The first prank is bad enough, but the second version of the prank near the end is even meaner.

Not that it stopped me from laughing at these poor bastards…

There are a several more pranks here, some funny and some just plain stupid.

You may think this is cute and all, but think about it: they’re building tanks. This is prototype armor for the oceanic invasion. When Mother Earth gets sick of us screwing with her, her aquatic minions will come fully armored for battle.

When the sharks and giant squid figure out armor, we’re hosed.

Or so I thought.

It stuns me that these things still happen. Most people of faith can reconcile science and psychology with their beliefs and move on with their lives. Unfortunately whackjobs like this make them look bad. As far as I’m concerned, these people are no different from the pinheads who kill albinos for their magic, sacrifice goats to fix airplanes, or marry their daughters off to frogs.

At least this kid lived through his ordeal. Another boy died, and police rescued a young girl as her own grandfather strangled her.

Welcome to progress, people. This is your modern world.

Really, they don’t. Taxes pay for our roads, our schools, and several other services. I often disagree with the way some of the funds are spent, but that’s to be expected.

The part I can’t abide is the greedy manner in which the system works. The politicians only see projects they need more money for, so they pile on more tax codes to squeeze out more money, and that’s why we now have this bloated system powered by evil and greed.

Founder of the IRS

The height of this evil? The fact there are tax codes concerning whether or not you can claim your child if the child is kidnapped. It’s bad enough that someone even thought that far, but can you imagine how you’d feel if you’re scrambling to find your kid, only to have an auditor knock on your door because you never thought about taking the child off your tax paperwork? No wonder people want to have IRS agents killed.

We’ve had stimulus checks, overhauls of the tax tables, many adjustments and exemptions, but when do we finally consider a complete overhaul to the system? Is it not obvious the system is broken when we’re taxed on the same money over and over, and nobody fully understands the system as it stands?

Last year I inherited some money when my aunt died. She had saved up money in a few different funds, plus she had a life insurance policy. We were advised by a lawyer and a tax professional to set aside a chunk of the money for the savings funds, but that we shouldn’t be taxed on the insurance payoff. Come tax time this year, and we still came up well short.

Okay, fine. I really wasn’t surprised. Then I started looking into the numbers a little deeper. I wondered if my aunt had put the money into the savings post-taxes; in other words, had she already paid her income taxes on what was invested? Turns out it doesn’t matter. The government hits the inheritor for a chunk of the entire payout, not just on what may or may not have been taxed or even just the interest that the account had accrued. As far as the government is concerned, it’s income and they want a chunk of it, just as if your employer had written you the check.

Kind of a swell guy, in comparison.

As for the insurance policy, we were “misinformed,” according to two different tax preparers. Fork over that shit, too.

But wait! The government’s not done yet! Because it’s income, they bumped us into a higher tax bracket! Nevermind that my aunt’s only going to die once. Nevermind that we’re not going to see a windfall like that again. We made more money (but not enough to enjoy the tax breaks of the mega-rich, of course), so now we owe more money, resulting in an increased percentage of their take from my paycheck.

Meanwhile, Illinois didn’t seem to care. I still got a modest refund from a state which now has a bigger reputation for corruption than the New York mafia. Our state was broke before the feds got in on the action, and our budget’s been out of whack for as long as I can remember, yet here they are, handing me my refund.

But hey, it’s nice to know that my money’s being used for something. I’d hate to see those AIG execs go hungry.

I don’t know the original source, but my old man says it all the time. He’ll say it when we’re trying to decide whether or not to bring something on a trip, or when we’d try to throw away some old piece of junk we found in the basement. It occurs to me, however, that it also applies to self defense.

It drives me nuts when people talk about some act of burglary or violence and say “Oh, that will never happen around here.” I live in a quiet, rural community, and I hear it all the time. I also hear them say “People don’t even lock their doors in town,” and they mean it.

