Michael Jackson

My thoughts on Michael Jackson, as posted on www.vigilantemind.com:

The undying coverage of Michael Jackson's death is precisely the kind of thing that The Vigilante Mind will not be covering. But since TVM isn't up yet, I'll saying something myself, and it's simple: instead of blaming the painkillers, the doctors, the media scrutiny, the massive debt, or (this is the most recent proposal) his burning accident in the 80s that led to his taking prescription drugs... how about we discuss the concept that the entire Jackson 5 was created out of an exploitative, abusive master plan orchestrated by Joe Jackson? He's still delivering his plan to this day, marketing the "aftermath of Michael" line of products.

The Jackson 5 never would have shown up in the entertainment market had Joe Jackson not exploited his children, causing massive personal psychological damage in the process. There's a very good reason why Janet Jackson seems like the only sane one in the family—she wasn't in the Jackson 5. It's not a coincidence. That's the place that pop entertainers hold in our society—we sacrifice the well-being of these people for our amusement, and in exchange we give them ludicrous amounts of money so we can call them the privileged ones. Michael Jackson was slated to live a short and embarrasing life the second that his prepubescent psyche was sold to America at the age of eight. When he was inappropriate with small children, he wasn't a pedophiliac—he was playing doctor with friends of his maturity level. When he was popping massive quantities of painkillers that led to his addiction, it wasn't because his hair caught on fire, it was because he finally—finally—was presented with something that would temper the demons in his head. The overdose was an accident, for the most part. What wasn't an accident was that we created in a human being a hell so fierce that no amount of drugs would be sufficient to shut it out of Michael's consciousness. But he sure tried.

The Vigilante Mind is now available (I think) as an RSS feed here:
http://www.feedfire.com/site/rss.cgi?ChanContentId=034309
Please let me know if that works. I'm not sure.

Major Stephan Cook

These posts are going to be more and more frequently links to The Vigilante Mind, once I figure my way around Google Sites... I will still use I, Portlander for my personal opinions and rants about work, and shift all my political commentaries over to the new site. But in the meantime, I bring you this:

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/story/777472.html

Now, those of you who have followed this story know that Major Cook has since been fired from his government job and disgraced, and his case was exposed as opportunism, the lawsuit was frivolous, and his intent in suing was explicitly to force the President to 'prove' that he's an American citizen. So we'll ignore the issue that Major Cook wanted us to look at. Instead, what's this about a soldier committing war crimes if he serves under the orders of someone other than the President?

Have we already forgotten about Blackwater (since rebranded as Xe)? What about the soldiers from Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, et al. who have served in wars that their country was not a part of? Were they war criminals? I was in talks with the Navy a few years back—they wanted me to do some cartography in Iraq (I would have likely been based in Europe), presumably in an effort to find enemy camps. I would have been a plainclothes, as are the majority of people helping in the war. Plainclothes contractors aren't under the command of the President. Are they war criminals too?

The fact of the matter is that we have to stop taking people like this at face value. Major Cook was not a patriot fighting for what he believed in, nor did he honestly believe that anyone in the world was concerned with President Obama's authority to lead the army (though I do believe he is convinced that Obama is secretly not American, simply because that's what he's told to believe). Major Cook is a hack job who is in the camp of The Twenty-Six (tune into future podcasts to find out what that means)—people who don't care one way or another about our country, but are just having fun with their time in the spotlight. Major Cook isn't a patriot, nor is he a traitor—he's just an idiot.

Letting Cynthia Davis speak for herself

The initial criticism from liberal pundit Keith Olbermann was that State Representative Cynthia Davis wanted to pull funding from feeding impoverished children because those children could just get jobs at McDonalds, who feed their employees for free. The criticism was that it was a "let them eat cake" mentality: that the remark was staggeringly insensitive to the problems that impoverished families were up against.

Ms. Davis responded to the criticism as follows:

We all agree on the importance of feeding children, but we differ on who should do this. I believe this duty belongs to the parents. Instead of respecting this time honored jurisdiction of the family, the summer feeding program treats families like they do not exist.

When government takes over a family function, like feeding children on a daily basis, we take a group of people who are capable and treat them like they are incapacitated. Some have a low view of parents, presuming most of them are inept and
proposing governmental intervention as the only solution.

I believe most parents are good and want the blessing and privilege of feeding their children. When families are sharing a meal around the kitchen table, much more is happening. Mealtime is the primary time for shaping values and strengthening
bonds. All of this is missing or diluted when it happens outside the family. Look into your own heart and ask, “What made a difference in my life as a child?” Was it standing in a line for a cafeteria style meal at school or was it sitting around the kitchen table with others in your family?

