It was four years ago today that I opened Barley Services. Like all startups, I didn’t know what was in store. I didn’t know if the phones would ring. My wife was sure that I was going to run us into bankruptcy.

This fear of the unknown prevents many people from leaving the security of a job and striking out on their own.

My problem most of the time is that my phone rings too much! I often joke when the phone rings, “I wish these people would quit calling me.” I cannot remember when I’ve been caught up with nothing to do. The last time might have been four years ago.

I’ve noticed that successful businessmen like to share their stories and to give advice. Maybe we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished. In my case, I really don’t think that I’ve accomplished much of anything in starting and running this business. I just took the step, started, and did my job day by day.

I believe my strategy may be encapsulated thus: I make it easy to do business with me, and hard to choose someone other than me. I try to keep my friendliness and devotion to my customers’ welfare so high, they’d be nuts to go elsewhere.

It’s weird, I know, but I consider the customer more important than myself. I don’t take the attitude “How much money can I make?” My attitude, instead, is “How much can I help this person?”

The money takes care of itself. I don’t make much money, but I’m happier than most of the people who do.

Here are two coworkers and a customer from Friday’s heart surgery:

And here’s the satisfied customer:

They finally killed her this morning–or finished killing her, I should say. Ann Coulter described it poignantly (of course): “This week, an indisputably innocent woman will be killed by the government for one reason: Judge Greer of Pinellas County, Fla., ordered it.” Ann went on to say that Greer’s dismissal from his church was based on the “only one God per church” rule.

So there was victory this morning. But for whom? Terri lost. Her parents lost. Most of the malpractice lawsuit award is now gone, so husband Michael loses (besides the additional cost of having millions of people calling him a scumbag forever). Judge Greer looks worse than the liberal caricatures of Justice Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision; so Greer lost big time.

Did anybody win? Heh heh, there was one big winner, as always. The lawyers won! Not Terri’s lawyers: they’re on salary from their legal foundation. George Felos and his associates walked off with the lion’s share of the loot.

Husband Michael won over a million dollars in a malpractice lawsuit, testifying that he needed the money to take care of Terri. But, once he started the long effort to kill her, most of it got transferred to the lawyers.

The head lawyer was George Felos, pictured here. He’s a new age mystic. Through his psychic powers, handicapped people tell him that they want to die, so he uses the law to get them bumped off, as in the case of Schiavo. Don’t believe me? Read this.

Why does the despising of lawyers reach back to even ancient Egyptian texts 5,000 years old? You don’t find such feelings directed toward, say, policemen. Policemen oppose wrong and work for justice and even kill people sometimes–but there’s no history of hatred for them throughout millennia and across all geographical and cultural lines. But lawyers–ah, that’s a different story.

Well done, Felos. I know your boss is proud.

Okay, here’s a quick quiz to see how bright you are!

The following quotations are from today’s New York Times. Read them carefully and thoughtfully, then proceed to the Key Question that follows them.

Quotation #1

Mr. Felos, who spent more than an hour with the stricken woman on Monday afternoon, disputed that description. “Ms. Schiavo’s appearance, to me, was very calm, very relaxed, very peaceful,” he said. “I saw no evidence of any bodily discomfort whatsoever.”

Quotation #2

As her doctors have said and the courts have ruled, Mr. Felos said, Ms. Schiavo is too brain-damaged to be aware of the world around her.

Quotation #3

Mr. Felos said Monday that Ms. Schiavo had never been on a morphine drip. She has received two five-milligram suppository doses of morphine in the last 11 days, most recently two days ago, he said. Each dose was minimal, he said, and would have worn off in about four hours.

Quotation #4

Another doctor with long experience treating patients at the end of life, Douglas Nelson of Hickory, N.C., said that providing morphine to a patient in a persistent vegetative state was unnecessary because the patient would be unaware of pain or discomfort. But, Dr. Nelson said, “It’s not uncommon for the nurse to suggest, ‘Let’s just give her a suppository to be on the safe side.’ “

Now, here’s the Key Question to see how bright you are:

Key Question: Are these jackals lying? (Y) Yes (N) No (D) Duh, I think the Republicans are politicizing it and it’s a family matter.

