an answer. Such a situation has befallen me. I met a man in the game, we became "virtual" lovers, the relationship fell apart after about 6 weeks (this happened in late January or early February), and the man involved just won't go away. I wish he would, because what he sees as persistence, I see as stalking.

He got banned from my land and my life after he decided that pursuing me to my private space in the game, without an invitation, was the right thing to do. Fortunately, SL has a "mute" feature where you can turn off all communications with any given "AV" or character, and I muted him in the game, whereupon he decided to start emailing me, outside the game. I used the spam feature of my email to block his address, so he sent emails in his wife's name, which were promptly blocked as well. Now he is posting to my blog in an attempt to get my attention, which, in my opinion, constitutes stalking, since I have made it perfectly clear to him that I want no communication with him on any level or in any venue.

Persistence is a wonderful quality in a person, and all too lacking in our fast paced, very shallow society, where instant gratification is the order of the day, and very few people will follow anything to the bitter end. It also has a down side, and if allowed to run amok, produces a situation like this. I consider myself fortunate that this man cannot show up on my doorstep, as he lives in another state and has physical disabilities, as well as a wife and family, but I wish he would just leave me alone. I will post this in the hope that he will see himself in my words, and finally respect my wishes. If he does not, I will investigate my options with the Authorities, since he has stalked me on the internet and I believe there are laws in place against such things now, since a young woman recently committed suicide after having been harassed online by the overprotective mother of the girl's neighbor, out for a laugh at the expense of an emotionally vulnerable teenager.

This is my last plea to you, Michael (you know who you are)....please, leave me alone, and cease all attempts at communications with me or I will take steps to make sure that you do. Your persistence has turned into stalking and it MUST stop.

Brilliant.....The Maverick Picks A Maverick

Wow...I didn't think McCain had it in him and I'm absolutely pleased and proud that, in fact, he does. His choice of Sarah Palin for his running mate is just brilliant. To the Dems....checkmate. I confess that up until now, I was not really all that gung ho for McCain, however, now I can actually vote FOR a candidate, instead of against one, for the first time in many years.

Sarah Palin couldn't have been a more insightful, intelligent and positively energizing choice for the Republican ticket. She is a fresh face, NOT a beltway insider, a mother with 5 children, former mayor and present Governor of one of the largest statest in the union, and above all, a woman who took on the corrupt Republicans in her own back yard and beat them at their own game. Gotta love it. She is a hunter, a life long NRA member who believes in the 2nd ammendment, and a well rounded candidate with more practical experience than the number one guy on the opposite ticket, as well as a great compliment and contrast to McCain himself. She is also pro-life, which isn't such a great thing to me, but the religious base will not be unhappy about it, so they are not likely to revolt.

Personally, I think the GOP needs to stop with the anti-abortion meme, because most of the country doesn't care about it anymore...it's been 30 years since Roe v. Wade, and I think more mainstream Americans are concerned with the cost of groceries and gas than abortion. Message to the anti-abortionists among us...please...get over it. Women are only truly free when they control when or whether they have children, and although I am past my childbearing years, I benefited from Roe v. Wade and I refuse to be a hypocrite in my old age. Abortion should be safe, sane and legal whether the fundamentalists like it or not. Women have been aborting unwanted pregnancies since the beginning of time, and if it becomes illegal in this country again, more women will die from backstreet abortions because they will have them anyway.

The Democrats will have to step very carefully in their attacks against Palin as well, because to belittle her accomplishments too much will, I think, offend middle class, female Democrats who are already feeling disaffected by the treatement that Hillary Clinton received at the hands of the Obama camp, so there is a distinct possibility that those voters will now vote for McCain instead of just staying home.

All in all, an excellent pick!

Nope..No Hillary...it's Joe Biden!

So, Obama wasn't faking us out to pick Hillary in the end. He made a much more destructive choice...Joe Biden. And, I think the reason that the whole "text announcement" wasn't made is that Obama either couldn't bring himself to actually commit to a running mate, the one thing written in stone that Obama cannot equivocate on or change his mind about, or he was turned down by the top 2 or 3 on the list who can see the train wreck coming and didn't want to harness themselves and their careers to a loser....a BIG loser at that. Ya'll know this is gonna get ugly, right? You can see the wheels falling off the Obama bus, right?

