reflections on those in power

here are a few reflections of mine on those in power in the united states, mainly the bush administration, republicans, and big business... (the democrats in congress are unable to wield power since it requires 2/3 majorities in both houses of congress, since the president opposes everything good they ever try to do, and enough republicans go along with him in congress so he always has his way)

1) the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen year after year. people who do not have enough money to afford things like cars, houses, and computers have been given more and more credit, more loans, more debt, and bought things they cannot afford, with things such as subprime mortgages. now, this whole system of enslaving people with debt by using advertisement to trick them into buying things they cannot afford is starting to collapse, with people losing all the things they bought, and going bankrupt. who is winning? the banks are. the banks get to reposess everything the people bought that they couldn’t afford, and people will have to work the rest of their lives to pay off their debt, and all that money will go back to the banks that tricked them into getting loans. we are also seeing this happen with student loans that people use to pay for college, people being unable to pay those off for many years, and a lot of colleges actually had secret deals between their financial aid departments and banks, which was uncovered by new york state attorney general andrew cuomo. and as for the standard of living in the united states? official statistics calculate per capita gross domestic product by dividing the total value of goods and services produced in a given year inside the country’s borders by the population of the county. this includes goods and services produced by illegal immigrants, in many cases. however, illegal immigrants are not counted in the official population statistics. this makes the per capita gross domestic product, or per capita gdp, look artificially high. the effect of this flaw in how per capita gdp is caluclated is far greater in the country of luxembourg, which, according to official statistics, is the wealthiest country in the world. this is a lie. luxembourg is not that wealthy. luxembourg is a small country between france and germany, a manufacturing center, full of factories, but the country has quite a small population. a large percentage of employees in the factories of luxembourg actually live in france and germany and commute to luxembourg for their factory jobs. thus, if you divide the amount of goods and services produced in luxembourg by the population of that tiny country, you get an inflated figure, and luxembourg ends up with a ridiculously high per capita gross domestic product in the official statistics. this is despite the fact that all those factory workers from france and germany live in houses or apartments in france and germany and spend a good portion of their income in france and germany. similarly, illegal immigrants in the united states send a lot of their money back to relatives in their home countries, as a net loss to the u.s. economy. and the jobs that illegal immigrants in the united states do are ones that u.s. citizens would be willing to do if the employers paid enough. but the employers do not want to pay enough! they want to pay low wages, lower than minimum wage, and are unwilling to pay any higher, because it would cut into their profit margin and make them less competitive with other companies that also employ illegal immigrants. meanwhile, republican politicians have for years cut taxes on the wealthy while increasing the tax burden of the poor. republicans propose replacing the income tax with a national sales tax, which they call a “fair tax”, but it is anything but fair. the “fair tax” would take the same percentage of income from someone who only makes minimum wage as someone who is a billionaire. that is far worse than the progressive income tax we have today, which, at least in theory, taxes the wealthy at a higher rate than the poor, because the wealthy have enough money to afford to pay such a tax, whereas the poor need all their money just to buy the essentials to survive. why is it that poor people are able to buy houses and big flat-screen televisions and nice cars and pay for expensive private colleges? because they get loans... free money! free money that they have to pay back... with interest. people are tricked into getting loans because their stupidity is exploited... stupidity they have because they are financially illiterate and have no idea how to handle money. and the big businesses that sell them things and give them loans have no intention of teaching people how to handle money, because that would reduce their sales and their profits. our entire economy is based on people buying things they cannot afford with borrowed money, and most of the stuff they buy is imported from countries like china, made by workers in sweatshops or in other bad working conditions. we in the united states import far more than we export, and how is this all paid for? our government itself is deeply in debt and cannot manage money, year after year spending far more than it takes in in taxes, going further and further into debt. some of this debt is to wealthy banking interests in the united states who are profiting at the expense of the american people. and some of it is to other countries like the chinese communist regime. the war in iraq costs the u.s. government hundreds of billions of dollars, and will probably go over a trillion dollars, and where does the government get this money? the money is all borrowed, and none of it is paid for by taxes. future generations, young people like me, will have to pay off this debt in the future, when taxes will be much higher... that is, unless the government goes bankrupt or has debt forgiveness like some third-world countries have managed to obtain from their creditors. the wealthy banking interests who loan money to the united states government by buying treasury bonds are the ones who finance most government activity, since republican politicians keep lowering taxes, and the money has to come from somewhere. perhaps republicans periodically lose elections on purpose when the government’s finances go south, just so they can force the democracts to raise taxes to pay for the lavish spending the republicans did on wars and other things they could not pay for. and raising taxes looks bad. so then after democrats raise taxes, which is of course essential in financing the government and paying for everything the republicans put the government into debt spending money on, the republicans can use raising taxes as a cheap political issue, manipulating the public into bringing back incompetent republican mismanagement of the government in the next election.

