The Power of Words

Dog Fights & Justice

George@GeorgeMello.com (George Colin Mello) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 20:45:00 GMT

By this time anyone who has electricity should be aware of the case against Michael Vick and his dog fighting camp. The terrible truth of the matter is that he is not alone. How many more operations, like his, are out there? Surely Mike's was found because it was a large operation of inhumanity and because he is a high profile individual. What of all those smaller operations tucked away just beyond the view of the general public?

Today I saw one of the dogs in its kennel on Fox News. It looked like the twin of my own dog named Winston. (Click on my club: Lovable Pits to see Winston). I began to tear up and my emotions ran high. That innocent creature was on death row. It never knew what it was liked to sleep securely in his master's bed at night, or curl up on the coach next to him while watching a movie. He never knew what its like to be free in large yard to run and play with other dogs. It never got to fetch a ball with the promise of adulation; or to roll over the grass, to chase butterflies and sparrows. He never got to take long walks in the woods with his "best friend", to discover nature in its infinite measure, to smell the the kaleidescope of scents and hear the symphony of life in all its majesty. This poor creature never knew the tender loving hand of any human's touch. It only knew pain, loneliness and fear.

What can we do to ensure that this does not happen again or at least punish those who continue to choose to live outside the bounds of civilized behavior by choosing to inflict pain and torture on the innocent.

I hope they throw the book at Mike and I hope we as a society will wake up and start demanding some stricter penalties and laws to protect against animal abuse. This is not about Mike its about a civilization that continues to find morbid delight in torture. Its about us humans "seeing, hearing and speaking no evil" as if we had no convictions or morality. I cringe when I hear of other athletes making little of this one case to protect one of their own.

Please come join with me to make a new commitment for the sake of animals. We can't take back what has happened to these dogs but we can prevent it from ever happening again.

Its time to close this blog and find my dogs, give them each a huge hug and then take them out to play ball with lots of praise and cookie treats. Take a moment and do the same today!

The Problem Lies in Islamism -- Not Us

George@GeorgeMello.com (George Colin Mello) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 04:59:00 GMT

The Problem Lies in Islamism -- Not Us
by Rabbi Aryeh Spero

Many in the West are shocked and horrified by the aggressive and wild outbursts coming from members of the Islamic communities on the streets of Europe and elsewhere. They see beheadings, shootings in Holland, rampaging young men burning down French streets, trains blown up in Spain and England, and Islamic women holding up signs in European public squares announcing the imminent takeover of Western cities and countries under the banner of Islamic supremacy and jihad. Churches in Asia are being burned and nuns shot dead in the street.

One American campus has already witnessed Christian students run down by an angry Islamic student while at other American campuses "Death to the Jews" is chanted by Arabs as the Israeli flag is burned. And, of course, there was the shooting of an innocent woman by a Moslem in Seattle because she was working at a Hebrew institution.

Westerners are not accustomed to seeing such barbarism on their streets and in venerated places. After all, we are civilized. We vent our grievances in ways far less fatal. Because many in the West know they can not reason with those behind these outbursts, they are blaming not the Islamic perpetrators but those of us in the West for somehow provoking these outbursts. It is easier and safer to lean on us in the West than it is to change the aggressor who will not listen. Blame the victim.

If we simply demur and mollify, appease and “understand,” this whole nightmare will simply go away, they contend, and we can go back to our business of having fun.

But such is not reality, rather a collective denial born of fright. We have chosen denial because, for too many, there seems to be no stomach to do, already, what is necessary to stop this barbarism. We can, if we want. But, instead, our timid elites find excuses and justifications for the militant activity. They opine: It is not Islam but we who are at fault.

Excuses: If only the Pope would stop talking theology. If only film makers would stop making films about humanitarian concerns. If only political cartoonists would stop drawing satirical cartoons. If only newspapers would stop printing editorials. If only speakers would stop speaking. In other words, if only the West would forfeit all of its centuries’ earned rights and bow to Islam’s judgment as to what is allowable speech and activity in our own countries. If only we would, out of “sensitivity,” first consult with the local imam or his Wahhabi superior back home in Arabia. In other words, if only we would take orders!

The very liberals who justify every form of art, expression and discussion -- even when it undermines the very foundations of our beliefs and society -- suddenly intone the need for self-censorship if it offends the Arab street or Moslem mob. And does it not seem that any truthful, non-flattering observation of current Islam is somehow parlayed by the mob as a direct assault on the Islamic god himself, thereby justifying immediate rampaging, torching and killing?

This inverted double standard against itself by Western liberals is not only a sociological historic first but bespeaks the utter fear now gripping those in denial. It is they, liberals, who are denying the true nature of current Islamism.