Ms. Davis clarified what her solution would be to make sure that the parents could feed the children themselves:

Better education can change the plight of the poor. My sincere hope is that we can lift families out of poverty through compassionate interaction with those who can show them a better way. This is why I agreed to chair an interim committee to study poverty and why I volunteered to teach a cooking class for mothers utilizing the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program to help teach young mothers how to prepare nutritious meals.

That's the problem: impoverished mothers don't spend enough time in the kitchen.

Often I feel compelled to offer my opinion on these issues. Sometimes I don't have to.

Forcibly Rape Journalists

I just heard something really interesting on Real Time with Bill Maher. They were discussing the rhetoric coming out of the Middle East (and particularly Iran) and how relations are strained by improper translation. One in particular that they focused on is the phrase "death to." When we hear them chant that, particularly in the context of "Death to America," we read it to mean that their ultimate wish is that we were all dead. In fact, that was one of the primary defenses in our torture of prisoners—they, after all, chant for our deaths!

By my approximation, the phrase "death to," though that is the direct translation, is the Farsi version of the word 'fuck.' Just as we drop the f-bomb fairly comfortably here, they use the phrase all the time there. When Ahmadinejad was handing out potatoes to people as a campaign gimmick, people who didn't support him would reply with "death to potatoes!" The person they interviewed would say it's fairly common if someone loses their car keys to exclaim, "death to my car keys. Where are they?" If someone makes a stupid mistake, they'll very commonly exclaim, "death to myself." In context, taking the saying literally is absolutely ridiculous.

Imagine the direct translation of the F-word. It's horrifying. How would people around the world react to Cheney's response to a barbed question he received from a journalist? "When the Vice President was asked a question critical regarding his associations with Halliburton, he responded casually to the reporter, 'well, I'd have to say, I hope you get forcibly raped very much.'"

I don't imagine people would think we were deserving of much respect either.

Jesus and The Worthingtons

Tomorrow begins the trial of the Worthington Family, religious zealots who allowed their daughter to die instead of healing her through medicine. I actually side with the Worthingtons on the broadest scale—specifically, that a majority of the hyper-religious are actually just self-serving detriments to society who hide behind religion because of its impenetrable veil, that they are exactly the people who are called out in the first commandment specifying that man is not the word of God.

The Worthingtons, on the other hand, are true faithful, those who stand by their beliefs whether it befits or punishes them. The question at hand, then, is whether it is the role of law to protect people like them who are victimized by dogmatic brainwashing, and more importantly, if they have the right to allow their daughter (who may not have grown up to share their beliefs) to die. It's a really difficult question, because if their daughter did grow up to share their beliefs (never mind whether the beliefs are valid), upon knowing that human medicine saved her life when she was young, she would spend her entire life believing that she was irreperably damned to Hell for something that she had no control over when she was only a year old.

Another interesting question with this case is how it relates to the pro-life movement. Under the religious pretense, it can be argued that the Worthington's actions are consistent with the pro-life dogma: mankind is not to intervene in God's Work by killing an unborn child, so similarly they are not to intervene with a born child that God intends to kill. However, the pro-life movement is increasingly set in a political framework, where it more closely pertains to our lives, and they have gone against the political mindset around kin. The political logic for outlawing abortions is straightforward—parents should not be allowed to abort a fetus, as it is a living, breathing thing, and they are no longer in a position to make the decision of whether another living human is to live or die. It is then to be inferred that The Worthingtons should not have been allowed to make a life-or-death decision with their child; rather, it is our societal responsibility to preserve the life of those who are not yet able to preserve themselves, and anyone who gets in the way (including the parents) are committing negligent homicide.

But what I'm most interested in is the metaphysical aspect of this case. Jesus was known to cure the sick. As an agnostic, I am inclined to believe that Jesus was just a man with great PR skills, not an actual divine being. Many religious historians (particularly on the humanist side) are quick to point out that through modern living, we are capable of carrying out all of the miracles that Jesus was credited for. Jesus himself said that it wasn't he who was responsible for the miracles, it was God. "God," as in "that which we are not capable of understanding." Which in Jesus's time included antibiotics. An argument can be made (which I may make someday) that Jesus himself had an advanced knowledge of antibiotic medicine, which he used to cure the sick.

Chew on that, Followers of Christ.

Subprime TARP

Good news everyone, we're out of the economic crisis! Or so say the bankers, who have returned their TARP funds to the government after deciding they can't meet the terms of the loan. (Oh, so they do understand that sometimes people default on loans.)

Actually, they can meet the conditions of the loan, they just don’t want to. Specifically, the government is placing a cap on executive salaries for any banks who have accepted loans. Essentially, the government is saying that the executives themselves have to help pay back the loan, instead of just cutting the employees. So the banks said they’d rather just give the money back. All twelve were very proud of themselves and immediately released public statements, basically saying “good news everyone—we still can’t afford to help our customers, so we’re not going to be giving out any loans, but the government did let us give back the TARP money designed to enable us to help people so that we can continue to earn huge dividends!!!”