2) the war in iraq is based on lies and there is absolutely no reason for the united states to have military forces in that country. “we” took saddam hussein out of power (we is in quotes because i personally did not participate as a soldier or in the government and i did not even vote for anyone behind that war except senator hillary rodham clinton), and we caught him from his “spider hole” (what a joke, saddam looked like a crazy homeless guy when we caught him), and we put on a show trial and executed him. originally the war was supposedly about weapons of mass destruction: chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. dick cheney stated as fact that saddam hussein had reconstituted his nuclear program. we were told ridiculous tales of unmanned robotic flying machines that would spray poison around our major cities. colin powell made a presentation in front of the united nations of all the fake evidence our intelligence agencies had doctored up against saddam hussein’s regime; i watched that whole presentation, and it was obvious to me that the evidence was all fake, and i lost all respect for colin powell, who had been the only person in the bush administration i had any respect for at all. there was even talk of saddam hussein being connected to 9/11, sometimes even from president george w. bush. in fact, george w. bush continues to try to connect 9/11 and iraq in his speeches, even today, despite the fact that there is no connection and it is a big lie. none of the 19 hijackers were from iraq and there is no evidence of any connection, except for 2 smaller lies. one of the lies is about a meeting between representatives of saddam hussein’s government and al qaeda operatives that supposedly took place in the czech republic. that meeting never happened and the whole story was fabricated by an intelligence agency. another one concerns abu musab al-zarqawi. zarqawi was in northern iraq, the part saddam hussein did not control, and was in a small section that was not controlled by either of the 2 leading kurdish factions that control most of northern iraq. he was in a section controlled by ansar al-islam, an islamic fundamentalist group tied to al qaeda. and mr. zarqawi was also tied to al qaeda. however, this part of iraq was not controlled by saddam hussein, and saddam hussein had nothing to do with ansar al-islam, abu musab al-zarqawi, or al qaeda. zarqawi later went on to found a terrorist organization inside iraq that later renamed itself “al qaeda in mesopotamia”, but which is referred to as “al qaeda in iraq” by the united states government. zarqawi was used as a bogeyman by the united states, who blamed him for most of the biggest terrorist attacks inside iraq after the invasion, and his group publicly took credit for those attacks, as well. however, his group probably took credit for many attacks carried out by other groups, just to gain prestige and infamy. eventually the united states military killed mr. zarqawi, but we continue to blame most of the big terrorist attacks in iraq on his group, regardless of who actually carried them out. anyway, back in the fall of 2002, the united states was trying to get a resolution passed by the united nations security council against iraq. syria, which was on the security council, wanted nothing to do with it. our diplomats convinced syria to vote for the resolution by lying to the syrians and saying that we were not going to attack iraq if the resolution passed. of course, the resolution passed (unanimously because of our lies and manipulations towards the foreign diplomats), and we ended up invading iraq early in 2003, proving to the world that our nation was governed by untrustworthy liars and that nothing we said could be trusted. the resolution required iraq to send the united nations a report accounting for all weapons of mass destruction, and iraq complied. the resolution called for weapons inspections in iraq, which were done by hans blix and mohamed elbaradei. the weapons inspectors went to iraq and did robust inspections for a short period of time, searching all over iraq for weapons of mass destruction, with the full cooperation of saddam hussein’s government, and finding absolutely no weapons of mass destruction. the united states told the weapons inspectors to leave, while they were doing their job, and started a war based on the false premise of weapons of mass destruction, even though the weapons inspectors had been actively searching for weapons of mass destruction! president bush told saddam hussein he had 48 hours to leave iraq before they would begin bombing. that was an outright lie! we began bombing less than a day later, right where we thought saddam hussein was! and yet some idiots still trust president bush, even after he has proven himself to be an outright liar, so many times! and then we began the campaign of “shock and awe”, or, in other words, terrorism. shock and awe are very similar in meaning to terror, but basically, we were dropping giant bombs everywhere and killing innocent civilians. and our soldiers in iraq use depleted uranium munitions, which poison people, causing cancer, birth defects, and other health problems. the iraqi forces quickly surrendered to the might of the united states military and a very small number of coalition partners, the so-called “coalition of the willing”, mostly tiny countries who had been bribed by our government into giving us token assistance of very small numbers of troops. the only major contribution from another country was from the united kingdom, led by tony blair, who was stupid enough to fall for the neoconservative theories of foreign policy and become a true believer in neoconservatism, completely brainwashed. of course, now that the united kingdom is led by gordon brown, he is trying to end british involvement in iraq as fast as possible, falsely claiming that the british have achieved victory in the area they controlled, mainly basra, when in fact they are fleeing in defeat. anyway, before the war, dick cheney formed his own miniature intelligence agency, inside the vice president’s office, because he did not like what was coming out of the cia and did not think they justified the war strongly enough or had a strong enough case against saddam hussein. so dick cheney brought in people like ahmed chalabi to give evidence against iraq. ahmed chalabi is a chameleon-like figure... in washington, he is a neoconservative who advocated war with iraq and produced false evidence against saddam hussein justifying a war. in iraq, he is a politician who distances himself from the united states and tries to pretend he is independent and a patriot. and in iran, he cozies up to the mullahs and tries to show that he is really one of their allies. dick cheney’s chief of staff, “scooter” libby, was deeply involved in all of these operations of producing false evidence to justify a war with iraq, and later he was convicted of perjury in the investigation of the affair of how the bush administration leaked the identity of cia agent valerie plame as revenge against her husband joseph wilson, who had written an article detailing how the bush administration lied to get us into war in iraq. the forces of saddam hussein’s government disbanded and refused to fight us, keeping their guns and weapons and going into hiding, thus allowing us to appear to win the war against them quite quickly. within less than a month the former regime was completely toppled. and then george w. bush dressed up like an air force pilot and landed on an aircraft carrier for a big photo op with a giant “mission accomplished” banner where he declared “major combat operations in iraq are over”. of course he was never a real soldier, and had used his family connections to get into the texas air national guard during the vietnam war to avoid serving in vietnam, and then he actually went awol, but his official records did not say he went awol, because, again, he used his family connections. george w. bush is a man who, throughout his life, just like j. r. “bob” dobbs, made a million bucks every time he screwed up. always an incompetent fool, who had a c average at yale, he kept getting onto corporate boards despite his stupidity and lack of business sense... all the businesses he ever ran went bankrupt. anyway, “major combat operations in iraq are over” turned out to be a big lie, and we have actually increased troop levels since that declaration, most notably in this so-called “surge” that bush started in early 2007, even though the voters in the 2006 elections elected democrats who promised to end the war. the whole “surge” is bush’s way of saying “fuck you” to the american electorate who elected candidates who promised to end the war just 2 months before the surge started. and who is profiting off this war? well, the war is not financed by taxpayers, since republicans have not only failed to raise taxes in order to pay for the war. they actually lowered taxes while we were at war, the first time in our nation’s history. that is their way of saying “fuck you” to the young people of our country like me who will have to work hard and pay taxes in future years in order to pay off the massive national debt these idiots keep racking up every time they lower taxes and increase spending with their voodoo economics and their fuzzy math and their laffer curve. and as dick cheney said, “reagan proved deficits don’t matter”. thanks a lot, asshole. democrats had to raise taxes to keep the government from going bankrupt, due to the massive deficits year after year caused by reagan’s voodoo economics, and the democrats’ reward in 1994 was newt gingrich and the republicans coming to power. anyway, this war just keeps on going and going and going, like an energizer battery with that pink bunny that keeps hitting its drum. at first, the iraqis were fighting an insurgency against our occupation forces, while paul bremer made himself emperor of iraq and there was a council of iraqi exiles brought in to advise him who had no real power. and paul bremer disbanded the iraqi military and did de-baathification and tried to privatize the iraqi oil industry so that big oil companies could buy up iraqi oil fields cheaply. all of those policies of paul bremer turned into massive failures and fueled the insurgency against our troops. just like when president bush said “bring ’em on”, inviting terrorists to attack our troops. but what does he care, since neither of his kids has any chance of being sent to war, since they are both girlies? he cares nothing about our troops, and keeps sending more and more of them off to get killed senselessly in pursuit of a failed strategy. and what about the no-bid contracts to companies like dick cheney’s halliburton? rather than having competitive bidding so that the most qualified company that is most efficient and best able to contain costs wins military contracts in iraq, the bush administration gave out contracts without bidding, to companies run by their friends. and everyone knows that a large number of top bush administration officials are former oil company executives... and bush himself was good friends with ken lay, the ceo of enron when it went bankrupt, the company that manipulated california’s energy markets, one of the companies whose leaders probably participated in dick cheney’s secret energy policy meetings back in early 2001. but war profiteers are not just limited to companies that have contracts with the defense department. the state department, too, is wasting taxpayer money on war profiteers, with its contracts with companies like blackwater. blackwater is the company that the iraqi government wants out of the country within 6 months, because they killed innocent civilians using excessive force, in several separate incidents. and blackwater employees are paid much higher salaries than u.s. soldiers, who are just as well qualified to do the same job protecting our diplomats in iraq. these excessive salaries are part of the war profiteering... it would make much more sense and be much cheaper to have u.s. soldiers do the same job that blackwater has been doing. and the same goes for other private security contractors used by the united states in iraq. why, then, do we use these private security contractors, if they are such a waste of our government’s limited financial resources? for one reason, the companies are led by people with close ties to the republican party who give a lot of donations to republicans (at least that is true for blackwater and halliburton). another reason to use these private mercenary armies is that the united states military simply does not have enough soldiers for iraq. we might have enough soldiers if we withdrew our troops from all the other countries around the world where we have troops stationed. over half the countries in the world have united states troops stationed in them, by the way. we have over half the world under military occupation (although perhaps that language of “occupation” is a bit strong for me to use). anyway, the iraqis do not want us there, according to all the opinion polls in that country. the iraqis think of us as their enemy and think it is justified to kill our forces. so actually, the people killing our troops are not terrorists. they are fighting to free their country from foreign military occupation. the patriots who founded the united states similarly fought to free the united states from british military occupation. of course, the iraqi government wants to keep our troops there, but only because that is the only thing protecting the iraqi politicians from all the people who want to kill them. iraq has become the most violent country in the world, since we invaded it, and our military is the only thing protecting the iraqi politicians, who get to meet in the green zone, the only safe part of iraq. so of course the iraqi politicians want us to stay, because if we leave, their own citizens will rise up in arms and kill them, because hardly any iraqis view their government as legitimate. the iraqi government is viewed as american puppets, and rightly so. as for all the sectarian violence between sunnis and shiites, i think that was actually instigated by our military as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy against the insurgents. originally, sunnis and shiites fought an insurgency against our troops, side by side, fighting for national liberation from their foreign occupiers. but the united states managed to turn the sunnis and shiites against each other and get them to fight each other, rather than our troops, as part of a strategy to reduce the killings of our own troops so we could establish permanent bases and occupy iraq forever. now more recent developments in northern iraq are interesting: the kurdish separatist group known as the pkk, which the united states and turkey both call a terrorist group, is holed up in mountainous areas in the border region between kurdish-controlled northern iraq and turkey. the pkk are carrying out terrorist attacks against turkey, and turkey has already started making military incursions into northern iraq, although they are trying to keep that from being reported on. the turkish parliament has authorized a full-scale invasion of iraq, and there is public outcry all over turkey calling for an invasion of iraq, calling for war, protesting against the inaction of the turkish government and its failure to have already invaded northern iraq. the united states commander for northern iraq has said that he will do absolutely nothing to fight the pkk, and will not interfere if the turks invade, or offer any support to either the turks or the pkk. so it seems the conflict in iraq is spilling out into neighboring countries already, and destabilizing the entire region, which is actually what the neoconservatives wanted to happen all along.

