War on Christmas! Political correctness gone mad!

I can't be the only one who finds it ironic when people cite "PC oversensitivity" as the reason they get offended (offended! really!) by a cheerful phrase like "happy holidays." 

Honestly: what could be more obliviously hypocritical (not to mention thin-skinned) than being offended when someone's cheerful generic greeting doesn't specify YOUR religion only? 

Grow the fuck up, you coddled little pussies.

Liberal jealousy

A lot of conservatives love to peddle the idea that liberals simply hate rich people out of jealousy, and that's why we value economic and social justice: if you stand up for society's "losers," you must harbor a jealous hatred of its "winners." But if that were the case, we'd hate Warren Buffet, John Stewart (who's doing pretty well himself), and most every wealthy liberal Hollywood icon just as much as we hate Grover Norquist and the Koch brothers.

It's not that we hate rich people; it's more that, as people with morals, spines, and standards, we actually give a shit HOW a person becomes rich and how they behave after they become rich. 

So if you're rich because you came up with a good business idea, put it into action, and ran your business well, then good for you! And if you recognize how much of your success is due to the efforts of your employees and due to the infrastructure in the US that makes it possible for new businesses to succeed; and so you pay your employees a decent living and pay your share in taxes like an adult, then also good for you!

But if you only became rich by skimping on your workers' salaries, or cutting corners on workplace safety, or by selling faulty products, or shipping jobs to sweatshops overseas, then I have no reason to revere you for your so-called "success."  If you then spend that money on lobbying for nefarious causes, bribing government officials, and hiring legal teams to find legal loopholes that allow unethical business practices, I'm not going to revere you as some god-like "job creator" that the rest of society owes some sort of feudal-style fealty to. Why should I support behavior like that?  Why should I view that as any different from people who become rich by other harmful means like robbing banks, committing extortion, or working as a contract killer?

There are lots of ways to get rich. Some of them benefit society, others harm society (or the planet). I'm not going to treat them as the same just so that rich people will smile down on me, and I'll never understand the submissive mentality of people who do. 

Then, of course, you have slightly less "submissive" conservatives whose motives go a bit beyond mere obedience and reverance for anyone with money: the ones who are deluded by fantasies that someday they'll be rich and when that happens they don't want to have to act responsibly. But I think that's still really telling of their mentality. It's akin to a slave supporting slavery because he would LOVE to get the chance to whip other slaves someday, once he somehow buys a plantation. A decent person simply doesn't entertain desires to harm other people for profit, not even in fantasies where they'd have the capability.

If I had my own company, I wouldn't triple my salary while cutting my employees' pay like the Hostess CEOs. I wouldn't run several sweatshops that barely pay a thing while buying myself several expensive hummers like Phil Knight. I wouldn't expect the government to cut public education funding before taxing me an extra 3% like Grover Norquist or the Koch brothers. I would never spend money funding disinformation and climate change denialism.  If these things were necessary to grow my company into a large one, then I'd keep it as a small business. If these things were necessary to give myself an exorbitant salary, then I'd maintain a modest, comfortable one.  I would only lay people off as a last resort to keep the company afloat (and again, never while raising my own pay, or even keeping it the same). I would never dump toxins into people's drinking water, or into vital habitat for some other species.  I wouldn't make my employees work in dangerous conditions (such as handling carcinogenic chemicals without proper protective gear) in order to save money on protective measures (money that would likely go into my pocket and not theirs).

I wouldn't do these things for the same reason I'd never murder someone for money: because I'm not a sociopath, and I'm not a greedy 8-year-old trapped in an adult business-major's body.  Anyone who does these things, or who would do these things if only they had the means, is human scum. And I refuse to treat them any other way.

All there is to say about Hostess

So a lot of people blame the worker's union for Hostess going out of business.  This despite their dropping sales (because fewer people find "cancer cakes" appealing for their children) and despite CEOs cutting their worker's pay while raising their own salaries up to 300%.  Yet with all this going on, the brown-noses-to-anyone-with-money on the right are blaming the unions for "not letting the company run efficiently." This viewpoint is only  made possible by the pathological levels of pathetic boss-worship that our country has adopted lately.

Even if I were dumb enough to believe in trickle-down economics, I still wouldn't blame the hostess thing on the unions for "not letting the company run efficiently." Cutting your employees' pay is NOT "efficiency" if you're simultaneously tripling your own pay. It's theft.

What these people are essentially saying is that the hostess workers should simply sit there and let their bosses steal from them. If they don't, they're being "ungrateful" for the jobs they've been "provided" (nevermind that a job is only good if you get PAID for it, and that the workers are earning that money by, you know, WORKING, so it's not like a job is a fucking charity donation).

This is such medieval peasant/lord bullshit that I can't believe anyone is spineless enough to condone it. I refuse to revere someone, no matter how transparently irresponsible, dishonest, and shitty their behavior is, simply because of their status as a rich CEO.

They sound like loyal slaves berating a disobedient fellow slave: "What are you doing? Don't upset your master! If you upset your master then it's YOUR fault when he beats you!" Pathetic.

