I have tried to stop posting my angry rants, but this is too much now. I am going to limit myself so that I don't type a 10,000 word screed against everything that pisses me off. I'm not going to link anything, you can find it all online from reliable sources, like the Red Cross and ProPublica, but here goes nothing:
My daughter has yet to be born, yet she is already smarter and more informed than Elisabeth Hasslebeck, whom is someone I respect* for being brave enough to go on TV despite being a grade-A idiot. I made the mistake of watching the clip of her getting destroyed by Jesse Ventura on her stupid show this morning. I am not going to link it, because I (and this is the truth) actually got so frustrated and angry that I had to bite my lip and pound my desk so that I didn't scream at the computer.
How can someone be so wrapped in a cocoon of stupidity, dishonesty, and immorality? I have no misconceptions that I can raise a perfect child, but I hope to be able to raise a child who is smart enough to understand the basis of her statements, to put one and one together and make two. People like Hasselbeck can't even do that. And for this she gets rewarded with a large national audience every day. It is irresponsible, at absolute best, for ABC to continue employing someone so separated from reality and sense.
I really should just block her show and Fox "News" from my TV. The stupid, the self-contradictions, the incessant blow-hardery, the non-stop dishonesty and downright incorrectness of it all... it's too much to stand. Their current story du jour defending torture (torture!) is unbelievable. It's like watching a B-movie in terms of believability. But then they go and outdo themselves, to the point of self-parody, such as Sean Hannity almost comically tacking "And I'm a Christian!" onto his defenses of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and stress positions.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." --Mahatma Ghandi
The only reason I am thankful for people like Sean Hannity is that they have always been around and were a big reason that I stopped believing in all these superstitions (e.g. God, etc.) when I was 13 or so. And, yes, I am morally equating people like Sean Hannity to child molesters. This may be unfair to child molesters, as the cheerleading of Hannity and his ilk led to the deaths of thousands, and then to unknown numbers more who died being tortured (tortured!) in order to create a reason for the invasion of Iraq ex post facto.
If you watch Fox News, may the FSM and his noodly appendage have mercy on your soul.
Her, Hannity, and the hosts of "Fox and Friends" should have a stupid-off and O'Reilly, Gingrich, Kristol, Barnes, Hume, Krauthammer, and Will can have an intentional-dishonesty off. Not to mention Malkin, Reynolds, Morrissey, R.S. McCain, Erickson, and the rest of the cheerleaders.
Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Bybee, Rice, Rove, and the rest of them can go to jail, already. And they should be waterboarded 183 times in a month, for good measure. After all, it's not torture and, besides, Nancy Pelosi may have known about it, which totally makes it OK.
I am hoping against hope that Obama is playing some kind of long-term game, trying to build up public support for investigations and prosecutions by denying the desire for them now, trying to preemptively eliminate the certain cries of "partisan witch hunt" that will emanate from Team Stupid, but if he's not, and he really has no intention of this ever being investigated, he'll lose a large amount of my support.
In all seriousness, if you in any amount agree with anything any of the people I have listed say about torture (TORTURE!), please never come back to this blog. I would happily - very happily - never speak to you again in my entire life. I don't want you near my child. Ever.**
*Not really ** Really
As an addendum:This makes me smile, but I don't understand what's wrong with people who go to church regularly. I understand that a large percentage of this type of people are Evangelical, and for some baffling reason (abortion, only abortion, oh and the gayz) they are married to the Republican party because the the GOP is so "Christian" [Ed. note: Ha ha ha ha ha! Good joke!], but WTF? Go read the Sermon on the Mount and tell me "WWJD?" I hate when I know more about religion than religious people.
Topical Edit:This. Read it all. All the comments, too.
Remember this rant, where I mentioned that Fox News and other right-wing morons love to use cold weather to go "What global warming?" Well, they were back at it again on Sunday with that dolt Sean Hannity pretending (I hope[?]) to deny anthropogenic climate change based on a blizzard in the northeast. I caught about ten seconds before I was able to change the channel and let me tell you that I raged SO hard. And *bonus* he included in his discussion... Lou Holtz? WTF? Why can't intentionally disseminating false information be illegal? This is not First Ammendment-protected speech. This is lying. And the scary part is that there is a significant slice of the population that believes this drivel.