3) the libertarians pose quite a problem. libertarians are people who claim they want to maximize individual liberty and freedom. libertarians want to shrink the size of government to be very small, legalize as many illegal things as possible, cut both taxes and government spending as much as possible, and deregulate everything. they want to take us as close as possible to anarchy without actually having anarchy, while still preserving a minimalist government, one that is just barely big enough to prevent any rival governments from trying to establish themselves, just barely big enough to maintain order. now, while i agree with libertarians on social issues, on drug legalization and things like that, i think they are completely wrongheaded when it comes to economic issues. libertarians, just like republicans, have a faith-based approach to economics, putting all their faith in the free market and the invisible hand of adam smith, thinking it is best to deregulate and privatize everything, and accusing anyone who disagrees with this as being a socialist. they view economics in black and white and not shades of gray, thinking you either support capitalism or socialism, and there is nothing in between, and that capitalism is much better. libertarians have a presidential candidate running in the republican primaries, ron paul. many libertarians rightly oppose the war in iraq and the patriot act and illegal warrentless wiretapping and other abuses of power by the bush administration. libertarians get pretty much everything right, except for anything that has to do with economics or the environment. libertarians have a long history of opposing the environmental movement and a lot of them are skeptics of global warming, or even if they believe in global warming, they do not want the government to do anything at all about it. the basic flaw with their view of economics is they do not account for 2 things: negative externalities and market failure. negative externalities and market failure are the 2 circumstances where free market capitalism fails and government intervention is required. one type of negative externality is pollution. if a factory is dumping toxic waste into a lake that people like to swim in that is used for a town’s water supply, libertarians would not do anything at all to stop this. if we followed their policies of deregulation and legalizing everything, there would be no punishment for poisoning everyone in your town. libertarians also want to privatize the educational system, and some even want to privatize the entire military. libertarians have some influence in the republican party, but only on economic issues. only on the issues libertarians are wrong about. not on the issues they are right about. on most of the issues libertarians are right about, democrats agree. of course there are a few exceptions, such as legalizing things like drugs and prostitution and gambling. but democrats are definitely more permissive in social issues about legalizing things than republicans are. republicans want to regulate sex. they do not like birth control or family planning or abortion or homosexuality or sex outside of marriage. republicans think that the only sex anyone should ever have is with someone they are married to, who is of the opposite sex, who is not part of a polygamous marriage, where no birth control is involved, no condoms, and it has to be standard coitus, where the penis goes into the vagina, and both people are 18 years of age or older, and all other types of sexual intercourse are outlawed. at least that is the view of the religious right, which is the largest republican constituency and the 2nd most powerful, after big business. perhaps republicans do not actually agree with these regressive policies towards sex, but only pretend to, and do token gestures to appeal to the religious right without actually enacting anything into law to further regulate sex. libertarians correctly oppose regulation of sex, as do democrats, but many libertarians wrongly vote for republicans, simply because of their wrongheaded ideas on economic issues. libertarians, in voting republican, fail to realize that democrats agree much better with libertarians on most other issues besides the economic ones. the punishment for drug users/abusers ought to be drug treatment and rehab, not going to jail (especially not a long jail sentence under new york state’s rockefeller drug laws). why not simply legalize drugs? a main part of the appeal of drugs, especially to younger people, is that they are illegal, which makes them cool, something rebellious, a way to stand up to authority. well what if authority and the laws said drugs are legal? then it isn’t so cool anymore. then druggies are losers. then there is no point in doing drugs in the first place. this is just about the only issue that libertarians get right that most democrats get wrong. but if we followed libertarian economic policies, it would simply make the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. and the minimum wage and child labor laws are both things libertarians want to get rid of... bad idea. i see the libertarians as a problem because i think people might become libertarians as a reaction against republicans and neoconservative foreign policy and big brother and the government doing warrentless wiretaps and detaining people indefinitely without trial in defiance of habeas corpus. and then they would be misled and end up fighting against the environmental movement and fighting for lower taxes on the wealthy and deregulation and other things that help big business and hurt everyone else. one of the major influences on many libertarians is ayn rand and her objectivist movement, who advocate a back-asswards system of morality where selfishness is good and actually giving a damn about other people is evil. to objectivists, the most moral person is the greediest person, and the least moral person is the most generous person. ayn rand escaped the soviet union to come to the united states, and her entire philosophy is based around her strong opposition to communism, and her desire to form a philosophy that is the exact opposite of communism. but it is an overreaction, and is reactionary, and goes too far towards the extremes of “free” market capitalism and radical individualism. libertarians fail to recognize that if they dismantle the government and prevent it from oppressing the people, the corporations and all the former government entities that got privatized will oppress people even worse. corporations are theoretically only accountable to their shareholders, but most corporations are not even accountable to them. there have been some shareholder revolts lately, with shareholders upset with how the corporations they owned were won, but lately it seems top corporate executives have been able to outmaneuver shareholder activists who try to hold them accountable. corporate executive salaries are going through the roof despite declining incomes for average people, and shareholders are unable to do anything about it, despite the fact that they own the corporations. it is madness to put more power in the hands of corporations, since they are, in practice, accountable to nobody at all. that is why i do not want people to be misled into becoming libertarians or supporting ron paul. people ought to be democrats. sure, the democrats are not perfect. nobody is. but at least democrats want to take us in the right direction, even if they do not fight hard enough. at least they want to end the iraq war, even if they continue to fail to do so. most of the failures of the democratic congress that took office in january of this year are due to republican obstructionism, both by republicans in the senate who filibuster everything, and by the president who vetoes everything. if it weren’t for republican obstructionists, we democrats could get a lot more good things done for this country. of course the republicans have every right to be obstructionists, under our constitutional system. it just means the people need to vote them all out of office in the next election. if democrats had a 2/3 majority in both houses of congress and had the presidency, then maybe we could start getting things done for real. maybe we could do something about how only 2 out of 9 supreme court justices were appointed by democrats, and 7 out of 9 were appointed by republicans. and 4 of the 7 appointed by republicans are right-wing extremists: antonin scalia, clarence thomas, john roberts, and samuel alito. 4/9 of our supreme court are right-wing extremists. it just takes one more and then you can say goodbye to all your freedoms like habeas corpus, and all the rest. and republican presidential candidates, except for ron paul, all support the president’s failed strategy in iraq, the “surge”, and are very hawkish towards iran, meaning, if one of them gets elected, it will mean more pointless and stupid wars based on lies that waste countless lives and countless billions of dollars, and a supreme court filled with right-wing extremists. and if ron paul became president? well then you can say goodbye to the united states government. of course, you probably hate the united states government and would like to get rid of it. so then go ahead, vote for ron paul. but then don’t come crying to me about negative externalities and market failure once everything is privatized and deregulated and legalized.

my sister had a baby

last week my sister had a baby. here are some pictures of it. you can read about it on her blog. the baby is a girl named erica renee watson. so now i am an uncle! yay! i don’t really know much about what goes on with my sister, since she has lived far away from me for years, first at a private school in poughkeepsie, then at beloit college in wisconsin, then in texas, and now she has been living in vienna, austria, ever since january of this year. it was maybe 2 years ago that she got married to matt watson, whose name is not really matt watson, or at least matt isn’t his first name, but his middle name that everyone uses to address him or refer to him. my mom is over there in austria with my sister and her husband and the baby and 2 vicious beastly dogs. and i am here in upstate new york with my dad and my silly little cute fluffy dog.

you know, i went to work today, and got sent home, because there is no work for anyone on my project today. my project is for a new york state government agency, and they don’t have any work on national holidays. there is still work today for people working on private contracts, the ones with other companies.

so anyway the weather is really hot today. this hot weather must be the result of global warming, caused by the heat coming up from hell as record numbers of sinners’ souls are sent down there for eternal torment. or maybe global warming is caused by greenhouse gas emissions like all the so-called “scientists” say. but aren’t these “scientists” the same ones who believe in ridiculous theories like evolution, gravity, or the world being round? an award-winning economist and new york times columnist, thomas friedman, wrote a book in 2005 called the world is flat. and yet so-called “scientists” continue to insist that the world is round, the same ridiculous theory that christopher columbus believed when he landed in america and thought it was india. join the flat earth society or the creationists or the people who deny global warming, or the antigravity coalition. there is a famous girl on youtube called lonelygirl15 who used to do video segments called “proving science wrong”. i am sure she has a lot of fans in the republican party. after all, those are the people who believe in “intelligent design”. personally, i support the theory of “retarded design”. there are some “scientific” theories that are actually just pseudoscience, though... there is no evidence to support superstring theory, other than the fact that it does not directly contradict any observable facts about reality. but anybody can make up a crazy theory that does not contradict any observable facts. most of the harebrained theories that the religious right comes up with, however, are not that well thought out, and actually do contradict observable facts about reality. all of their nonsense about “moral values” is repulsive because they think hating people who are different and being greedy and not caring about other people are good values. i find it hilarious that the religious right cannot find a conservative republican wealthy old christian white male who is hateful and evil enough for them to like him. they want a candidate who denounces evolution, who denounces homosexuality, who denounces any sex outside marriage, who denounces divorce, who denounces abortion, who denounces birth control such as condoms, who denounces interracial sex, and who basically advocates that everyone mindlessly pair up with the first person of the opposite sex and the same ethnicity who is willing to pair up with them, without asking any questions, and marry them and make lots of babies and never ever divorce even if your spouse beats you and cheats on you, and brainwash all the babies to be hateful bigoted mindless drones. it seems most of the religious right’s obsessions outside of denouncing proven scientific theories are with limiting access to sexual intercourse with a long list of rules about unacceptable circumstances for sex, so that there is only one type of sex left, namely sex between married spouses of opposite genders but the same race in the missionary position with no birth control. as for whether the marriages are polygamous, or if they are incestuous ones between first cousins, well, as the fundamentalist church of jesus christ of latter day saints has shown us, the exact rules for sex may vary between christian fundamentalist denominations. but, i think the best way to think about religious right churches is that they are basically dangerous mind-control cults, except much larger and more dangerous and influential. they preach a crazy and stupid message about how the end of the world is coming soon and everyone who does not share their exact same beliefs will go to hell for all eternity. the republican party has had close ties to these cults ever since ronald reagan became president or maybe even earlier. and preachers like pat robertson and jerry falwell got to be so famous and influential because they had wealthy backers such as sun myung moon, the infamous crazy korean cult leader who to this day publishes the washington times, which ronald reagan famously called his favorite newspaper. most of these religious right cults at least claim to be christian, and most of them are not led by people claiming to be jesus christ or the messiah. but it is hard for me to see much of a distinction between crazy cults and “mainstream” religions. it is all the same bullshit, the same brainwashing. and i am sick and tired of it. and the fundamentalist followers of one religion vigorously denounce all other religions. a fundamentalist christian denounces islam and cults such as scientology. and most of those criticisms are correct. but they fail to see the faults in their own belief system. some of the criticisms made are just irrelevant from the standpoint of a nonbeliever, like how fundamentalist christians denounce mormons or jehova’s witnesses for having different theology from in their denominations. there are good resources like the skeptic’s annotated bible, luckily. oh, and for a good example of a hateful right-wing christian fundamentalist fanatic, i highly recommend watching the videos of venomfangx... the harder he tries to promote his religion, the more he does to discredit it. i love how he denounces “evolutionists” as evil and satanic. he is such a self-parody!