I can't wait to see Biden on Meet the Press, twisting himself into an intellectual pretzel, trying to weasel out of his words at one of the primary debates where he stood behind his prior statement that Obama, who was standing right there, wasn't ready to be President. The problem with Biden as a running mate is that everybody knows he barks a lot (the reason for his selection as VP is because he has a reputation as an "attack dog."), but the problem with attack dogs of Biden's stripe is that they mouth off in the heat of the moment and often have to mitigate or retract what they've said down the line and they often end up looking real stupid.

So, Joe...what's changed in, oh....SIX MONTHS?

In an election cycle that should have been a cakewalk for the Democrat Party, they've done nothing but shoot themselves in the foot. First, by pitting their 2 biggest voter demographics against each other for the nomination, they have secured the enmity of the voters who feel like their candidate was not only defeated in the primaries, but was disrespected as well. Next, they have used their Machiavellian "electoral college of superdelegates" to select Obama over a more experienced and more electable candidate (granted, nobody would motivate the Republicans to rise up and vote en mass like Hillary), thus alienating what I see as a plurality of the independents and those folks who are sick of the present administration, but who were waiting to see if the Dems could actually pull it off. (Message to independents: THEY CAN'T) Last, but hardly least, is the candidate himself with his messianic image and campaign promises that even Moses himself couldn't keep. The moment when the oceans started to rise? Is he real?

I'm beginning to think that the left in our country just lives in a fantasy world of their own imaginations. They must be in la-la land to think that an ivy league educated guy who lives in a million dollar mansion, paid for with help from now-convicted felons, who hangs out for years with unrepentant terrorists who wish they could have done more to bring down the federal government, and who spent, literally 1000 Sundays sitting in the congregation of a radical, black power church (where he didn't hear the toxic message, don'tcha know), and who concerns himself with the price of arugula instead of milk and eggs, could EVER get elected President of the United States.....it just boggles the mind. Factor in the angry wife with a racial chip on her shoulder and an only recent, new-found love of her country and what do you have? A recipe for a historic landslide. If this (losing by a landslide) doesn't bring the Democrat Party back into reality, nothing will.

Now he picks Joe Biden for a running mate? What a laugh. He's probably the only one who accepted the gig...the rest of 'em ran screaming from the Messiah with their hands covering their privates!

Is Obama Faking Us Out....or Hillary for VEEP?

Has Obama been faking us out all along and actually intends to select Hillary Clinton for the VP slot? Well....it's plausible, but stupid, for a myriad of reasons. If Obama is looking to unite the Democrat party by selecting her, that's probably the smart thing to do, but only if party unity is more important than actually winning the election. Nothing would mobilize the Republican base more than an Obama/Clinton ticket, unless it is a Clinton/Obama ticket!

The following are the reasons why, in my humble opinion (which means absolutely nothing), selecting Hillary Clinton for the VP slot would be stupid:

First, there's the bitter battle fought between the two for the nomination to begin with. Her campaign and her husband both played the race card....badly, I might add. The surreptitious release of a picture, by the Clinton camp, of Obama, tarted up like a muslim, went over like a lead balloon and I suspect there is more than a little personal enmity between the two of them because of her consistent negative attacks on him during the primaries, once she realized that Obama had bamboozled his way into winning caucus states that, evidently, her campaign didn't take into consideration in their planning of her coronation...

Second, Hillary's already been co-President and would probably not willingly do her duty and fade into the background, only to be trotted out to break a tie in the Senate, or nod enthusiastically during the State of the Union addresses. She would, I think, take any and every opportunity to steal the limelight for herself and upstage the Messiah at every turn. I'm thinking that after the primary fight with her, Obama would much rather drive a stake through her heart than give her a position as his running mate...but that's just me.