If you get your news from TV (especially, but not limited to, Fox "News"), you are doing yourself a severe disservice. You are actively melting your brain. For example, maybe you have heard that the stimulus includes $8B for high speed rail connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas? Just one problem, it's an outright lie. Go ahead, read it yourself. Want to know where we might build rail? Here are the corridors of interest. John Boehner is in a tizzy over it, but you know who gets disproportionate rail service? OHIO.
The stupid makes my head hurt.
Also, let me add that there are so many stupid people out there on other fronts, like grasping a progressive tax system. For example, if your doctor who wants to take fewer patients so that he makes less money because he doesn't understand the concept of tax brackets, get a new doctor. (Equally inexplicable is the fact that ABC News doesn't seem to understand.) And these are the morons who are running around screaming "Socialist!" because the marginal rate on the >$250k/yr bracket is increasing from 35% (which was designed to be temporary, so it's not really an "increase" at all) to 39.6%. Well, then I suppose that uber-lefty Nixon was a dyed-in-the-wool Red Commie with his >50% bracket. As John Cole wrote,
39.6% = socialism 35% = capitalist nirvana
I am in the world's lowest tax bracket, and despite no experience with higher brackets even I understand the system. Idiots. Tax brackets do not make the system complicated. If you hear someone say we need a "fair tax" (i.e. flat tax rate) to simplify the system punch them in the face. Tax brackets are the symplest math possible; the IRS provides you with tables showing how much you owe depending on your income, so you don't even have to do math. Complications in the tax code are elsewhere, not with rates. And I haven't even mentioned that the stimulus that passed included tax cuts for 95% of people.
What really frightens me is that these are the morons who decide elections. They are the ones who up to a couple of days before the election hadn't decided between McCain and Obama, who are polar opposites. Listen, if you supported McCain, and in your own mind you have a philosophy that you adhere to, that you believe, and that you can support using empirical evidence, more power to you. I happen to disagree with you, but at least you are justifying your choice. But if you don't understand how progressive taxation works, if you think that climate change isn't real, if you buy into the concept of a flat tax rate because Mike Huckabee calls it "fair," if you think the world is 5,000 years old, or if you're a dumbass like Joe the Plumber and can't understand that your small business is taxed on net and not gross, please I am begging you to never vote. And I think it would be in your best interests to never actually speak. As the saying, often attributed to Mark Twain, goes,
It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
Christ on a cracker, the only thing that I cannot stand in this world is stupidity. Sadly, it's what humanity creates most efficiently. If you do one good deed today, please inform an idiot that they are stupid and need to learn about things before they open their pie-hole. Luckily, most idiots are fundamentally incapable of and downright allergic to learning. Unfortunately, they will not shut their yap, but you might feel a little bit better. I never fear to inform someone that they are deficient in the neural area.
Oh hey, look! Someone is angry on the internets! I've now gone cross-eyed with rage. I know, no one wants to read my complaining about people, especially if you fall into one of the categories I'm raging against. So that's enough raging for this week or month... basically as long as I can avoid repugnant thugs, like Hannity or O'Reilly or Glenn Beck.
Update (9:02 AM): Sometimes, good news comes at the least expected times. It's a start.
Update II (4:39 PM): While I have no intentions of turning this blog into a "Daily Ragefest" kind of thing (there are tons of those, plus you have Fox News, CNN, and most of MSNBC to provide you with that if you want), I came across something today that is - in my opinion - quite relevant to this post and the situation we're facing. The problem we are dealing with (with great frequency in this country, to some extent everywhere else) is very strongly related to an anti-science faction that has a disturbing amount of clout here.
Consider the survey results: of those who believe in miracles, 84 percent say they happen because of God. About three quarters further identify Jesus and the Holy Spirit as sources of miracles, while lesser numbers attribute them to angels (47 percent), saints (32 percent), deceased relatives or others who have passed on (19 percent), and other spirits (18 percent).
So what’s going on? Wouldn’t the Creator of the universe have better things to tend to than pulling off the occasional miracle? It depends, of course, on whom you ask.
To a scientist, events that many would consider miracles are not only explainable, they’re inevitable—because in a universe of nearly infinite possibilities, outrageously unexpected things have to happen at least occasionally.