anyway, my sister had a baby. i do not really know all that much about it since i live on a different continent from her and the baby and the baby’s daddy, and even my mommy is now over there in europe. my daddy was over there earlier this year to visit them. i think that even at this early stage in her development, the baby erica renee watson is probably at least 10 times smarter than the venomfangx idiot on youtube. both of erica’s parents are geniuses and scientists, after all. erica will probably be the first person on mars or invent a cure for cancer or something.

this sucks

i would like to express my strong disgust and dislike for how things are going in the world today and also in my own personal life. i should probably focus on my own personal life because most of the horrible things going on in the world today do not really affect me and there is nothing i can do about any of them. my life sucks, basically. i am sick and tired of watching time go by. the passage of time is the most pernicious of all evils, it seems to me. all of my faults as a person and all of my misfortunes and bad luck have together managed to ruin most aspects of my life. i am aware that many people actually have it much worse off than i do. but, my dissatisfaction with my life has been a fact of my existence for many years, and it seems it will continue for quite some time.

primarily, my problem is a social one. you see, i was never a very social person, and did not have social skills, due to the fact that i probably have asperger syndrome. when i switched from elementary school to junior high at the beginning of 7th grade, i started having a much more difficult time fitting in, and getting picked on a lot, and i never had any friends. so in 7th grade, when i was 12 years old, i started seeing psychologists because i was having so much trouble socially and had no friends and was so miserable. basically, none of them ever helped, and in 12th grade, the problem was worse than ever, so at that time, i was put on my first psychiatric medication, an antidepressant called paxil, by my pediatrician, at age 17. that occurred in the year 2000, a very important time in my life, soon before i graduated high school. now, i always had the highest grades of anyone in my class and i always took the most advanced classes, and nobody else was even close in the contest to see who would be valedictorian. supposedly the smartest person in my class, i still had no friends and was picked on all the time, considered a nerd, a geek, a dweeb, a weirdo, a loser, whatever. anyway, i was always bad at all sports i tried in gym class, and picked last for the teams. and athletics was much more important than academics at my school, at least in terms of status among peers. the most popular kids were the guys on the football team or the girls who were cheerleaders. i had a great deal of envy towards the other students, who i thought had it much better than me, and i also felt very bitter, and angry, and hateful, and like i was a victim. when i heard about school shootings such as the ones at columbine, i sympathized much more with the shooters than with the people who they shot, because their stories of being bullied and made fun of and not having friends and being loners, it was just like what i faced, even though i was valedictorian and was in all the most advanced classes getting the highest grades. i felt a tremendous amount of attraction towards the pretty girls in my grade, but it seemed completely and utterly hopeless to do anything at all to try to get any of them to be my girlfriend. it seemed like a hopelessly unachievable dream, and that if i ever tried, my rejection would be all but certain, and i would become a laughingstock for being such a loser that no girl wanted to go out with. i was incredibly shy and whenever i tried to talk to anyone (of either gender), if it was a social situation, i would be so nervous i would be unable to think straight or say much of anything coherent. so i never got invited to any parties or anything. well, oddly enough, that changed when i was a senior in high school. i actually got invited to graduation parties when we all graduated, which really surprised me. and for once, in that month when we all graduated, in june of 2000, people were not being mean to me all the time, and they actually seemed to treat me as sort of an equal, with some respect! it was quite strange and unnerving to me and i kept thinking something screwy was going on, and that these people couldn’t possibly actually be nice to me and be friendly to me without it being some kind of trick to embarrass me and make me look bad and make me feel miserable. i did not trust anyone at all and was extremely paranoid and thought everyone was out to get me, and i had been feeling that way ever since 7th grade. there had been a number of incidents throughout high school where my paranoia was proven correct and it turned out that everyone really was out to get me, or at least it seemed that way to me. now i had to give a valedictorian speech to all these people i hated who had made my life a living hell, but i managed to deliver a nice speech that sounded like i actually liked these people, although i was so nervous that i had both diarrhea and vomiting from all my anxiety, and i think people could hear the anxiety in my voice when i delivered that speech. for quite some time, i had been getting physically ill, getting diarrhea and vomiting, from the anxiety of social situations, but usually i would just get one at a time, get vomiting right before school or on the extremely rare occasion i am at a party, and diarrhea more often than the vomiting, while i am at school, or at home, or whenever. anyway, i always blamed all of my problems on other people, who i saw as all being out to get me and all evil and nasty and untrustworthy, and even when people acted nice i thought they were up to something devious to try to screw me over. the only creature i had any real trust in or any real love for was my dog mokka, and it seemed to me that everyone else was my enemy. and i thought religion had to be wrong because i thought everyone else besides me was evil for mistreating me so badly, and that they all deserved hell regardless of what they believed, and only i deserved heaven, but since that was not what any religion taught, religion had to be wrong and this meant no afterlife and nothing supernatural existed, no god(s) or magic or anything silly like that. i thought that many people who believe in christianity and go to church are actually evil, nasty people who deserve the eternal torment of hell. and i thought that maybe there might actually be some good people out there who do not believe in any sort of silly religious nonsense, and even if i was the only good person, that at least meant 1 good person who did not believe. but anyway, i was very paranoid and did not trust anyone or have any friends, and still viewed everyone else as my enemy. this did not mean that i treated anyone badly or anything. i was always very nice, since other people terrified me so much and i did not want to antagonize them because i thought they would gang up on me with all the other people who i thought were my enemies. i viewed picking on someone or insulting them or bullying them in any way as a way of demonstrating hostility and evil intent and dislike and basically the fact that whoever is doing the insulting or bullying is the sworn enemy of the victim, and the idea of picking on someone in a friendly way and just joking around was very much beyond my understanding.