Third...well, there's Bill. Does Obama really want a guy like Bill Clinton loose within 100 yards of the White House interns? With no accountability for his debauched behaviors? Does he really want a running mate who is married to a former President, who, by all accounts, already feels like his position as an elder statesman of his party has been disrespected? Talk about a loose cannon.....Bill Clinton would have no "official" position in an Obama administration, but as a former President and the husband of a possible current Vice President, he would be free to create as much trouble as he wants and never have to pay the political price for it.

Fourth, and finally, would selecting Hillary really make the PUMA's (that's Party Unity My Ass) happy? I think not. They would still be mad because their girl should be at the TOP of the ticket, not playing 2nd fiddle to a rank amateur....sure, some of them would come around, but how many, and is it really worth it when we know Hillary wants the Oval Office for herself come 2012? If that's the case, Obama has to lose this time, so why would she yoke herself to a loser?

If all the Obama camp is looking for is party unity, selecting Hillary would be the way to go, but at what cost? The wheels are coming off the Obama bus faster than a wreck at a NASCAR race, and they're starting to show a little desperation.....kinda early in the season for this kind of desperation from the guy who has been "anointed" as the Great Unifier, isn't it?

Pass the popcorn...I can't wait for the carnage at the DNC....

The Greatest Generation Goofed....

And their children are making it worse.

The Greatest Generation are generally thought to be those who fought and survived WWII. They came home from the privations and traumas of war to father and raise the next generation, generally referred to as the Baby Boomers. Your erstwhile author is at the tail end of that generation, having been born in 1960.

Those of the Greatest Generation were probably the last generation of Americans who really ever suffered or sacrificed for their country, with the exception of anybody who has served in the military, to this day. This generation of Americans, most of whom were born at or near the turn of the century, were raised with a work ethic, moral values, and inculcated with a love of their country. They grew up in a simpler, yet a much harder time in the evolution of America. There were no microwave ovens, remotes or cell phones, and the young men of this generation were the ones who marched off to war to fight the Germans and the Japanese, while the rest of America stayed home and made their own sacrifices. American women, for the first time, were forced to work outside their homes, making up for the male workforce and the family income lost to the war. Their food and gasoline was rationed, as well as many other things, so these at-home Americans were participating in the war effort alongside their fathers and brothers who were sitting in jungles and trenches in Europe and the Pacific theatre.

These men came home from that war, got jobs, started families and raised their children with the idea that they did not want their heirs to ever suffer the privations that they had suffered, fighting in the last world war. They wanted, as all parents do, to give their children a carefree life...for them to live up to the potential invested in all children, and to be able to live their lives free of the spectre of another world war. In other words, these parents wanted the best for their children, so they set about raising them in complete comfort. Protecting them from everything, giving them everything they ever wanted and granting their every wish. They goofed.

The Baby Boomers turned out to be one of the most selfish and destructive generations ever born to America. Witness what happens when there is little or no adversity in your life. You create it. The children of the Greatest Generation are the spoiled, pampered, elitist America haters they are because they were never inculcated with the same work ethic, values like love of country means duty to country, or a willingness to sacrifice themselves for something bigger than themselves. So they evolved into the feckless, relativist, tune-in-turn-on-drop-out, anti-war, hippy dippy, let's-all-link-arms-and-sing-Kumbayah collectivist Marxists that we see today.

What does the left in this country have to be mad about, and why do they think that ruining our econonomy with a treaty like Kyoto, socialist health care, dumbing down education and making our population more dependent on the government, not to mention being more like Europe is going to make America better? Why do people who have had the most advantages in this world feel like they have it so bad? The problem with making the government your daddy is that you might wait in vain for daddy to come get you....can you say....Katrina? All those folks waiting for daddy government to come and rescue them were wishing by the end of that experience that they had walked or skateboarded out of New Orleans, I'm sure....it's not like that hurricane was a surprise. They had nearly a week of warning, but their dependence on the government tit was what kept them waiting for daddy and he didn't come quick enough.

America is the richest country in the world. We have a lifestyle rich with technology, we give the most to charities, and even our poorest people are fat. Show me a fat person in Zimbabwe or Darfur and I'll show you a crony of the guy in power.