If only America would change its policy and if only George Bush would morph into John Kerry or Jimmy Carter – peace and tranquility would be at hand. Are the Muslims in Kashmir and India fighting the Hindus because of George Bush? Are the Moslems in vast parts of Asia and the Philippines rampaging because of American foreign policy? If only the Palestinian Arabs had their own state. Are Muslims killing, raping and enslaving all over the African continent, and in Darfur, because there are Jewish families living in Hebron and Jerusalem?

The over 100 wars across the globe involving Islam are, according to the professional bureaucrats, always the fault of those defending themselves against Moslem aggression, never the fault of those engineering the world-wide push for dar Islam and revived Islamic messianism. “If only” … is the mouthing of those in denial about what is steadily chipping away at Western sovereignty: Islam on the move. To acknowledge the reality means that something must be done now to stop it. But because they are too emotionally weak or self-hating of their own civilization, they choose to deny while submitting, eunuch-like, to this self-abasing sensitivity nonsense.

But not all Muslims are radicals, insist the “if onlys.” Absolutely true. But neither were all Germans Nazis. What counts are not those who are passive and uninvolved but those in the driver’s seat, those who can intimidate entire populations. The silence of virtually all of Islam’s world wide population, including America’s, regarding these barbaric outbursts and beheadings, demonstrates how the Islamic masses are acquiescing to the jihadists -- or worse.

Is the barbarism and terrorism we are witnessing today the fault of the West? Absolutely not. Here is proof. In reality, the Moslem Palestinians have been in charge and control of their own Palestinian state for almost two years. During this time different Islamic factions have been warring against each other, Fatah against Hamas. Carolyn Glick, a correspondent in the region, describes what is routinely happening there.

She writes how in the Moslem State of Palestine, two year-olds are killed by rival Islamic groups. Children are woken up in the middle of night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshippers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques.

In the State of Palestine, women are stripped naked and forced to march in the streets to humiliate their husbands. By whom? Rival Moslem groups. Ambulances are stopped on the way to hospitals and the wounded are shot in cold blood. Islamic terrorists enter operating rooms and unplug patients of rival groups from life-support machines. People are kidnapped in broad day light and paraded in front of television cameras to instill fear among the population.

Moslems eviscerating other Moslems in a Moslem state. Is this, too, the fault of the West? Is this due to some one not having provided proper respect and sensitivity to Islamic religious ideas or because the prophet was miscast in a political cartoon? Is it the Pope’s fault? Or, more accurately, is this simply the modus operandi of current Islamic hot heads, barbarism for whatever reason they choose.

In the Moslem State of Palestine, Christians are persecuted, robbed, humiliated and beaten in what can only be viewed as a systematic campaign to end the millennia-old Christian presence in Bethlehem. “If only” those insensitive Christians had not built that Church there! Surely, they “provoked” the Islamic terror squads. Verily, the problem lies not in us but in Islam.

And the Whinner is....

George@GeorgeMello.com (George Colin Mello) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:21:00 GMT

From the Feb. 27 issue of Investors Business Daily:

Oscar And The Grouch

Environment: Al Gore’s Academy Award should be for best actor in an unsupported role. Once Chicago was under a sheet of ice a mile thick. Just what melted those glaciers, Al?
   If Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” had failed to win an Academy Award for — and we are not making this up — best documentary, no doubt the search for more hanging chads would have begun. It was a political statement by a political town, and we doubt artistic merit was the yardstick. We didn’t notice if any of those who are smarter than the rest of us showed up at the Oscars in stretch hybrid vehicles.
   Gore’s opus is built around the premise that Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is melting rapidly and will soon put New York City, and perhaps all those expensive homes in Malibu, under about 20 feet of water by 2100. Problem is, the ice was probably melting faster in the cocktail glasses of Oscar celebrators at the post-show parties.
   Satellite data published in the November 2005 issue of Science did show that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. By our math, Greenland was shedding ice at the rate of about 0.4% per century, hardly a cause for concern.
   Earlier this month, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland’s ice loss had suddenly reversed.
   According to a recent report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at the 2005 rate, Greenland’s ice loss would have contributed less than an inch to sea level rise during the 21st century.
   An earlier study published in Science by Ola Johannessen of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway, found that ice was actually accumulating on Greenland’s interior glaciers, far away from the news cameras.
   British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton tells us the Greenland ice sheet “grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year” from 1993 to 2003.
   A study published last year by the National Center for Policy Analysis reported that not only had the Greenland ice mass grown but that “average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s.”
   Greenland is supposed to be melting, but it was warmer when Eric the Red brought settlers to the appropriately named place in 986. The climate there supported the Viking way of life based upon cattle, hay, grain and herring for about 300 years, predating the Industrial Revolution, the sport utility vehicle and the stretch limousine.
   By 1100, a colony of 3,000 was thriving there. Then came the Little Ice Age, and by 1400, average temperatures had dropped by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit and the advancing glaciers doomed the Viking colony in Greenland.
   Petr Chylek of the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia notes that Gore in his movie “suggests the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005.”
   But, Chylek points out, “1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland” and that “if Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner.”
   Meanwhile, there’s a planet where the southern ice cap has been shrinking for three consecutive summers — the red planet, Mars. Could be due to our Mars landers — they’re electric and solar powered. Maybe, as NASA reported, it has something to do with the fact that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades.