The reason why they’re so proud of this is because the shareholders are all going to get a bigger slice because of it, and they’re taking the slice right out of the actual business they’re supposed to provide. Like the skyscraper that Portland has invested billions into making (by Nordstroms), which has been suspended indefinitely because their bank has said that they won’t front the money, even though it’s guaranteed and has already been collected from people who have dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on leases. Now the investors are trying to figure out what to do for all the businesses who paid six or seven figures for an office that they don’t have. It's like a season of LOST—just when you think that big business are the villains, you find out that they're right there with us as helpless victims of a far greater evil: the banks.

I hope the banks collapse. We’ll all be fucked in the short term, but it’s the only way we’ll ever move forward. Portland has room for a few more spangers, let the fat cats beg for change on the streets.

The truth is in the comments

Note: This blog entry has some graphic details. Read at your own risk.

The crime is too recent to have the full story, but what appears to have happened is that a woman in Tigard saw a posting online from a girl who was 9 months pregnant, and the woman wanted her baby, so she lured the girl to her house. She planned on coaxing the girl to hand over her baby, and even started out on building her alibi, spontaneously telling people she was pregnant so it wouldn't look weird when she suddenly had a baby.

When the girl came over, this woman tried to coax her into inducing labor (and may or may not have succeeded), and in any case got the baby out of her, then calmly killed the woman and stuffed her corpse under her house. The baby, not yet fully developed, was either never fully alive or died shortly after it was removed. The woman called her boyfriend and had him come over and help her bring the baby back to life. When he was unable to revive the baby, she called the police, saying it was her baby and she needed help, despite showing no signs of pregnancy, no record of having a baby, and a dead body under her house.

There is no ambiguity here. This woman, the reason doesn't matter, was not human. She was severely damaged beyond repair, she is beyond reprieve, and there is no chance that she will ever see free soil again. It's possible that she doesn't even care. At the very least, she will get life in prison for first degree murder of the mother. Then the prosecutors mentioned that if they can determine that the baby was at one point independently alive, it would qualify as a person and they could pin second-degree infanticide on her as well.

The first comments on the news report were fairly straightforward. Condolences to the victim and her family, disgust at the perpetrator. Then a couple people mentioned in passing how awful it was that they were calculating the charges on whether the baby was ever a person. One person casually states that the case makes her want to leave Oregon.

Then the floodgates open.

The pro-choicers come out against the commenter for making it political. The pro-lifers come out against the pro-choicers for not caring about the baby. The Democrats come out against pro-lifers for using the case to push their agenda. The religious conservatives come out against the Democrats for being heartless liberals. Soon everyone commenting have reduced the discussion to saying the other side are all going to hell. Nobody shows remorse for the victim anymore; the only mention of the original article is that everyone states that anyone who disagrees with them are just as bad as the psychotic murderer.

Eventually, someone from the family of the deceased have the misfortune of reading the comments on the page. A mere three and a half hours after the news is released, an acquaintance of the dead adds a comment expressing their anguish. The response is almost immediate:

heathers kin:
Most everyone would feel the same way in your position. I know I
would.

That said...

...and the debate continues. It quickly devolves into people citing statistics on the percentages of pro-lifers vs. pro-choice. Demographics on the death penalty. Geography of crimes in Multnomah County. Rights vs. Suppression of Free Speech. Within less than 28 hours, the conversation thread has devolved into calculating the margin of victory of President Obama.

The only mention remaining of the original tragedy is each side of each argument accusing the other of putting their own political agenda over the death of this poor, poor girl, whom they then use as an instance in furthering their own agenda. Commenters open with a suggestion that all dissenting opinions be removed from the website, then conclude with the pre-emptive accusation that the other side will attempt to suppress them, thus proving their point, whatever that point will be.

Well, now I'll add my two cents to the argument, because let's face it, I'm not better than any of you. I don't even know this woman, and it doesn't affect my life in any way that she's dead. My life is made worse from knowing that this psychotic killer even exists, but even the article itself points to how naive and gullible the victim was, literally to a fault. I do what I can to protect myself, and I assure you that the killer is not that difficult to outwit. Given my personal opinion, I would suggest that she be put promptly to death, and I would suggest keeping a close eye on her two kids—she's surely fucked them up by now.

Now, as far as the other politics: abortion rights, free speech, death penalty in general... I just watched the social discourse, in the span of just one day, completely forget that there's anything wrong with what happened last week. To some degree, every single one of us saw this event as an opportunity. A chance for us to make the world a little better for ourselves. And our anger is not directed at the psycotic baby-killer who caused this, but at our fellow commenters, who have commited the far worse crime of diagreeing with us.