Imagine their shock when a couple teenagers looking for a quick buck went from house to house, going into garages and cars to steal money, CDs, and whatever else caught their eye. Imagine their surprise when two young men, armed and on the run from Georgia, were chased down and arrested in a field on the south end of town. My parents lived in a small, nothing-happens-here town, and the guy renting an upstairs apartment next to them kicked in their front door one afternoon. They were out shopping, and if they didn’t have a dog, the guy could have helped himself to anything in the place.

Any one of those could have escalated to violence. What if someone had been up working late on their car, or sitting in an adjoining room, when those boys broke into their garage? What if those two Georgia boys made it through the field and tried to hide in someone’s house? What if my parents had arrived home while their neighbor was still in the house?

Today I read about Brittany Zimmerman, a 21-year-old woman who was murdered by a stranger, possibly a vagrant. She was beaten, strangled, and stabbed and the police didn’t show up for 48 minutes. The dispatcher didn’t hear anything, so the police were no doubt sent on higher priority calls. If the attacker was a stranger or vagrant as the police suspect, then they may never find the guy, much less figure out why he did it. Maybe he broke in and didn’t know she was home. Or maybe he just felt like stabbing someone.

Not likely? Allow me to share one of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever seen (language NSFW):

This guy just attacks this random car with a crowbar — a deadly weapon — simply to demonstrate how bad he is. How would you like to be the driver? Just sitting there, waiting to pull out of the parking lot, maybe wondering what to do about supper, when bam, some maniac is beating the shit out of your car, and for all you know he’s going to pull you out the door and bash your skull in. 911 isn’t going to do you a lick of good, nobody around you seems willing or able to help, and you can’t even drive away because you’re trapped between other cars.

What do you do? Try to run him over? Fight back? I’d probably try the former first, but that’s not the point. The point is this guy wasn’t provoked. He had no beef with the driver and he wasn’t trying to steal anything. It’s about as random an attack as it gets, and there’s not a damn thing that would have stopped him or defused the situation.

This is one of many reasons I carry a knife. This is one of many reasons I am studying karate. This is the reason I would carry a firearm if it were legal in my state.

“Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

First of all, every time she has to go somewhere, the path is frought with peril. Whether she’s visiting the library or her grandmother, she has to take these long, roundabout paths through forests, mountains, and caves. If that weren’t enough, there are usually obstacles such as crocodiles, snakes, giant spiders, and even trolls. Would you want your six-year-old trying to find a safe path through a den of vipers? I think not.

You may say “But Mike, her cousin Diego does the same thing!” True. However, Diego is an animal rescuer. Diego’s in the jungle doing his job, and one would presume he has training to cope with such things. He also has a the wicked cool Rescue Pack which turns into anything he could ever need, from a hang glider to a toboggan.

Which brings me to Dora’s next problem: her hungry, hungry backpack. This thing will eat anything. What if Boots strays too close? Kiss his red ass goodbye. At least it gives back to Dora, though. It has a lot of things she might need, but never anything of real utility. For example, can you say machete, kiddies? How about pistola? Scissors to cut down the troll’s net is nice, but wouldn’t be easier to put a bullet in his head?

A bullet would nicely handle her next villain, Swiper the Fox. What kind of bastard steals anything and everything he can from a little girl? Dora could just stay home or, you know, have mom drive her to grandma’s house. Instead she has to expose herself to Swiper the masked kleptomaniac.

Today I discovered Swiper is the least of her worries. As she made her way to the library today, Dora was chased by an old witch who looked like the kiddie-eating, gingerbread house-living type. Dora the Explorer becomes Dora the Dinner, with a side of bush meat. (Though I hope the trio of musician insects become appetizers. They’re annoying.) A good machete would discourage the witch nicely, I should think.

I’m sure the creators meant well and all, but poor Dora, if she keeps flirting with danger like this I fear she’s not long for this world.

Step into my web, little fly

I’m pretty sure this is an Argiope, and its body alone is an inch long. It’s not supposed to be a biter, but I don’t plan to get close enough to find out.