Now the Baby Boomers have come full circle....they want to be our nannies. They want to protect us from everything, give us everything, and grant our every wish, provided, of course, that you toe the marxist line and live your life the way they tell you to. You'll never be responsible for your actions again. You'll be taken care of by the state from cradle to grave, but we own your ass. I'm sorry, but I don't want to live that way. I want to be responsible for myself. I want to be self sufficient. I am proud of my country and it's people. I don't want to be more like Europe...hell, we fought a war to get away from them!

I'm sure there are many Boomers out there who still love their country, and can still think for themselves. Fortunately, most of us got our educations before the left got a stranglehold on it, and still have critical thinking skills that the younger generations lack, big time. It's going to take all of us to turn the tide of socialism creeping into American life, and take responsibility for ourselves and our world back from the creepy leftists who have it all but want to give away that belonging to the rest of us.....our pride in America and our certainty that this country is the best place in the world to live and to raise our children.

Don't let them.

Thoughts on Michelle Obama as First Lady

Could the mental image in the mind of the average voter, of Michelle Obama in the White House, lose the election for Barak? I'm inclined to believe it could.

Her newfound pride in her country (which is a total turnoff to the rest of us who love our country despite it's flaws) aside, her attendance at the Rev. Wright's church for 20+ years, where it's obvious to anybody who listens to her speak that she has definitely absorbed some of his toxic, "get even with whitey" message could very well cost Obama the election. Even if Barak can hide it, she cannot. Of course, she wasn't groomed from the cradle to be the wife of a politician, and though she is a trained lawyer with an Ivy League degree, she hasn't quite mastered the rigid control of self necessary to deceive the "unwashed" masses and convince them that she should be the next First Lady, any more than her erstwhile husband has convinced us that he's anything more than a vapid rock star wannabe.

Since it's very un-PC to say that she comes off as a very angry black woman, suffice it to say that she comes off as just plain angry, and her complaints about finding the 10 thousand dollars to pay for her daughter's ballet lessons is just short of loony. Does she really believe that average Americans who struggle to put enough gas in their cars to make it to work are going to be sympathetic to her whining that it's so expensive to put their kids in dance school?

How clueless and elitist is this?

There are average Americans every day who have to decide between transportation and food and this woman is whining about the cost of dance lessons and the fact that she's only recently (since her hubby decided to run for Prez) had reason to be proud of her American citizenship, and that America is a "mean" country. I wonder if she thought it was so mean when she got her affirmative action scholarship to Harvard? I wonder if she thought America was so mean when she got a 250 thousand dollar raise in her already no-show job? I'm sure she thought America was mean when the Rev. took his little PR junket to the Washington Press Club, not to refute his toxic message, but to reaffirm it. I'm sure America was mean to actually take him at his word.

But I digress...

This is a woman who claims to want to represent us all as our First Lady. I'm sorry, but she doesn't represent me. I love my counry, right or wrong, and I think it's the best nation in the world to live in, bar none, and I don't want to hear the woman who occupies the White House whine that it's only a great country when she says so. Americans want another Jackie O in the White House, not another two-fer co-President with bigger balls than her husband, ala Hillary Clinton. That two-fer thing didn't work out so well for the Clintons either, as Hillarycare was shot down in flames and the co-Prez was humiliated for all the world to see.

Michelle Obama's clueless, racialist, elitist attitude toward her country cannot but hinder the Obama campaign, and if she was as smart as they like to tell us she is, she'd tone down the negative rhetoric and start baking cookies.

Obama's But is Showing.

I love my country, but.....

I'm proud to be an American, but....

The Democrat's but's are showing. They love their country, but.....it's not what it once was. The last 6 words of that sentence were directed recently, by Mr. Obama, at a 7 year old girl asking the candidate why he ran for president. What purpose, do you suppose, is there in telling a little girl, with her entire life ahead of her, that her country sucks? Why tell a child that the only place she's ever known as home "isn't what it once was?" Why not just tell her he's running because he loves his country and leave the "but" out? Why poison a child?