I'm going to say that again in its own paragraph: at our basest level, we consider diversity of thought to be a greater evil than carving a baby out of an innocent woman and tossing her corpse under a house.

Now we know how tragedies like this come to pass. Evidently we have more important things to worry about.

"My Boyfriend is lying to me," pt. 2

Click here for part 1. Chick is the same person, boyfriend is the same guy. We went to lunch with a friend and discussed. Our friend does in fact refer to her boyfriend as 'Loser.'

FRIEND: "So how are things going with Loser?"
CHICK: "I'm actually really mad at him right now because he's playing games with me."
ME: "How so?"
CHICK: "Because I don't know if he's going to hang out with me over Memorial Day weekend or not, and he won't tell me."
FRIEND: "When did you ask him?"
CHICK: "Well, a couple weeks ago I mentioned to him that since it was a holiday, we'd both have the weekend off (usually I can't hang out on weekends because I do volunteer stuff on Saturdays) and we should get together. So he says that he's going to be going camping with his friends instead."
FRIEND: "So... he has plans."
CHICK: "Well, yeah, so I tell him that he needs to spend the weekend with me, so he should cancel his camping trip with his friends so we could spend some time together, and he said he wasn't going to. So now I don't know whether we're going to be hanging out or not."
(silence)
ME: "Well... it sounds like you're not going to be hanging out with him this weekend."
CHICK: "Well, I don't know, I'm kind of mad at him for not giving me an answer, but I'd be willing to—"
FRIEND: "He gave you an answer. He said he was going camping."
CHICK: "Yeah, but he should be hanging out with me, not hanging out with his friends."
FRIEND: "Hm. Yeah. That was a really stupid thing to say to him."
CHICK: "What was!?"
ME: "You gave him an ultimatum."
CHICK: "What's that mean?"
FRIEND: "When you give a guy a choice saying 'either you do what I want you to do, or you're in trouble,' he is never going to do what you want him to do. He'll go against you just out of spite."
ME: "You may never hear from him again."
CHICK: "But that's not what I did!!!"
ME: "How is that not what you did?"
CHICK: "I didn't give him a choice! I told him he needed to spend Memorial Day weekend with me if he wanted us to work."

Can't argue with logic like that. I don't mean it's solid logic, I just mean, you can't argue with logic like that.

To be continued, I have no doubt...

Satanists and Catholics Unite

I was intrigued by a passing comment on The Colbert Report that the only demographic which is on the rise in all 50 states is atheists. I actually looked into this statistic and discovered that additionally, the only demographic which is decreasing in every state is Monotheists (the group which includes Jews, Christians, and Muslims), though there is variation for each particular faith.

Religious leaders defend this by saying (and I completely agree with them) that the number of people of true faith have not decreased; they have actually increased for the most part. I personally would suggest that “atheists” also qualify as people of true faith (i.e. they sincerely believe in their metaphysical beliefs).

What appears to be happening is that people who are ambivalent towards religion have long considered themselves Christians because, well, that’s what normal people are. Atheists, however, have done a very good PR job of telling people that, by definition, if they don’t actively believe in God, then they are atheists. Therefore, when people are asked what religion they consider themselves to be, people who used to call themselves Christians are now calling themselves atheists, even though nothing in their belief or lifestyle has changed at all.

Now, I would like to suggest that anyone who casually refers to themselves as Catholic, Muslim, Mormon or Protestant, but don’t go to church/mosque or follow the rituals of their dogma are not actually of that religion, and people who refer to themselves as atheists but don’t really think about whether or not there is a God are not atheists. They’re simply non-religious.

My theory is that if the only people who considered themselves members of a belief system were people who actually believed it, the world would be incomparably better than it is today. If you ever look at debates between devout muslims, devout Christians, and devout atheists, they are almost always completely cordial with each other. Many of the most religious actually believe that they are in the same circle as those from other religions, they simply disagree on the details.

Even some of the higher-ups in the Church of Satan point out that Satanism is merely a rebranding by Christians of the worship of mother Earth, that Satan wasn’t even considered evil until the Catholic church announced that he was the ruler of Hell in the 400s. They don’t condone sinning, deception, or evil of any kind—the church is essentially a nephew of paganism, and are simply victims of a slander campaign 1600 years ago. And much like the other ‘non-believers’ I mentioned before, anyone who calls themselves a Satanist because they drink goat’s blood and evoke the Dark Lord are not really Satanists; they’re just idiots. And really, they’re no worse than the extreme fringe of most other religions, whether it’s radical Muslims, Opus Dei (i.e. radical Catholics), or radical Fundementalist Christians, who condone oppression, mortal punishment of nonbelievers, and provoke violence against innocents, like abortion doctors, gay rights activists, and blacks (lest ye forget the affiliation of the Ku Klux Klan). Even radical Hindus have some issues to deal with. Suicide by fire on a public street is not rational behavior.