“The Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials,” says Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things (W.H. Freeman, revised, 2002). “Events with a million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.”
Seriously, I mean come on. Believing in miracles problematic because it provides people with an excuse to not understand something. It's the lack of intellectual curiosity that fuels the blanket distrust of science among those who would deny climate change in the same way that people deny the Earth is billions of years old. That doesn't make me anti-religion, it makes me anti-anti-science.
As I said in the comments,
[If] all of these people who believe in miracles or creationism or whatever took a fucking moment to look at the science and see how unbelievably complex and perfect (for life) the universe is, I would have a hard time believing they wouldn’t see God in science, too. I doubt any of them have ever heard of the fine structure constant, much less have any understanding about the ramifications of changes to it or other things we know about the universe, but if they did, and if they wanted to tell me that God essentially "programmed" the universe, then I think I could get along with them much better… so long as they don’t think it was "programmed" 6,000 years ago.
It's not just that. It's the value of G. It's the rotational bonding possible around carbon. It's 10 gazillion other things that have to be juuuuuuuuust right for us to be here. And if you are inclined, you could easily interpret this as God's work. I can disagree with you, but I can't argue with you. We have no way to disprove that at the moment (we have no way to prove it, either, and without a test that claim resides fully within the realm of philosophy and not science). We may know where life came from, but not why (if there is a "why"). But if you believe in miracles, then you are not concerned with real-world solutions to real-world problems; perhaps something miraculous will happen. I strongly hope that we aren't relying on miracles to get us out of this climate change mess, but my fear is that this crowd won't even believe that there is a problem.
OK, sorry, like I said. This is not indicative of the direction I'll be taking this blog, and I hope that on the basis of the last 50+ posts you can see that (the actual direction is: shitty jokes and lame anecdotes). There was just a confluence of events over the past week that sent the needle on my rage-o-meter to 11 and I had to get this out there. We're all friends here, though.
One of these days the morons who continue to deny climate change are going to come around, but it's going to be too late. Typically, these horrible people (usually the pathological Fox News) offer some kind of anecdotal evidence - like a record snowfall on a particular date in Whitehorse - to say that, "Obviously there is no Global Warming!" even though people who live up there see the changes firsthand, even if it's still cold as all hell. They're doing nothing but taking advantage of an unfortunate moniker. It's climate change, you nitwits, not "Global Warming." But, no. They'll take what they can get now, future of the rest of us be damned. (By the way, how's that working out for you?) Whatever, they don't care. It's mostly just going to be those poor 150M+ Bangladeshis, who don't count. That is, if you completely ignore the loss of the U.S. coastline, which is probably going to be worse than expected if we don't stop what we're doing like rightthisveryinstant. Obviously, we need a carbon tax levied at the point of extraction. Gas taxes won't cut it. If Exxon is calling for it, you know it's bad (although I am wary of every proclamation Exxon makes - somehow they'll find a way around it or something like that). Unfortunately I have no faith in our policy makers. What is needed is too radical to even be proposed by people who are only interested in being reelected, and what we might even get will be too watered down to be effective (as you might predict based on the bizarre machinations of the Republicans and "centrist" Democrats concerning the proposed stimulus). It's too bad we didn't invest in these things while the economy was good, but now that it's bad and everything is cheaper and we could do a lot of these projects we need, we are given trillions of dollars in... tax cuts. Oh, great. Tax cuts, there's your solution. It's so insanely stupid on so many levels.
Either way, it's this kind of thing that has made me decide that I could not work for an oil company (or any subsidiary or vendor or whatnot) or coal company or natgas company, etc. Oil companies come in here to Austin and hire dozens of people away from this very university, and to say they pay handsomely is the mother of all understatements.
Nope. Not going to do it. I wouldn't even work for one of their alternative energy divisions, like BP's. Why? Let's say I am involved in the next great energy supply. What's to stop BP from getting their IP rights and sitting on it? Nothing.
No. If I'm going to feel like I'm going be helping make the world better for my daughter, then I have to play an active role, even if it's just my small part. I can't passively wait and just cast votes. I'd rather roll the dice with a local start-up like Heliovolt, or do advanced materials research for the military, or even work with the TCEQ. All of those would be infinitely more justifiable than working for Exxon.