If this is love of country, count me out. If this is Obama's pride in his culture, we're in deep do-do. I'm not one, generally, to echo Rush Limbaugh (I'm not a huge fan of his, due to his propensity to call strong minded, independent women Feminazis), but...why couldn't Obama just tell that little girl that he ran for president because America is the greatest nation in the world and he wants to be president of it because of that?

Americans don't want to hear the buts. We want to hear "I'm proud of my country," or "I love my country." We don't want to hear it qualified. We want to hear it plain. We want to know that the man we elect to lead us loves his country without reservation, without qualifications and without the "but's." Obama tells us he loves his country, but....we should be more like Europe.

We know America isn't perfect...nothing is, and despite the liberal dream of a perfect, utopian society, which, to them is NOT this one, why is America still the country that people in every other country want to emmigrate to? They don't say, "I want to live in America, but, it's not the country it once was," they just say they want to live in America because it's a better country than the one they're coming from. Isn't it strange that they only immigrants you hear complaining about America are the ones that come here illegally?

Why can't Obama bring himself to just say..."I love my country, and I'm proud to be an American?" Why does he have to qualify it with a "but?" Hopefully, sane, thinking Americans will tell Mr. Obama, by means of a historic landslide for the most boring Republican in years, that his "but" is showing and we want none of it.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Is the Obama Cult of Personality on the downslide?

I think so. He's beginning to be seen in even the most liberal circles now as being a bit arrogant, as grudgingly admitted on the McLoughlin Group yesterday by, of all people (!), Eleanor Clift! I immediately snooped the Internet to see if hell had frozen over, but alas, no, it hasn't.

Are the scales beginning to fall from the eyes of the hard core liberals and are they finally realizing that Obama is, as we say in Texas, "all hat and no cattle?" Are they starting to see that running for "President of the World" is, maybe, a bad idea? Is it sinking into their numbed little skulls that average Americans might be turned off by the idea of a mere presidential candidate acting like he's already won the election by using his own fake "presidential seal," having a seat on his "O Force One" plane embroidered with the word "president," or courting the German/Euro/world vote?

It seems to me, being one of those average Americans, that a mere 60 years out of World War 2 (you know, the one where the Germans tried to take over the world?), that giving a speech to a cheering crowd of Germans isn't going to read well at home. But, of course, the liberals are not all that into history, and this probably never occurred to them when planning this event. It doesn't surprise me that Obama's European victory lap (taken before the election, of course) didn't get the huge bump in the polls that his campaign staff thought it would. There are plenty of WWII vets still alive and they all have families, extended families and friends, and they might see a presidential candidate pandering to the very people they fought a mere 60 or so years ago as not all that special. But that's just me.

I don't see average Americans as being as enamored of the Europeans as the liberals in our country seem to be. They're all for abolishing borders and having a EU style government of the North American Union. Give me an absolute break. Fortunately for America, average voters still love their sovereign country (America) and are not about to support the Marxist Mexican government and the loony, Eurostyle Canadian government (they're already prosecuting people in Canada who don't toe the PC party line...see Mark Steyn) being joined cheek by jowl with America. I see America falling to socialism eventually, but I'm hoping I'll be dead by then.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.....average Americans will NOT elect a presidential candidate whom they feel has nothing in common with them. You can spin it until you're blue in the face, but Obama is not, and can never be, everyman. As boring as John McCain is as a Republican presidential candidate, he is seen as a more common man than Obama ever will be.

What McCain needs to do now is ridicule Obama for his hubris in acting like the President before he gets elected....who cares about race when you can poke fun at an elitist? John Kerry lost his bid for the presidency the last time because he was seen as a snob who did not understand the day to day travails of the average citizen, and who could not seem to hold ONE position on anything. Obama is stepping into the same trap. Between his flip flops on core liberal issues and his obliteration of the fine line between being seen as potentially Presidential and being seen as presumptuous, his value as a candidate is hitting the liberal skids, even.

If somebody like Eleanor Clift is forced to admit that Obama is presumptuous, then the Emperor truly has No Clothes.