Basically what I’m saying is that we need to do a reorg of the country’s religions into the five actual belief structures on our planet:

• Fundementalists
• The Devout
• Casual Believers (i.e. those who merely attend service because all their friends go to church too)
• Humanists (atheists, agnostics, Unitarians, certain liberal factions)
• Non-believers

We’ve outgrown these geographic clubs. Let the Fundementalists go to war with the Devout, and leave the rest of us out of it.

Scandal Schmandal

I’m sure you’ve been watching the news and heard about the “protests” against Obama speaking at Notre Dame—their reason being that a pro-choice President should not be giving a commencement address at a Catholic institution. Conservative media spoke from the perspective of how outrageous it is that the university is allowing Obama to speak, despite the cries of their community. Liberal media spoke of how outrageous it is that the community protest our President being able to speak to an educational institution because of their own prejudices. Non-partisan media have made a big deal of just what a big scandal the whole deal is, regardless of the reason. Even the Wikipedia entry for University of Notre Dame has been edited to include the controversy, suggesting that this event is now an integral part of the university’s 160 year history.

What the media haven’t covered is the actual commencement address. When the extreme minority of community in South Bend who did oppose Obama’s commencement address spoke out, a much larger part of the community reacted harshly. When a few people inside the ceremony interrupted the President’s speech with pro-life rhetoric, they were very quickly drowned out by a huge unison chant of “Yes we can, Yes we can,” the rallying cry of Obama supporters. The fact is that the vast majority of students, faculty, and community members seemed to be honored to have the President grace them with his company, and though they haven’t been given the same voice as the protesters, have tried to make it clear that they were proud of their University’s tradition of attracting such influential speakers.

I guess the truth just isn’t as salacious.

As the GOP falls

Nearly every political scientist is insisting that the Republican Party is not in danger of collapsing, that both major parties have survived far worse than the GOP are now. Well, if they don't collapse, it won't be for lack of trying.

You may have heard that recently the Republican Party, after a failed effort to rebrand themselves, have decided to rebrand the Democrats instead. They have resolved and pledged to now refer to the Democratic Party as the “Democratic Socialist Party.”

The result? In a recent poll done by a conservative polling company owned by Rupert Murdoch, studies have found that only 53% of Americans consider capitalism to be superior to socialism, meaning that nearly half of Americans do not see anything wrong with socialism; in fact, 20% now consider socialism to be superior. In an effort to scare people away from the Dems, they have associated Democrats with pinkos… and because of peoples’ high opinions of Democrats, their response is now “well, maybe then being a pinko isn’t so bad.”

The only group that this did provoke outrage from, in fact, is the actual Democratic Socialist Party of America, who are outraged that the Republicans are applying the moniker to their sworn rivals, the Democrats. So the effect of this decision is that moderates now think more highly of left-wing radicals, and left-wing radicals now think even less of right-wing conservatives!!!

If you don't take your shorts off, we can't pull the stick our of your ass.

Another day in Tualatin, another God-crazy politician trying to impose his beliefs on his denizens. Stars Cabaret, a dingy strip club, is moving into Tualatin. In Lake-O, they tried to block a new strip club. They failed. In Twally, they tried to block Stars' liquor license. They failed. Now they're trying to add an amendment to the state constitution to block strip clubs. They will fail.

Let's start with step one. The role of government is to cover needs and services of the people. They also have policing responsibilities, to keep people safe. That's why there are liquor licenses— bars have to be accountable for their patrons, ensuring that people are cut off at a certain point, minors aren't given (too much) booze, and no drunken brawls break out. That has NOTHING to do with looking at naked people. Blocking their liquor license is a perversion of their responsibilities and an abuse of power. That is not why they are given licensing authority, and the effort is clearly for the sole purpose of dissuading people "different from them" from doing what they want to do. It is the exact same thing, and I will fight you to the death on this, as preventing Jews from moving into your city because you don't like accountants. It's presumptuous, it's bigoted, and it's flat out fucking prejudiced.

Sidenote: So prejudiced, in fact, that this is how they're trying to include it into the state constitution—where the Constitution states that "no law shall be passed restraining... free expression," they want to add onto the end of it (this is verbatim) "nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or prohibit a local government from imposing... restrictions on the operations of nude dancing businesses."

Let me reiterate: Where the Constitution specifically states that the government shall not impose their beliefs on the people they represent, the city of Tualitin wants to add "except for when the government wants to impose their beliefs on the people they represent." Fucking assholes.