The problem with shooting a pic like this is when you have the camera to your eye, the subject looks huge. When it suddenly pounced on some prey, I was convinced it had just leaped into my shirt and was going to sink its fangs right into my heart. I jumped back and banged my already-sore knee on the sidewalk.

At least I didn’t drop my camera.

The evil, it feeds

I don’t know what it ate, but the victim was gone in a flash. It used three of its legs to stuff the carcass into its mouth. I’m sure it’s only looking for bugs, like all the baby crickets that appeared around our garage this week, but I can’t shake the feeling it’s trying to catch my cat.

Or my kids.

We’ve split the atom, condensed the sum total of human knowledge onto silicon chips, and have shot satellites into the depths of space, yet a significant portion of the world’s population is still living in the Dark Ages. There may be parts of some cities I wouldn’t walk through at night, but at least I don’t have to live in fear of marauders hacking my legs off with machetes because they want to mix up some potion or another.

Yeah, I’m glad most of us have put superstition and magic behind us. Modern societies just don’t have room for — oh, wait… never mind.

DNA Collection Kit
Originally uploaded by MikeOliveri.

Our school is distributing DNA collection kids to elementary students.

My son’s will be promptly round-filed.

Like many a well-intentioned-but-flawed process, they’re doing this to protect the children. This kit will supposedly help the police locate your child should he be kidnapped, molested, or otherwise run afoul of some Great Evil.

Mm-hm. And how, exactly, will that work? If my kids are kidnapped but recovered alive, the feds can draw their DNA and run a paternity test. If the kids are murdered and their otherwise-unidentifiable bodies are turned up in a forest somewhere, well… let’s just say it hardly matters at that point. And the odds of the latter scenario taking place approach astronomical, despite what the media would have us believe.

So again, how does having my child’s DNA (or fingerprints, for that matter) on-hand or in a database help protect my child? Is someone developing some DNA sniffer that will take this sample and then roam the populace in search of my child? I doubt it.

Now let’s be paranoid the other way and discuss the potential for abuse. With these convenient packets, there’s now a huge sample of DNA for a given population available to whoever can get their hands on it. Yes, Gattaca was just a movie, but we don’t know where technology is going to take us five, ten, or even twenty years from now when these kids are adults. Abuses could range from discrimination to high-tech identity theft to government monitoring.

“C’mon, Mike, that’s just sci-fi.”

Okay, let’s bring it a little closer to the present and remove the 1984 factor and consider two scenarios:

1) An insurance company gets their hands on the data. They discover a high incidence of a gene related to colon cancer. The bean counters crunch their numbers and boom, premiums for the area go up.

2) A pharmaceutical company uses the genetic data for research. Iceland sold their genetic database, and all of the same concerns for abuse are there. One theft, unscrupulous employee, well-placed bribe, or new law and your DNA is up for grabs. The pharma company probably saves a ton of money, but do you think that savings will be passed on to you when you need the new meds? Hardly.

Still think it’s far-fetched? They’re already halfway to #1:

Some scientists believe that the homogeneity of a population such as Iceland makes the search for genes associated with a disease a simpler task. deCODE has already discovered variations in the Icelander’s genome that may indicate susceptibility to multiple sclerosis, hereditary hand tremors, and osteoarthritis.

And it was all government-mandated:

The government of Iceland has passed a law enacting the creation of a national health database. As first proposed, the bill required only medical and family history records to be included in the database. Opposition to the bill escalated when the government decided to add genetic information.

Given the PATRIOT Act and other overreactions to 9/11, do you really think our government wouldn’t do the same?

Thanks for thinking of us, Knights of Columbus. I’m sure your intentions are pure, but I’m going to take a pass on this one.

CNN has a video of a giant squid that, fortunately for the dude in the tank with it, is dead.

At least I hope it is, for his sake. “Not dead which eternal lie” and all that.