Case in point...

This website demonstrates part of the point I made in my last blog post.

This, GOP.  This is what's wrong.  This is why everyone thinks you're stupid.

So let's make a deal: you take a time out to get a grip on the basic topics (e.g., "rape is a BAD thing and it is very bad when rape happens"), and then maybe we can talk about BIG BOY topics like economics and foreign policy!

How does that sound?  What's that?  Obama's a secret Muslim from Atlantis?  Oh.  OK.  Well maybe we can do this in another four years.  *Sigh*

A rant about "fiscal" conservatives who plan to vote Republican

Everyone knows someone who plans to vote Republican but claims not to be one of those pathetic homophobes or woman-haters, and they're not some crazy religious nut either.  They're simply voting Republican based on fiscal policy, they say.

Setting aside how downright terrible fiscal conservatism actually is (on both moral and practical grounds), this still doesn't qualify as a good excuse to vote Republican in this day and age.  Even if you agree with their fiscal policies, it's still not a given that their shitty social policies can therefore be ignored.

Let's pretend, for a second, that we live in an alternative universe where "gays" and "women" aren't the two big social issues that half our country seems to be struggling with (as if the concept that "all people are people" is fucking rocket science).  Let's also say that, in this universe, two US Senate candidates from my state are in the middle of their campaigns.  One is a Democrat who shares all my wonderful, generous, latte-swilling liberal philosophies on economics.  The other is a Republican with the typical Republican fiscal philosophy that the wealthy will totally bestow more jobs upon us if only we paupers would french kiss their assholes juuuuuusst a little bit more this time.

Seems like a no-brainer, right?  Except it turns out that the Democrat happens to believe that Chinese people shouldn't be allowed to marry, that people with green eyes are witches, and that left-handed people are demons in disguise and must be burned at the stake.  If that were the case, I wouldn't vote for him.  I'd vote for the boss-worshipping Republican before I'd vote for that kind of crazy.

So why do we give "fiscal" conservatives a pass?  Why are fiscal conservatives perfectly OK with voting for people who believe that rape is God's will (Mourdock), that rape babies are a "gift from God" (Santorum), that the earth is 6000 years old and fossils are a ruse put in place by the devil (too many to name), that gays are the spawn of Satan (also too many to name), that climate change is a hoax that has been pulled off more elaborately than any conspiracy in world history and yet has no motive beyond "scientists are big meanies who hate oil executives for no reason and want to be really, really mean to them" (again, too many to name), that women's vaginas can magically kill rapists' sperm (Akin), and that the USA (despite the FIRST FUCKING AMENDMENT) must be governed as a "Christian" nation (the entire fucking GOP)?  How can they believe that it's responsible to put these people in power just because they share one or two opinions on fiscal policy?

Even if fiscal conservatism worked, its benefits would be counteracted by the mere presence of people in power with this level of stupidity and insanity.  There's simply no excuse to vote GOP until after they're forced to clean house and get rid of the hateful, superstitious garbage-people that they've allowed to infiltrate their ranks.

When the GOP fully supports gay marriage and abortion, laughs out anyone who doesn't, shuts the fuck up about "wars on Christmas" and "ground zero mosques," demands a secular government, bans teaching "Intelligent Design" as a scientific theory in public schools, and demands equal pay for women, THEN fiscal conservatives can expect to be taken seriously as responsible voters.

They'd still be wrong, but at least they will have graduated from being downright idiotic.

Climatology vs Meteorology

This is a common tactic among climate change-denying hack media outlets: they'll interview a meteorologist (never a climatologist) as an "expert" who does not believe in climate change. Their argument, unsurprisingly enough, is always based on meteorology (never climatology) and generally amounts to this: "we can't predict the weather next month, so how can we predict climate next century?"

Well, the answer is obvious: because "weather" and "climate" are different. Weather involves atmospheric conditions at small time intervals over small spaces, while climate involves mean atmospheric conditions over larger intervals of space and time. So for example, we don't know what the weather will be like in Scotland next fall.  We also don't know what the weather will be like in Chad. No meteorologist will claim to predict what the temperature and humidity will be on any given autumn day next year at these two locations.

However, a climatologist can be reasonably certain that next autumn, Chad will be hotter and drier than Scotland. This is because, while we can't predict the weather of either place, we have a fairly good understanding of the climate of each place. It's the same with global climate and time: we can predict the climate in 100 years a lot more easily than we can predict the weather in 1 year.

It should be a red flag to anyone when a news organization bring forward an "expert" in a field different than the one being discussed, whether it's a meteorologist discussing climatology, a politician discussing women's medicine, a priest discussing psychology and human sexuality, etc. If climate change really is a hoax, then surely the climatologists of the world would largely share that opinion, right?

BONUS ASIDE: The PDO that he was talking about? Climatologists account for that in their predictions. But even if they hadn't, then Pacific Decadal Oscillation still wouldn't be a likely culprit. If this really were nothing more than PDO, then long-term temperatures would be following an oscillating pattern centered around a consistent long-term average. That long-term average itself would not show an increasing trend through time, as it does. Also, it wouldn't be a global trend, since PDO is a North Pacific phenomenon.