If I lost any of you on that comparison, let's come back for a second. I'm not saying that people who go to strip clubs do so for religious purposes (though some of them might). I'm saying that the only reason why someone would try to ban a strip club is because they have it in their fucked up little Christian heads that anyone who goes to nudey bars does so purely because they have an evil Satan voice in their heads telling them that women are to be used and subordinated, and that the patrons all fantasize about raping the girls as they dance. That is an absolute fucking insult, and borderline hate crime, against professional strippers. Just because you fucking churchies can't go five minutes talking to a little boy without ramming his dick in your mouth doesn't mean the rest of us have demons to expel.

People go to strip clubs purely for entertainment purposes. Believe it or not, it's not even sexual. Very few men (or women) get aroused when they go to a strip club. They just get tired of spending all day and night pretending that there's nothing to appreciate in the female form. It's one of the few things that crazy right-wing puritans and crazy left-wing liberals can agree on: people should be ashamed for having an interest in the female body. No, I don't want to get to know every girl that I want to see naked. Kind of like how I don't want my doctor to fix my car. They're two completely unrelated proficiencies.

So I get fucking tired of forcing my eyes up when a girl walks by. I get tired of people looking aghast at me when I check someone out and proclaim, "you're married!" Most of all, I get tired of dimwitted, bitchy women who spend 4 hours a day making themselves look good getting offended because I don't like their personalities any better now that they got a boob job. To have a place where you can walk in and look straight at a woman and think, "I want her to take her clothes off without me talking to her about her favorite movie," and lo and behold, off comes the top... well, I'd pay good money for that.

So would a lot of people. A lot of people who have no desire to associate with these women otherwise. I actually found out once in college that a stripper I'd seen a couple times went to school with me. She was actually incredibly nice, and I had some great conversations with her, but then I couldn't go to her strip club anymore because I'd feel guilty. It was too... intimate, once I knew her. So you see, I have no idea to get to know these women, let alone get intimate with them. The whole idea is that I can drop the 19th-century conventions that we're held to for one night and watch them do their thing. And you know what? The good ones enjoy it. They've worked hard on their bodies, and they get tired of having to hide them. They want to be able to just shove their implants in some guy's face and say "look at these, fucktard. You want them, don't you? You want these big titties? DON'T FUCKING TOUCH!" Then the guy thanks them and gives them a dollar.

Disgusted? Fucking deal with it.

These are people different from you. I don't fucking understand. People don't like fatty foods, so they want to close down McDonalds. People want to drive by themselves to work, so they want to shut down the bus. People like taking the bus, so they want to install toll bridges. How about we pretend that we're a country that allows you to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Hell, I remember there was a strip club in Idaho that was shut down because neighbors didn't "feel safe knowing it was there." Sharing a building with the strip club was a gun store and a head shop. What the fuck do you care what we do behind the big black door? Hell, even if you happened upon it by accident the bouncer wouldn't let you in.

Which brings me back to the politicians in Tualatin, who should all be fired. Here's the basic math: if your constituents really don't want a strip club nearby, they won't go to the strip club. They're really expensive anyway. If the strip club doesn't go out of business, it's because THE RESIDENTS OF TUALATIN WANT A FUCKING STRIP CLUB.

Don't worry, we deviants in Portland will not be making the drive down to the Twally to check out your nickel-and-dime pastie dancers. We've got clubs here that serve you a porterhouse while the stripper grinds the ketchup. We have peep shows where for five bucks you get to yell "stick your finger in it." We've got an old fuckhouse with heroine needles in the drywall that's being converted into a family restraunt, and—pay attention, now—part of their mission in remodeling is to retain the flavor of the original establishment. So no, you don't have to worry about a new strip club "attracting an undesirable element" into the city. All it will do is give the undesirable element something to do on Saturday night. And in exchange, they'll sleep in Sunday morning, instead of trying to pass legislation to shut down your church.

The History of Liberia

After Jim Crow laws were passed stating that no blacks were safe in the United States, even in free states, some of the founding fathers of the U.S. (most prominently Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner) decided that black Americans needed somewhere they could really feel safe if they were freed, so why not Africa? A team of Americans , including Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and Paul Cuffe, a Native American slave ship captain, secretly sent a ship to Africa, taking with them 33 African Americans and settled an unmapped city in West Africa called "Freetown." Over the next sixty years, slave ships going to pick up more slaves would secretly ship escaped or freed blacks back to Africa, slowly populating the secret civilization called the ACS (American Colonization Society) and helping them establish a shadow government in Africa. When the Civil War seemed inevitable in the late 1840s, many Southerners who had been part of the ACS movement started sending boats FULL of blacks over to Freeville.

When Great Britain discovered this secret colony, they made an attempt to annex it as part of the United Kingdom. They figured that the United States would be afraid to admit what they had been building and would abandon the colony, giving the UK prime coastal land in West Africa. Instead, the United States officially granted the ACS their independence and renamed them Liberia. Five states—New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Maryland, and the southern state of Virginia, who founded the ACS—all pitched in interest free loans to the Liberian government so they could fund an army. In nearly bankrupted the states, but they felt morally obliged to act.