This just grinds my gears to no end. Build nuclear plants now. Recycle the waste. Use it again. Store it in a salt mine when it's done. Build windmills in the Midwest now. Build tidal power generators now. Build a smartgrid now. I know part of the problem is also a liquid fuels problem, so let's end our stupid corn ethanol mandates and price guarantees and let's put money into hydrogen generation from water and plug-in cars. We're in an insane amount of debt now anyway. It's been going like crazy since Reagan and getting worse under both Bushes with some small headway made under Clinton, although they've all presided over some deficit spending (Clinton being the only one really to eek out a surplus). We're going to have to inflate it away, so what's another trillion? At least we'd have a planet to work with in that scenario. I know that Obama is actually much savvier than any of us ever give him credit for (and I think we're learning to give him a lot of credit already), so I'm just hoping that somehow he'll be able to get all of this done smoothly and still have a smile on his face.
That's not much to ask, is it? /sarcastic
Protip: there is no longer any such thing as a fiscally conservative politician; government will always be expensive when it's set up like ours is, so let's demand that they at least spend wisely.
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Well, this turned into an incoherent screed somewhere in there. FWIW, this is actually about my daughter, at least tangentially. Somewhere in that rambling, the point is that people are constantly, continually, and knowingly hurting future generations. For some reason they don't care. It's times like these that I lose all faith in people (but not my readers, all two of you of great!). I'm trying to figure out how to financially support her without selling her out. Ain't easy here in Texas.
I guess it's pretty easy to discover the days when I have almost nothing to do at work. I hate when packages take too long to deliver.
tl;dr: We're doomed, so here's something that always makes me laugh.
I am spending an unbelievable amount of effort trying to decide upon what my daughter will spend the first years of her life pooping on. I have sat down on two separate occasions to do some research, and I have logged at least five interweb-hours researching, and I'm still not sure if we're making the best choice. As of right now, we've settled on gDiapers (no, not that kind of G, this kind). I have 10+ years of chemistry-heavy education, and I'm still mostly in the dark. I kid you not, I even did some Google Scholar searching. I won't do it now, but expect a 10,000 word diatribe against the entire industry in the near future. This post is mostly just a flimsy excuse to introduce the Poop tag, which I assume will be getting a lot of use in the next several years, especially if this recession continues.
Why does China have to screw everything up? Every. Single. Thing. Seriously, can they do one f'ing thing without cheating? China is like the person who volunteers to be the Monopoly banker, and then nearly three hours into the game you see him making himself incorrect change and the whole game has been tainted and you've wasted a lot of time and why on earth does anyone play Monopoly?
Not only do they pirate intellectual property, not only do they undervalue their currency by pegging it to the dollar, not only do they have virtually no environmental regulation, not only do they do business with Sudan and Iran (not that the western world is much better with Saudi Arabia and the like), not only do they crush dissent and any movement toward individual rights, but the toys with the lead I mean COME ON. It just doesn't stop. This really grinds my gears. At Babies R Us and Target every single toy - every single toy - was made in China.
Dear China,
I'm not going to buy your shitty, lead-laced toys. Please stop sending them.
Sincerely, Kinderbloggen
P.S. At least try to keep the beef and broccoli free of toxic materials.
And then their state media issues the cry-me-a-river sob story that OH NOES their toy exports only increased 2.5% last year, as opposed to 20.3% the year before. Sorry, I don't think I can type any more with these tears streaming down my face. Thank the FSM that compassionate conservative George W. Bush made big cuts at the CPSC and FDA, in between committing war crimes, of course. I'm sure it won't be long before China deals with this the way China always deals with things that cause them international embarassment.
Now India may permanently ban Chinese toys. India. India.Permanently. Not the U.S. - the wealthiest country in the world, which could do this to protect our kids and create some jobs - but India. I feel like I am taking crazy pills.
And Jesus Christ now there's lead in vitamins? Why not just give my daughter a big piece of lead to eat as her first solid food, and then she can enjoy a nice sundae topped with cadmium and mercury for dessert?
So what can we do? Try as we might, it's going to be tough to find toys made in North America or Europe. We've got some tips from Consumer Reports and a public interest group that uses XRF to do their own testing, but that and home testing kits are more or less it. Guess we'll try to buy local. If not, guess Baby's getting a Bag O' Broken Glass.