The Dems’ Do-Over

George@GeorgeMello.com (George Colin Mello) — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 03:12:00 GMT

From the Feb. 26, 2007 issue of Investors Business Daily:

The Dems’ Do-Over

Leadership: Democrats now want to take back their votes in support of the 2002 resolution approving the war in Iraq. Like schoolchildren, they seem to think they can have a “do-over.” They’d better grow up.

   Democrats voted for the war in Iraq on Oct. 11, 2002, and helped to build strong margins of victory in both the Senate and the House. And no, they weren’t “duped” into it by a deceitful White House.
   Nor was their collective decision based narrowly on the idea that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as some now maintain. The Iraq War Resolution that was passed lists no fewer than 23 reasons for going to war with Hussein.
   Now, here’s Friday’s headline in the Washington Post: “Democrats Seek to Repeal 2002 War Authorization.” In what the Post calls “an unofficial war council,” a number of senators are drafting a new law to require, among other things, withdrawal of combat troops by April 2008, with only a small remnant left to help with “training, border security and counterterrorism.”
   Another, even worse idea would force an immediate troop withdrawal, with remaining troops allowed only to fight al-Qaida.
   Imagine that — a U.S. soldier is fired on, and he’ll have to ask for the terrorist’s al-Qaida membership card before he can fire back.
   By the way, four of the seven senators who took part in this defeatist exercise — Joe Biden, Majority Leader Harry Reid, John Kerry and Charles Schumer — voted “yea” in 2002. Now, as the war’s support weakens, the senators say they’re against it. Sorry, but four years into a war, you can’t just “repeal” your responsibility for it.
   As we’ve said before, whatever else you might think of the Democrats in Congress, they’re completely untrustworthy on national security. That’s why Sen. Joseph Lieberman might join the GOP.
   In approving war in 2002, Democrats had the same intelligence President Bush had — the same that intelligence agencies around the world virtually unanimously believed. It said this: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and planned to make more.
   He did have WMD, though not in the numbers we feared (U.S. troops found several hundred canisters, mostly with mustard and nerve gas). And he did plan to make more, as the CIA’s Duelfer Report — often cited by Democrats — noted.
   Securing Iraq and ending the factional terrorism that has riven its population has been a tough task. As the war’s popularity wanes, Democrats have desperately sought to absolve themselves of responsibility for what they did.
The Senate’s “unofficial war council,” as such, is only a symptom of a far more serious disease: the Democrats’ surrender to the far left that now controls the party’s agenda. Look at Rep. John Murtha’s proposal for a “slow bleed” of our troops. Or the House’s failed vote a week and a half ago, pushed by Democrats, to halt Bush’s “troop surge.” Do they care if we win? The Democrats’ official policy now seems to be failure at any cost. Just like a coyote gnawing its foot off to escape a trap, Democrats think they can simply revote on their original Iraq War resolution and — presto! — they’re free, and it’s all George Bush’s fault. They can’t. Americans aren’t stupid. Nor are they children. In life, there are no do-overs. Only responsibility.

Linch Pins of Humanity

George@GeorgeMello.com (George Colin Mello) — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:41:00 GMT

Very recently my last grandparent, my grandpa, passed away. I was crushed yet again as I think about my loss. During my times alone I could not help but think of those people that have been in my life in the pass both dead and alive. As I get older I'm finding that my mind wonders this way more often. Astonishingly, the more I think of people who were once part of my life the less I think of the "things" in my life.

I lost almost everything in Hurricane Andrew and most of my property and many valuables in my move to New England. Despite this I hardly remember what those "things" were yet I remember vividly even those people who hurt me in my past. So it comes to this: As a race, humans need humans. It is people in our lives that do more to enrich or impoverished us. If you think about it; even the conversion of a friend into an enemy is a painful scar that can move us to morn. I can't help but conclude we are not much without people in our lives and it is the people closest to us, including our family and friends, that are the most valuable possessions in our lives. The loss of any one of them leaves a void that can not be filled by anything especially "things".

The best way to deal with the loss of those you love or once loved is to hold fast to the positive memories and lessons learned from them. When a human dies he takes with him the summation of all the people that was once in his life. If this is true then it is a catastrophe unless we share our lives with others. For the human race its imperative to reach out to people in your lives, neighbors and family alike. This is not because you are God's gift to them. Instead think of like this: We need each other for without each other we are only lonely hominids with very limited instincts and abilities to survive. On a personal note a life rich with positive human contact will sustain you to the end. Just don't forget to share this blessing with others.