In 1847, Liberia drafted their constitution and was founded as a free Republic. They renamed Freeville to "Monroeville," in honor of James Monroe, who had raised over $100,000 for the colony while he was sitting President of the United States. Though it's just as rife with conflict and war as any African country, it is still a sovereign nation, still in good standing with the Anglican world, and this year elected their first female President, in an election which was completely free of corruption, and are on their way to drafting a balanced budget.

So you tell me that American History isn't just as fascinating as European.

Blessed Economy

My wife is essentially a student—she's self-teaching so that she can get licensure to work in a specialized field, so as a result she isn't employed. In a good economy, that would be a problem. In the shitheap we live in now, though, my high-end-of-average paycheck ($1k every 2 weeks), we're doing quite well. We don't shop the good stores, but every time we see a liquidation sale, we march in with a fistful of bills and walk out sitting pretty. The missus has doubled her wardrobe, and I've been scooping up all the old games and software that people have been hawking, desperate for money. We've also gotten ourselves a new HDTV, one of those digital frame thingys, and we're moving into a much bigger and better apartment that (after incentives) will end up costing us hundreds less than where we're living now, since they're desperate to get tenants of any kind.

I feel guilty, to a certain degree. I really do feel like I'm profiting off of other people's mistakes. But then, isn't that how it should work? All those pretentious fucks I knew in college kept saying to me in their most condescending voices, "you're an idiot for renting an apartment. You're throwing your money away, not buying a house." Meanwhile, 80% of their house payments went to the bank, and the bank just blew the money on nothing, and then reneg'ed on their loan, and their house depreciated by more than they paid for it. That's not even considering all the money they spent on yard improvements, sewer lines, maintenance, and all the other stuff that's built in to a rental price, but they have to pay for themselves (which doesn't improve the value of their house).

All those fucktards kept chiding me for getting an English degree while they were out getting their MBAs. Then they got a lucrative job at Washington Mutual, while I devoted myself to being a big fish in a little pond, and now they're getting laid off because their company realized they provide no actual value to their employer, while my income has increased steadily and unwaveringly by 28% a year. And because I have practically no investments in high-risk stocks (all my money is in CDs and annuities), I haven't really lost any money in this economy. And once my wife does get her license, she'll be applying for jobs almost completely unopposed, because for all those snobby little assholes who were skating through med school with 'C' grades, their parents started questioning whether it was worth it paying 6 figures on an education that their kid clearly doesn't give a fuck about. So while the health industry itself is recession-proof, and riding a wave of support from a President who wants to amp up health care, there aren't any new doctors coming out of the college circuit, and the ones who are coming out don't know shit about the actual work, they just knew it was a high-paying enterprise. So as the hospitals try to keep costs down so they'll qualify for some of that sweet, sweet government subsidy, they spend a lot more time looking at these alternative-certification doctors who really know their shit, and couldn't care less how much they spent on their education. As Keith Olbermann is fond of pointing out—the fact that he went to Cornell A&M just means he was paying $500 per class for his Cornell education instead of $3,000; the classes were all the same.

So you know what? I take it back. Fuck all you self-congratulatory blowhards. You were wrong—that's what happens when you get your life philosophy off the cover of Greedy Fucker magazine. I learned all my life lessons by living. You see, things make more sense when you find them by thinking things through.

P.S. See my new fiction blog, The New Republic, at http://web.me.com/bonwell.parker/The_New_Republic/Blog/Blog.html.

Teabagging countdown

Still think news is boring? You don't watch cable:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Next starting at 1:30—

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And, finally:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

It is now that we can see the unforeseen consequences of Republicans not going to college. Otherwise, at least one of them would have known what "teabag" means.

Slick as a seal's ass

This concept that our economy is struggling because of bloated bureaucracies is absurd. I work for a bureaucracy, and I can assure you that they are a 100% solution-oriented operation. Let me give you an example.

Security is so restrictive here that they spend about $1000 every month just unlocking people's accounts. Mine, for instance, locks up as a precautionary measure every day at about 4:00 because my computer automatically handshakes with a third-party vendor that I have to use for my job, and my computer isn't 100% sure they aren't trying to steal our information. Additionally, since our Internet Explorer is two generations old, it's so slow I can't even do my job with it, so I use Safari, which my computer doesn't recognize, so it locks me out from time to time.

74% of calls to IT, evidently, are people who are locked out of their computer for some reason. So the company has just released a bulletin letting people know how to solve this cost-prohibitive issue. Their solution? Stop calling in to have your computer unlocked. See how simple that is? If nobody calls in, it doesn't cost them any money to fix it! What exactly we're supposed to do with a locked computer, of course, is our problem.

Fuck Catholics

Now in the news: backlash and protests, as Obama has agreed to speak at the mightiest of Catholic Institutions in America.