now starting around the last month of high school and going up until the end of my first semester of college, i started to change a great deal. i started to actually trust other people enough to think that they are not all really out to get me like i used to think, and that maybe if they act nice, they might actually mean it. but i was still not sure about it, and still thought the chances were about 50/50, and did not want to push my luck by actually showing any interest in other people. i still thought that if i ever showed any interest in a girl, it would mean certain rejection. once i got into college and got courageous enough to actually ask a very small number of girls out on very rare occasions, i found that whenever i show interest in a girl, i really am rewarded with certain rejection, and no girl has ever really shown me any affection or responded positively to my advances. except for one. but the one who did respond positively to my advances, well that was a unique situation and one i would not like to ever replicate, because it was very pathetic and somewhat tragic. but i am getting ahead of myself... that does not happen until later in time. for now we will talk about my first semester in college and the time leading up to it. well anyway, i was starting to become more social around the time of the graduation parties for high school, and at some of them i consumed alcohol, whenever it was available. and i had gone to the senior prom without a date because i was too scared to ask any girls out plus i figured all the pretty ones were probably taken and i had no interest in girls who were not pretty and it just seemed hopeless, and i was actually suicidal back in may 2000 in the weeks leading up to the prom. and then there was the class trip to boston, which was when i started to find myself gaining acceptance socially, and i got drunk with some other students and vomited in the restroom of a hotel room where some girls were staying, where a party was taken place, quite memorably for me. and on the day before my birthday, on june 17, 2000, after a graduation party that happened a little early, i went to a club at 11:30 pm, driven there by 3 very beautiful young women, half an hour before my 18th birthday, and they let me into the club even though you had to be 18 to get in, because i was only half an hour early, and that event was quite memorable. a whole lot of kids from my graduating class were going to that club that night, and these hot girls apparently were one of the few cars going there who had an empty seat available in their car, and somehow i managed to arrange to go with them, at a graduation party that happened earlier that day. this was all extremely unbelievable to me. and anyway, i went there with them and they drove me home and we went to wendy’s in the middle of the night and it was just quite odd and made no sense. i wanted to have sex with all of them but i was too afraid to really talk to them about much of anything. so nothing really happened but it still amazed me. and when i graduated high school, the mother of another pretty girl told me how that girl used to come home every day and tell the mother how great i was and how much she liked me, and a few years earlier, that girl had a secret admirer and had been hoping it was me, but instead it turned out to be this other guy who she didn’t like at all, but she ended up going out with him because he was so persistent and wouldn’t give up, even though he was the most annoying guy in the world. anyway, i was quite shocked that anyone female would actually like me, and found it impossible to believe. but enough of this... anyway, around this time i started not only to drink excessively on occasion, but to smoke cigarettes. i started smoking in mid-august of 2000 because a friend of mine got me started. yes, i actually had a friend, although i had never realized it before, and had always thought of myself as not having any friends. sometimes you do not even notice that someone is a friend, and just feel all alone in the world, forgetting about people who you have done stuff with. so when i got to college, in the first week, i partied a lot with 2 of my roommates (i had 3 roommates), going to frat parties, getting extremely drunk, smoking lots of cigarettes. after the first week i gradually started to get sick of the frat parties and of getting drunk, and i stopped going to frat parties with my roommates, but i kept smoking cigarettes with them and hanging out with them. these 2 roommates were both filthy rich and loved to waste lots of money, and one of them was a real asshole, and the other was a real ladies’ man who had a somewhat high-pitched voice that girls, for some strange reason, really found appealing. there were a lot of other strange characters who hung out with us, especially this crazy kid from washington, d.c., who would do anything people dared him to do, no matter how crazy. this kid had no inhibitions whatsoever. on one occasion he was dared to break a glass beer bottle over his head, and he tried to do it but the bottle didn’t break and it made his head hurt really bad. so naturally, he tried again, but hit harder the second time, and it still didn’t break. he kept trying and finally around the fourth time the glass shatters and there are shards of glass everywhere and his head started bleeding a lot. one of my roommates called 911 and this crazy kid went off to the hospital, his head bleeding, and he wanted to break more bottles over his head to prove how crazy he was, but everyone was telling him no and to stop. another time, someone dared him to hold his arm on the electric stove while it was turned on, and i think they only dared him to do it for like 30 seconds, but he ended up doing it for like 3 minutes, and he got 3rd-degree burns on his arm shaped like a giant spiral that perfectly matched the burner on top of the electric stove. naturally, he had to go to the emergency room again for this one. oh, and this kid also drank a whole lot and fell asleep on our couch (instead of a dorm room, we had, like, a giant apartment, since it was designed for faculty-in-residence, so we had a lot of parties there), and anyway, when he fell asleep, he would always pee a lot during his sleep, just like how my current dog pees in his sleep on the couch. anyway, i had once been very hard-working at academics and done all my homework, but under the bad influence of my new friends, i started to become a slacker, skipping class, not doing homework, smoking and drinking and misbehaving. around october of 2000, my roommates and their friends started smoking weed, mary jane, grass, marijuana, you know what it is. and i smoked it with them a few times until one time it gave me a really really bad panic attack. i actually thought i was dying. it felt like my heart was going to explode. my heart was beating really fast and i had really bad chest pain and i was sweating a lot and i actually thought my heart had exploded and the blood was coming out through a hole in my chest, but then i put my hands where i thought the blood was coming out and it turned out it was only sweat on my chest. i thought i was going to die that night and i went to sleep thinking i would not wake up the next morning, and that this was the end of my life, and i had so many regrets, and i thought i was going to fade away into the empty abyss of nothingness, that whatever “soul” i had would cease to exist completely, and that my short, meaningless life was all over and that after a funeral and some weeping by people i know, people would all move on and forget about me, and that i never really accomplished anything or got anything i wanted and that everything i had ever done was pointless and in vain, and that i was having my life cut short before i could ever accomplish anything or achieve any greatness or become famous or change history or save the world or anything. so i woke up the next morning and i was alive and actually seemed to be perfectly fine and it was very surreal because for a while i actually wondered if maybe i was dead and was a ghost or something, but no, i was alive and, seemingly, perfectly healthy. i kept having more severe panic attacks where i had chest pains and thought my heart was stopping and i ended up going to the gannett health center on the cornell campus and they were the ones who finally told me that it was a panic attack and i was not in danger. of course, i did not believe them or trust them at all, and thought it was a lie and i was really dying. but after going to the gannett health center a few more times and seeing my psychiatrist and psychologist some more and stuff like that, i realized it was true and it was just panic attacks, even though i had never heard of panic attacks before coming to the campus health center. anyway, i had to quit smoking weed, quit smoking cigarettes, and quit drinking, and i got put on higher doses of psychiatric medications. i kept having really bad panic attacks where i thought i was dying, until i gradually lost my will to live, and then panic attacks no longer worked because when i thought i was dying it actually seemed like it would be a sweet release from the terrible