Here’s a lawyer whose web site gives a lot of insight into the legal issues surrounding Terri’s trial and execution.

This is a picture of Terri before her heart attack, a photo which you’ve seen a hundred times before

And this is a photo of Terri after her heart attack, which left her brain without oxygen for fifteen minutes and reduced her to a Persistent Vegetative State.

Notice the unmistakable vegetable qualities. How can anyone think that the person in this photo is human? Or, if she is human, how can anyone think that such a girl as this wouldn’t want to die? See how miserable she looks? How grotesque? Obviously she wants to die now.

If the girl in that first photo could have seen this second photo, I’m sure she would have said “Michael, if I ever get into that condition, promise me you’ll let me lie unattended until I die of thirst.”

For the true state of the medical question (is she a vegetable?), see this article.

In his editorial today, Wesley Pruden (my favorite columnist) has done a magnificent job.

The governor might even risk impeachment, but what better issue on which to risk all than to risk it saving the life of a helpless and innocent woman, about whom [the others] care nothing at all. Life is a gift, and precious. This was once the abiding American belief, and it could be again.

I suspect that Jeb could become the most admired man of his generation if he’d move in and rescue Terri. But could the rescue be made permanent? That’s a legal question I haven’t heard discussed and can’t answer.

Sometimes injustice wins and the wicked triumph. They pay later, but that’s another topic. Meanwhile, putting the inconvenient to death has become American policy.

Ann Coulter is dead right once again in this week’s article:

[Judge] Greer has cut off the legal rights of Terri’s real family and made her husband (now with a different family) her sole guardian, citing as precedent the landmark “Fox v. Henhouse” ruling of 1893. Throughout the process that would result in her death sentence, Terri was never permitted her own legal counsel. Evidently, they were all tied up defending the right to life of child-molesting murderers.

Here’s a link to a Windows Media Player stream from the Glenn Beck program where Beck interviewed Terri’s brother. Listen to it! The horror of this whole affair is unspeakable.

No water for three days. If they did that to somebody’s pet cat, they’d have their building torn down by raging mobs and their entrails fed to the birds of the air. But they can do it to Terri. Or they think they can.

What was Terri’s crime? Why nothing, of course. If she were a criminal, maybe an axe murderer or something like that, the loonies and lefties would writhe and scream and be out there with candles and signs that say “Not In Our Name.” Instead, since she’s just an innocent white Catholic, they snarl and sneer and say that Bush is just trying to pay back “the Evangelical nutbags” who elected him. (Yeah, I heard it with my own ears on Air America.) They’re happy to see her disposed of.

I’ve often wondered what it would take to get the tree huggers on Terri’s side. Maybe if she were declared to be Florida’s State Vegetable the environmentalists would weigh in.

The case is far from simple, although partisans on both sides believe that it is. Here is an excellent site that covers all of the data in a sane way, as if anyone wants to be sane any more.

I’ll just make a few points:

(1) there are people on record who once appeared to be hopeless and unresponsive, yet they recovered and testify today that they were very aware of all that was going on–but the experts had said that they weren’t! Experts don’t know everything.

(2) Just because Terri is disabled doesn’t mean that it’s okay to kill her. The fact that she cannot eat on her own only places her in the same class as a baby or a quadriplegic. They want to kill her because her brain is damaged and they’re calling the feeding tube “life support” as an excuse.

(3) It’s hard to consider human life sacred without acknowledging God. Let’s face it: if there is no God, “sacred” is just another name for the way somebody feels about something. Atheism (they call it “the separation of church and state”) is coming home to roost in America.

(4) Why kill her with thirst? As I recommended in October, her loving husband Michael could saw off her head in a second or two; no muss, no fuss.