Thank God that Notre Dame has their storied football program, or they would be as much of a detriment to civilization as the rest of the Catholic system. Unfortunately, a couple of bible-thumping quarterbacks isn't enough if you still belong to the first anti-Christian sacreligious cult, the largest in the world, the one that didn't even wait for the Christian Church to establish before flat out discarding half the teachings that Jesus devoted (and sacrificed) his life to get out into the world.

Now the institution has invited the Baptist President of our country to speak at their commencement, as well as offer him an honorary J.D., and in exchange he will provide an intellectual debate over his controversial decision to allow federal funding for abortion and stem-cell research.

However, the student bodies of this alleged "house of higher learning" have come out strongly against education. Instead, they are pushing for the Catholic tradition set by the Apostle Luke and which reigned free in the 17th century, directly leading to the darkest time in our history and more deaths and suffering than Christianity as a whole has been able to prevent. That tradition is oppression of dissent and abolishment of thought. They have spoken, and spoken loudly, in their belief that anyone who doesn't blindly agree with their perscribed belief system, someone who considers matters of life, death, and soul to be a little complicated, even someone whose own belief system doesn't allow for the more rational position of pointing out that their own beliefs have long been disproved beyond any shadow of a doubt—someone who proposes even that minimal level of thought, as is dictated in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, and every other philosphical system that isn't Catholicism or Islam, should be considered, is to be banned from their institution, and should not be allowed to speak to them.

The only thing Catholics have ever gotten right is that they're not going to Hell. As the world progresses forward without them, as the percentage of people who prefer reason over mythology creeps toward the majority, as the history books start to shift Dogmatic Christianity into the same category as all the other ridiculous religions of primitive humans, this superminority of our kind continue to serve as the single greatest obstacle to the survival of humankind. There are more of us who consider the Catholic Church a tragedy of history than they realize. And as their leaders become more aware of that fact, they press harder to hide their denizens from the collective thought of the rest of us, and in time, they will become so separated from the voices of reason that they will break off and shrivel away as another failed experiment in the forward progress of our kind. Homo Erectus, Habilis, Neanderthals, Catholics. Yet another addition to the list of people we'll look back at and wonder how humans could ever believe something which falls apart before their very eyes.

Believing what they want to believe.

To begin with, people have to get over this preposterous notion that anything that comes from the mouth of a child has to be true. On the contrary—children spend most of their lives playing pretend. They will lie if it will get them attention. They will experiment to see what the reaction is.

Then you have extreme examples, like the one above. This is a group of hundreds of people listening to the "gospel" of a very young child. As a trained linguist, the fact that this kid has no fucking clue what he's saying is blindly obvious for more reasons than I can list, but let's start with the obvious: his body language shows that he is flat-out imitating people he has seen before. Children do not have the psychological capacity to be as passionate as this kid is about his message. No knock against the kid, it's not his fault, he doesn't have a chance.

On top of that, what twisted fucking world has a mass of adults taking cues from a young child on where we came from? How in holy hell would he know? He hasn't even hit puberty yet. He doesn't even know where he came from. For all he knows, he was born from unicorns. When I was his age, I was open to the possibility that I did come from monkeys, as in my actual parents were monkeys, and those people in the living room were just looking after me. I wasn't detached from reality; I was a normal five year old. What difference did it make to me where I actually came from?

Whoever made this video made the statement that this was child abuse. I disagree. I think that kid's having the time of his life. I'm 29 years old, and I still fantasize about preaching to a huge group of people. As far as what the kid thinks, I'm not worried... yet. Kids can believe anything when they're young, that's why we have the saying "grew out of it." Human psyche is very malleable at that age, and any "damage" done can fairly easily be undone, so long as it is within the threshold of what a child's mind can handle.

I'm more worried about the adults who are watching him. Their minds aren't as malleable. They are, in fact, beyond hope. They have been irreparably indoctrinated into this ridiculous cult, and if they were convinced tomorrow that all of this were untrue, they wouldn't be able to adjust. Their bodies and souls would be forever breached by a grey void, and they would lose purpose for anything they do. That's how the cult is designed; once you join, you're detached from the enemy for life.

Don't feel sorry for this kid. Feel sorry for the adult he will become.

Losing My Edge

You know, I started this blog so that I'd have an outlet to say all the subversive, offensive shit that pops up in my head, shit that I can't say when my name's attached to it, so I can spew anonymous vile into the internet. Sadly, I don't appear to have been expelling my demons properly as of late, and there's plenty to expel.

Rather than taking out this rage right now, however, I leave you with this simple thought: if a Pro-life Hebrew has a vasectomy, doesn't he have to forgive Hitler? I mean, he's killing a hell of a lot more Jews (no pun intended) than Genocide ever did.