pain of living. then later that year i was obsessed with this girl and asked her out and she said no and i pretty much went insane and had a practically psycho obsession with her, plus she ended up dating the 3rd roommate, the one who did not drink or smoke, who was a worse nerd/dork/dweeb/geek than me who liked star trek, and i thought that was totally retarded and lame and i was all like “wtf?” so i met another girl online on the internet because she found me on the icq instant messaging program and i ended up going to her prom and we were supposed to have sex because we both agreed to it in advance but then she changed her mind, and then 2 years ago, in november 2005, she and i agreed to finally do it and have sex so i drove all the way to new hampshire just to have sex for the first time in my life when i was 23, and it wasn’t any good, because she was very obese and i was not attracted to her at all or turned on at all so i was incapable of getting an erection to have the sex since arousal is sort of necessary for that all to work, but anyway, that is four and a half years later than back in the spring of 2001 when i went to the prom with this girl at her high school, and in a way she was just using me because she needed a prom date and went on the internet to find someone, anyone at all, and it happened to be me. and then later in that year of 20001, 9/11 changed everything, because i was sitting in math class that morning on september 11, 2001, and near the end of the class, some random dude who wasn’t even in the class came into the room and announced that a plane had hit the world trade center, and everyone was like no way, you are totally bullshitting me, but this dude was like, no i am for real y’all, someone flew a plane into the world trade center, probably just an accident. so i was like wtf? and went back to my dorm to the tv lounge and watched the news there with other people and when the towers fell down and the pentagon was hit i was worrying about whether i had to go to the rest of my classes that day or if i could skip them and if our nation being under attack would be a good excuse for missing classes, since after all our college was nowhere near new york city or the pentagon and maybe we are supposed to keep on attending classes no matter what happens in the news, who knows? eh, so anyway, i sorta got through the rest of college ok, i went to my classes most of the time, did about half the homework, went to all the exams, and there was another semester that i had to leave early and get incompletes in all my classes because my anxiety and panic attacks got too strong for me to handle, and that was when i was working on a computer program to predict the stock market and make lots of money. for a while i was working on the computer program to predict the stock market and i actually thought it worked. but eventually once the project was finished i tested it on a different set of data and it totally failed. the computer program failed to outperform the market average with its recommended stock picks. so anyway, i just barely managed to graduate since i had to finish this artificial intelligence project as one of the incompletes, right before graduation, because i kept procrastinating it, and i was kind of worried about how it didn’t work in predicting the stock market, but i figured, hey, at least that will keep my teacher from stealing the source code and using it to make lots of money, and it is probably for the best if other people think my program to predict the stock market doesn’t work, but i can continue to work on it in secret and perfect it until it really does work. unfortunately, after i graduated, it turned out i am too lazy to work on the stock market program, although i could really use the money, and being a billionaire could be a lot of fun. imagine... actually having sex for a second time in my life, maybe even a third or fourth... with someone i am actually attracted to... and having my penis actually function properly... naw, that’ll never happen. anyway, since i graduated cornell with my double major in computer science and math, things have not gone so well. i have had a few jobs, nothing too good, and spent most of the time unemployed, and still have never had a girlfriend. and i committed myself to psychiatric wards twice in the 3 years since i graduated, both times for being suicidal. see, the problem is quite simple: i can observe the fact that time continues to pass all the time, right? but nothing ever seems to improve or get any better in my life. all of my problems that are unresolved continue to be unresolved. i never actually get anything i want. all my needs remain unfulfilled. and i am stuck because i cannot get myself to actually do anything, to put the least bit of effort into anything in life, and even when i do decide to do something to improve my life, i keep procrastinating it more and more until it is quite late. for example, my computer is broken, because the northbridge fan on the motherboard no longer works, and that is needed for cooling to keep the circuits from getting fried. so what do i do? do i fix it? do i take it to a computer repair shop? do i contact the manufacturer for help? do i pray to god to magically fix my computer while i am asleep next to it without making any noises loud enough to disturb my slumber? no, i just do nothing at all to get it fixed. and my laundry... my clothes are all dirty, but do i wash them? no... i just procrastinate and i am all like, oh i’ll do that shit later, but i never actually get around to doing it. i am just incredibly lazy. but i was not always like that. i just started being a slacker back when i was a freshman in college and was drinking and smoking and hanging out with the wrong crowd. but some things have improved, i guess. i can talk to other people without getting diarrhea or vomiting, and actually think and speak coherently, even if they are attractive young women. that used to be impossible for me. unfortunately, there are not that many attractive young women in my workplace where i have a job, except for a few who have boyfriends, and i do not really do much else outside of the house besides go to my job, so there is no way for me to meet people, except perhaps on the internet. but the internet is evil, a creation of satan himself! i don’t really believe that of course, but it sounds funny when i say that, at least to me. from time to time, i find myself thinking thoughts like i wish i was never born, i hate my life, i wish i were dead, my life sucks, i am a loser, i hate myself, and that sort of thing. i do not have the energy right now to put quotation marks around all those thoughts. anyway, these negative thoughts and this low self-esteem seem to be a really bad problem for me, mentally, and i can’t seem to get rid of these negative thoughts or get my self-esteem any higher. supposedly i am smart and good-looking. smart because i was valedictorian and completed a double major in 2 difficult subjects at cornell. and good-looking because my mom tells me i am good-looking. and once there was actually a girl who told me that (but she had a boyfriend, she was just telling me i was good-looking for some random reason, who knows why). but i think all that good-looking stuff is in the past. now i am fat and ugly because i eat too much and weigh a lot more than before... 200 pounds is what it has been lately... it actually got above 210 a few weeks ago but i got it back down to under 200 and now it is back over 200 again. i hate fat people. it sucks that i am officially categorized as obese because, as someone who hates fat people, this means i hate myself. not that i didn’t already hate myself, this just increases the level of hatred. anyway, i really want a girlfriend, but not just any girl/woman will do. but it is strange. i am insane, or at least i think of myself as insane. i actually removed one of my toenails back in april of this year 2007. i was just trimming the edges of it and usually i just cut around the top of the toenails but there was a pointy bit on one of the sides so i trimmed that off and then for some reason i found the bottom part of the nail was detachable so i trimmed the bottom side and eventually most of the nail was gone except for the part underneath, the little part where it comes out of, and then that just came out, it was loose, surrounded by some gooey fluid or something, and once i took that bottom part out, my nail was gone completely, forever. now i have 9 toenails. i feel like vincent van gogh after he chopped off his ear. i am like wtf? and i am wondering why the hell i did this and what do i do now, especially now that i know i am completely batshit insane. ugh. anyway, my life sucks, it always has sucked, and it always will suck. my affection towards potential mates of the opposite sex is never returned, and my ambitions towards financial success are never rewarded with any sort of increased monetary supply in the form of a stable revenue stream of sufficient income to finance the extravagant sort of luxurious lifestyle that i obviously deserve after all of the pain and suffering i have been through in this stupid waste of a life.