Gays vs. Nature

Anyone who insists that heterosexuality is the only natural mating strategy has obviously never opened a single book on fish. Fish exhibit monogamy, polygamy, hermaphrodism, sex changes, dressing in drag, cuckoldry, orgies, oral sex, post coital cannibalism, asexual reproduction, and all manner of things that would just be improper to mention on the internet. You'd think that one could study the ocean, at least, without inadvertently proving homophobia to be hopelessly stupid, but NOPE.

Homosexuality (and more) is all over the animal kingdom, and no self-respecting biologist should let homophobes get away with saying that it isn't.

Besides, you know what's really rare in the animal kingdom? Marriage.

AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!

HAHAHAHAHA

"President Obama is extremely wealthy," Bachmann said when USA Today asked how someone with "vast wealth" could connect to the American public. "He and his wife have been wealthy for a number of years, and so I think that's really the issue. President Obama is wealthy–what does he understand about the common man right now?"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

(that is all)

Mandatory + Unpaid = Freedom?

Right-wingers are always droning on about how they're the party that truly values freedom, because left-wing regulations take away your freedom to exploit others. What they always forget is that those being exploited are having their freedom taken away.

This is just one example: a coal company forcing its employees to attend a political rally, without pay. Making anything "unpaid and mandatory" is unethical enough; doubly so when that thing is a political rally. What next? Forcing them to vote a certain way? A right-winger would argue that this is "true freedom" because the coal CEO is "free" to force his employees into political rallies, and cracking down on this would infringe on such freedom. By that logic, a dictatorship is the most liberating form of government around, because by god that dictator gets to do WHATEVER HE WANTS!

I'll spell this out: the "freedom" we're supposed to protect is the ability of individuals to live their lives as they see fit, not the ability of a select few to control the lives of others. The coal CEOs can go to the goddamned rally themselves; THAT's freedom. Forcing others to go to rallies; forcing others to drink polluted water; forcing others to receive shitty pay for dangerous work: these are not freedom. They're acts of tyranny. And it makes no difference whether they're committed by a government or a corporation; they do equal harm either way.

Romney's Birth Certificate

Come to think of it, why haven't we clamored to see Mitt Romney's birth certificate?  He hasn't proven his citizenship any more than Obama did (before revealing his).

In this clip, Romney is outright confirming that the whole birth certificate farce was nothing more than good old-fashioned racism.  Here, you have two politicians who have shown the country the exact same level of proof that they're citizens (again, prior to Obama's big BC-reveal).  Yet only one has been pestered to show his papers.  The reason?  Because Romney has shown one piece of "proof" that Obama hasn't: white skin.  That's the only difference in their citizenship indicators, and I'm supposed to believe that racism has nothing to do with it?

The fact that this comedy of errors continues even after Obama showed us his birth certificate is just further proof that this is nothing more than hood-wearing, cross-burning, sister-fucking racism.  We're taking white skin as more reliable proof than a literal full-form birth certificate.  And Romney's response?  Validation.  Gloating.  In this video, he's admitting to being every bit as racist as every other birther.  Is this something that we, in fucking 2012, really want in a President?

Call me crazy...

Call me crazy, but if a ban on lying on the news results in your news organization being expelled, it just might not be a news organization.

And if your political party is trying to lift a ban on lying on the news, it just might not be a trustworthy political party.

And if your political ideology requires lies in order to survive, it just might not be a valid ideology.

http://www.skepticmoney.com/fox-news-banned-from-canada-law-forbids-lying-on-broadcast-news/

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

This is the most frustrating band I've ever come across.  On the one hand, their music is pretty damn good.  But then their lead singer (who the fuck let him in the band?) comes in and shrieks like a mid-pubescent  hillbilly. 

Lots of lazy critics laud his voice as "unique."  Unique isn't automatically good, people.  Compared to most foods, I'm sure dog shit has a "unique" taste; should gourmet food critics be giving it four stars?  Does this mean I can get away recording an album of myself scraping my nails down a chalkboard for twenty minutes because it's a "brave idea" that nobody else has tried before?

Anybody with a band who might be reading this: don't worry about writing songs.  Just do precise covers of CYHSY songs, except with a lead singer who can actually sing.  They wouldn't need a beautiful voice; just a tolerable one.  Trust me, people would pay top dollar for some Alec Ounsworth-free CYHSY.  I know I would.

Sorry North Carolina...

...but your state and your lives remain just as shitty as they ever were.  It's just that now you have one less convenient group of scapegoats to lash out against in the hope of fixing things without having to actually make any sacrifices.  Maybe you can try flinging your shit around literally instead of figuratively?

Test

This is a test.  If this works I will periodically post on this blog.  The rants I post are in no way endorsed by anyone with whom I share the faintest connection, professional or personal.

This is how I'm testing line breaks.

There should be a skipped line between these two lines.  If not, then I need to enter "<br>" to break lines.  Maybe that broke a line already.