of course i am being facetious when i claim i deserve an extravagant, luxurious lifestyle. i don’t believe anyone is entitled to anything like that. like kids who have wealthy parents are not entitled to inherit anything. having encountered such individuals in person at cornell, as well as having seen the exploits of people such as paris hilton on television and the internet, i am quite well aware that these little brats don’t deserve a penny of the money their parents and/or older ancestors earned (or stole). i just want to be able to make enough money to live on my own and not be stuck living with my parents. it sucks how even though we have economic growth now (a few years ago the economy was much worse, during dubya’s 1st term), all the money is going to the top 1%, and the standard of living of people who are average and lower is actually going down. for most people, the united states is gradually devolving into a 3rd world country. all the high-paying jobs are going away and replaced with low-paying ones. people take on second and third jobs just to make ends meet, and more and more people are entering the labor market because it no longer works for one member of a couple to not have a job. people are tricked into getting credit cards and buying too much, or getting loans and buying stuff they cannot afford, getting mortgages and buying houses they cannot afford. most people do not really make that much money, and buy things beyond their means, and our entire economy is based on a stack of cards, on consumer spending by people who cannot afford to pay for what they buy, but the money has to come from somewhere, and then everyone goes bankrupt because nobody can pay their bills. i make barely enough money to pay my bills. and 40% of americans, including me, have never lived without having a bush or clinton in the white house (either as president or vice president). countries like myanmar have repressive dictatorships and use their militaries to massacre their own civilian populations whenever there is any kind of protest, and they kill innocent people, and nobody is punished for these atrocities. the united states is allied with nations such as saudi arabia, egypt, and jordan which do not have any freedom or democracy, repressive dictatorhips... and saudi arabia is just as bad a theocracy and fascist dictatorship as iran (iran, of course, finds the need to put to death homosexuals even though its president knows that homosexuals do not even exist in iran, so i guess the people put to death for homosexuality are all wrongly convicted since there are no homosexuals in iran). i mean why do we have to support these fascist dictatorships? we got rid of saddam hussein and started a democracy in iraq, right? but we just screwed it up royally because we tried to run another country ourselves without having any clue what the hell we were doing. we should have let the iraqis run their own damn country and not messed with them. we should have just gotten rid of saddam hussein and then left iraq completely and let the iraqis run their country without outside interference from us. we ought to overthrow every autocratic, undemocratic, fascist or communist dictatorship in the world, by targeting individual leaders of those nations for assassination. that would work much better than wars against thousands or millions of soldiers who are just following orders. why not simply take out the evil assholes who are in charge of all the evil bullshit that is going on? someone should just kill people like the president of iran or the north korean dictator or the leaders of the junta in myanmar or the dictator of sudan. those people are all mass murdering evil despots who need to be eliminated. or we could go a little more gentle on them, and try something like what we did to the leader of panama, mr. noriega. we could put all those world leaders in prison in miami along with noriega. crazy ones like mahmoud ahmadenijad could be committed to insane asylums. permanently. someone should seriously have kidnapped the iranian president when he came here and shipped him off to an insane asylum for good. maybe assassination is a little too extreme. but that dude is crazy, and should not be in charge of a country. as for president bush, he ought to be declared mentally incompetent and removed from power, and sent to an assisted living facility for people who are mentally retarded idiot morons. and as for dick cheney, i think if someone sprayed some water on him he would melt, because he is a witch. if dick cheney floats in water, that means he is made of wood, and therefore a witch. but of course the water would melt him if he were a witch. anyway, the point is, he is a witch! also, did you notice that in his speech at columbia university, mahmoud ahmadenijad questioned both the holocaust and 9/11? he was actually correct in questioning them! it is a little-known fact: adolf hitler and the nazis were behind 9/11, and osama bin laden and al qaeda carried out the holocaust. people just get them confused! of course the official version of what happened is wrong! everything is a giant conspiracy and only crazy iranian dictators have any idea what is going on! also, there is no such nation as israel: this is a zionist conspiracy. all 6 million jews were wiped out in the holocaust and there are none left. the people alive now who call themselves jews are all liars and they are actually former muslims who were tempted by the great satan america and its hedonistic materialistic culture into renouncing their former religion of islam and embracing a dead religion that was wiped out by osama bin laden in 1945. and they are all homosexuals, which means they do not exist. it all makes sense now, at least to the crazy iranian president. anyway, the military dictatorship of myanmar has been massacring innocent peaceful protestors, and the punishment for murdering innocent people ought to be death. an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. rather than simply having economic sanctions against myanmar, why can’t we find the people in charge of that nation and kill them all dead? seriously... why do leaders and diplomats of most western industrialized nations act like such pussies and wimps and pushovers? you know what josef stalin said... one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is just a statistic. if someone who is just a private citizen murders a single person, they are usually put on trial and punished, in most nations. however, if a national leader murders thousands or even millions of people, what is the punishment? there is none! for example, ugandan dictator idi amin got to live out the rest of his days in luxury in saudi arabia, after committing horrible atrocities against his own people in uganda. sure saddam hussein and slobodan milosevic were both punished, but how many other dictators were not? there is no crime worse than the mass murder that only a dictator can carry out, and no punishment could possibly be harsh enough to fit such a horrendous crime. it amazes me that we still have alliances with evil dictatorships despite our nation’s rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy. our government is incredibly hypocritical, since we are quite selective about where we choose to spread democracy and where we help out those who are preventing democracy from happening. i mean seriously, why do we keep helping out pakistan’s military dictator pervez musharraf? osama bin laden and the al qaeda leadership are in his country, and he is either incapable or unwilling to tackle this threat. right now, people are trying to re-establish democracy and freedom and rule of law in pakistan, and end the military dictatorship. why is the united states unwilling to support democracy in a nation whose military dictator has failed to stop the terrorists from establishing safe haven in his own country? oh, and how could i forget the issue of private security firms like blackwater operating in iraq. did you know that blackwater is above the law? they do not have to follow iraqi law, american law, or even international law. they are above the law, just like dick cheney, who is not a member of the legislative, executive, or judicial branch, but rather has his own special 4th branch just for him. and people in blackwater are paid much higher salaries than soldiers in our military. why doesn’t the state department just use our military soldiers for security? they are paid lower salaries! it would be cheaper! it makes no sense to spend all this extra money for private security when we already have our military in iraq. blackwater is just a scam, war profiteers stealing taxpayer money to make themselves rich while killing innocent people. we ought to let the iraqis put the ceo of blackwater and his henchmen on trial, in an iraqi kangaroo court. why does blackwater get to be above the law? i want to be above the law, but if i kill someone, i go to jail. if blackwater kills some people, nobody gets punished for the murders. that is no fair. so here is what i don’t get: iraq is filled with 160,000 american soldiers, yet our state department cannot find any soldiers worthy of defending our diplomats from harm, and the only people good enough to defend our diplomats are in the private sector, and cost a lot more than regular soldiers, plus they are above the law. if our military does not have anyone good enough to defend diplomats in the state department, our military sucks. there has to be someone capable of carrying out that mission. and if there are not enough soldiers, why not get the people in blackwater to re-enlist and rejoin the military, and do the same mission under the auspices of the pentagon? at least that way, the soldiers can be court-martialed if they kill innocent people without provocation, and the uniform code of military justice will at least allow some punishment for wrongdoing. i do not see any reason for us to be paying private mercenaries to do the work our own military should be doing. not just blackwater, but all the private mercenaries from outside iraq should be kicked out of iraq. i have heard news reports about all sorts of mercenary fighters that are being used by our own military in iraq, brought into that country from all over the world, used because we do not have enough soldiers in our own military. we ought to put an end to this nonsense. and bring our own troops home too, of course. but, not all at once. that has to be more gradual, so iraqis have the time to build up the strength to defend themselves. we ought to have a timeline for withdrawal, but not one that is publicly known, instead a top-secret timeline for withdrawal that nobody in the media is allowed to find out about. oh and you know what else in the news pisses me off? george w. bush is holding a fake-ass stupid conference on global warming to compete with the one at the united nations, and bush’s conference only invited the nations that are the biggest polluters, the ones who do not want to have to cut carbon dioxide emissions. and he is promoting voluntary cuts in emissions, not mandatory ones, and letting each nation decide for itself what to do, and not forcing anyone to reduce emissions, just encouraging it and hoping for the best. does that work in fighting pollution? if a factory is dumping toxic waste into a lake, does it really work if the e.p.a. tells them “we would prefer if you stopped dumping the toxic waste, and it would be really nice if you did that, but we are not going to force you or anything, and you can do whatever you want.” i mean, if a serial killer is going around killing people, should the police, when they catch him or her, ask them politely to please stop but say that it isn’t really mandatory to stop killing, and it is up to the serial killer to decide what to do, and then they release the serial killer back into the public again with no punishment? well what the hell kind of policy is that in combatting global warming? we are not talking about individuals dying, but entire species being wiped out! and it is optional, not mandatory, for people to do anything to stop global warming. thanks a lot, george w. bush. and george w. bush doesn’t want little kids to have health insurance. he promised to veto a bill that would give sick little kids the health care so they live and don’t die. george w. bush wants to kill children, basically. and the democrats in congress pay for this healthcare for kids by increasing a cigarette tax, which would make less people smoke, and less people would get lung cancer and other lung diseases. but george w. bush wants people to smoke cigarettes and die, after going through childhood with no healthcare. what a great president we have... what a great role model for the kids to look up to. all these bushes and clintons... i am sick of it! why is hillary clinton doing so well in the polls compared to other democratic presidential candidates? those polls make me sick. dennis kucinich should be #1 in all the polls, because when he talks, at least it makes some sense. back in the 2004 elections, i actually cared who won, and supported a candidate, namely howard dean. this time around, i don’t even know who to support, because i am so disgusted with the system. i think iowa and new hampshire can go fuck themselves. i hate the elitists who think people in those states are better than everyone else and ought to decide who the presidential candidates are, and that people in states like mine are unimportant and our opinions do not matter. why should someone in iowa get to decide who the democratic or republican nominee is, and not someone in new york, for instance? it ought to be one person, one vote, in a national primary that is not done state-by-state, but is instead a national popular vote. and we ought to use instant runoff voting in that national popular vote presidential primary. the current system is undemocratic and i hate it. i hate iowa and new hampshire. the idiots in iowa chose john kerry and decided howard dean sucked. well guess what? john kerry lost the election because he sucks, and howard dean is way more awesome than john kerry could ever hope to be. i remember john kerry condemned howard dean for opting out of the publicly financed system of matching funds to be able to raise more money privately. and then john kerry did the exact same thing he had just condemned, pretty soon after. what an asshole and jackass and hypocrite! that is like larry craig condemning homosexuality and then turning out to be gay! the idiots in iowa chose john kerry after john kerry demonstrated his idiocy and hypocrisy, after john kerry demonstrated the fact that he sucked and howard dean ruled. we should have just had a national election to pick the democratic nominee for president, so we could have picked the best candidate, namely howard dean. so this time around, for 2008, i am pretty glum. i think the people in iowa and new hampshire do not represent the interests of the country as a whole and should not get to decide who the next president is, and i think people in those states are too conservative and tend to choose the wrong candidate, and there is no hope for progressives to win presidential elections if they have to win caucuses and primaries in iowa and new hampshire first. i am sick of conservative southern governors becoming president! and i am sick of republicans, the party of greed and hypocrisy, who want to increase the gap between the rich and the poor, and regulate the sex lives of individuals, the party of war profiteers who make money off mass murder and bigoted fundamentalist preachers who in past generations said blacks were inferior and currently say homosexuals are evil hellbound sinners. republicans unfortunately have enough votes in congress to block congress from overriding any vetoes from president bush the retard. so congress cannot accomplish anything meaningful because these assholes are blocking the way. no wonder most people disapprove of congress. congress would need much bigger democratic majorities in both houses in order to really improve things in this country, but the republicans are currently able to keep anything good from getting done. and every veto president bush has made so far has been unjustifiable and the wrong decision, bad policy, indefensible, etc. most people who disapprove of congress have no idea how it works or how difficult it is to get things done with hundreds of people all with their own opinions and ideas who all disagree with each other. and of course, congress is by definition the opposite of progress. but at least congress does not actively promote evil like the bush administration has been doing for 7 years. at least i know that many foreign regimes exist which are much more evil than our own bush administration. we are certainly not the worst, but we are the most powerful nation. the regimes of china and russia, for example, are both quite evil and nasty, especially in how they prop up evil dictatorships like in north korea and iran and sudan and many other smaller nations. the united states government is nowhere near as awful as the chinese government. but they are both bad. i think more than half of the countries in the world should probably have regime change, including the united states. we need revolutions all over the world against tyranny and oppression. in our case, we are luckily a democracy, so we can replace our misleaders through voting. under dictatorships, often the only solution is a violent overthrow, a coup. i know the cia is responsible for many revolutions around the world, and there is nothing wrong with that in general. i just disagree with many of the specific revolutions they carried out against democratic governments. but in general, there is nothing wrong with having the cia overthrow foreign governments, and i would like to see more of it. they overthrew the iranian government in 1953... time to do it again. 1953 was also the same year as the divine emaculation of j.r. “bob” dobbs, by the way. praise “bob”!

god got sued

ok, so a nebraska state senator has sued god. it is in wikinews, the associated press, fox news, and wired news. in the lawsuit, state senator ernie chambers of nebraska accuses god and his followers of making numerous terrorist threats against him and his constituents, and of countless natural disasters causing untold death and suffering to humanity. i am all for this lawsuit even though it is obviously just one big joke, since the defendant is a fictional character. now all the time there are articles about atheism. here is one on the washington post, and here is one from an awful evil republican website called worldnetdaily.com. basically the point of the articles is this: atheism has been getting more and more popular since the attacks of september 11, 2001, because people are realizing that religion is evil and is ruining everything. ok, here are some examples from the recent news about how evil and stupid religion is: the polygamist leader warren jeffs is in charge of a cult known as the fundamentalist church of latter day saints, an offshoot of mormonism that still practices polygamy. and of course, people in this evil cult of warren jeffs do awful things to each other. it has been all over the news lately. osama bin laden put out a new video recently. he is evil, and a devout muslim. and his terrorist followers are all very evil, and very devout muslims. and madonna was in israel recently and declared herself an “ambassador for judaism”, even though she is not a jew and never was, and is instead a follower of some superstitious bullshit nonsense called kabbalah that comes from judaism. and jewish rabbis have condemned her for studying kabbalah and said it is forbidden to non-jews. madonna is an idiot and so are these rabbis! who cares about this kabbalah bullshit? and what about scientology and tom cruise and john travolta and all those other idiot followers of l. ron hubbard? that is a bunch of bullshit too, and they are all idiots. scientologists have to pay tons of money to their stupid cult, just to gain access to secret bullshit so they can brainwash themselves into even bigger idiots. and what about the republicans and their stupid fundamentalist christianity that teaches them to hate people who are different from them such as homosexuals but also including many other groups? rather than fighting injustice and intolerance, fundamentalist christians promote bigotry and hatred, and they are very closely tied to the republican party. so senator larry craig, the gay homosexual faggot from idaho who likes kinky butt sex up the ass, pled guilty to trying to solicit gay sex in the men’s room of a minneapolis airport a few months ago, and he got all up in the news for lying and claiming he was innocent and not a flaming homosexual. what bugs me is not that this guy is totally gay, but that he is a hypocrite and a liar, who hates homosexuals because he is part of the christian fundamentalist belief system that teaches people to hate homosexuals, and that even though he himself is a homosexual, he has to lie to himself and everyone around him, and he still can’t get over his own bigotry and prejudice. meanwhile, another republican senator, david vitter, has been fucking prostitutes, but none of the republicans wanted him to resign, even though that shit is totally illegal. republicans just can’t stand gay people like larry craig, mark foley, ted haggard, jeff gannon, and probably thousands of other right-wing self-hating-homosexual political hacks like those losers. the fact remains that plenty of high-ranking republicans are gays, and republicans, no matter how much they hate gays, cannot eliminate them all, because these republican homos are so good at staying in the closet and pretending to be straight. i don’t hate gays but i do hate republicans because they are hypocrites and they are evil and they have ruined this country and their entire ideology is based on hatred of anyone who is different, and greed for wealth and power, and pretending to be moral and righteous when really they are the most immoral of all. now, i do not really hate all republicans, just some, and i do not hate them that strongly, just a bit. i know most republicans are just brainwashed into it. it is like a cult. you see, all religions are just like cults. the big established religions just have a lot more members and are able to intimidate people into not criticizing them by accusing them of being bigots. muslims accuse people of islamophobia, jews accuse people of anti-semitism, and christians really haven’t come up with a good term to label those who criticize christianity yet, but they are probably working on it. anyway, i see no difference between any of these religions or cults. and the republican party is so closely tied to the cult of right-wing christian fundamentalism that the republican party itself is basically a cult. a cult of personality. a cult of pretending to believe in so-called “conservative principles” that are little more than window dressing for bigotry and greed, an ideology of divide and conquer, of promoting hatred against those who are different, and letting rich people keep all their money, and doing nothing at all to help those who need it. osama bin laden could talk about his islamist principles and how noble and righteous they are, but would you be gullible enough to believe his bullshit? of course not, unless you are a terrorist or something like that. in all of osama bin laden’s videos, he acts like he is the most noble and righteous person in the world, and like he is leading the fight against evildoers, who he defines as anyone who opposes his extremist version of islam. but even if we ignore the extremist and fundamentalist and hateful versions of all the religions of the world, and ignore all the dangerous and stupid and wacky cults out there, if we just look at the religions that preach tolerance and peace and nonviolence and social justice, well that stuff is all well and good, but i still do not agree with their wacky beliefs about supernatural powers! i am all for the quakers spreading peace and tolerance and nonviolence and love and all of that. but leave god out of it! leave jesus out of it! leave allah and mohammad and l. ron hubbard out of it! leave the kabbalah out of it! leave out the stuff about ufos and aliens and human cloning that the raelians believe in! look... when he was alive, jesus christ tried to spread a message of peace and love and tolerance, and he befriended those who society wrongly condemned, such as prostitutes and tax collectors. do you really think jesus would hate gay people? where do these right-wing christian fundamentalists get off? their entire belief system is bullshit, because if jesus were alive today he would condemn them and everything they stand for. jesus believed in sharing and helping out those who are less fortunate. jesus believed in socialism. he did not advocate letting the wealthy keep all their money while the working poor don’t have any health care. the republicans in congress and the white house and those who are running for president are trying as hard as they can to keep america’s uninsured from getting access to quality health care. the white house has promised to veto a bill that would help get health insurance to children. not even adults! just kids! that would be cheap! but republicans would rather let poor kids die from lack of insurance than show any signs of human decency. and i have not seen michael moore’s new movie “sicko”, but i do know that cuba has pretty much the best health care system of any third-world country with a per capita income as low as it is there. rudy giuliani has said that hillary clinton’s new health care proposal is european-style socialized medicine and not what’s right for america. well guess what? europeans are not complaining about their health care system and saying it gives them too much coverage, and asking to have less coverage like those of us here in the united states! europeans are not asking for their politicians to put an end to socialized medicine! on the contrary, they love socialized medicine and any politician over there who takes a stance against it has basically committed political suicide. health care costs in the united states are going up much faster than inflation and people cannot afford it and neither can businesses and it is insanity to say that our system is better than what they have in developed nations in europe. i personally am having to get off expensive prescription drugs and go onto cheaper ones instead to treat my panic attacks and anxiety, because my new insurance that i am paying for myself (with help from my parents) does not cover mental health at all. and does my job offer health insurance? i think it offers a plan that is cheaper than what i have now, but with even less coverage. i need drugs dammit! now who is going to pay for my drugs? i am paying money to an hmo every month but it won’t pay for anything because everything is too damn expensive! and the republicans think we have the best health care system in the world! ha! maybe for wealthy assholes like them the system works! you know this blackwater security company, this private army of ex-special ops soldiers who used to be in the u.s. military, who just got kicked out of iraq? their ceo is a billionaire who inherited all his money from his dad. i hate people like that!!! seriously, i really do!!! and this asshole used to be a navy seal or a marine or some kind of special ops soldier or something. and his dad basically bankrolled the evil asshole james dobson and his organization focus on the family. james dobson and focus on the family are an incredibly evil organization of right-wing christian fundamentalist zealots and bigots who basically should do the world a favor and commit suicide because all they ever do is make things on this planet worse, not better, and we would be better off without them living on this planet with us. oh, and did i mention fred phelps, the evil evil pastor of the westboro baptist church in kansas? he is like the evillest of all the christian fundamentalist preachers. he even hates the united states because he says we are a nation of “fag enablers”, and says we are all going to hell. i think people like fred phelps capture the true essence of religion and demonstrate to everyone the true nature of religion, what religion is all about. isn’t it really all about hate? but the only religion that actually comes out and admits that it’s all about hate is the church of the subgenius. we subgenii hate the pinks, and everyone who is not a subgenius is a pink. pretty much all religions teach their followers that their religion is good and anyone who is opposed to it or does anything against it is bad and evil, and that people who are followers of it are better than everyone else, and that all the other religions are wrong and only their religion is right. you know, right-wing christian fundamentalists are correct about all religions except one. they are correct that judaism is wrong, correct that islam is wrong, correct that hinduism is wrong, correct that buddhism is wrong, correct that scientology is wrong, correct that zoroastrianism is wrong, correct that all non-christian religions are wrong. unfortunately, they are blind to the fact that their own religion is just as wrong as all those other false religions. a true subgenius knows that the church of the subgenius is yeti nother false religion, and that all its teachings are complete bullshit, but chooses to follow it anyway, not in spite of the teachings being false but because they are false. a subgenius embraces the false beliefs with full knowledge that they are completely wrong. the ultimate purpose of this enterprise is to win back the slack stolen away by the conspiracy, or, in layman’s terms, to parody and make fun of the rest of the world and pretend you are better than everyone else, which is a parody of how other religions are full of followers who actually believe they are better than everyone else, except because the subgenius knows that the whole thing is one big joke and nothing but bullshit (or as we prefer to call it, bulldada), the subgenius actually realizes that they are not really better than anyone else, and it is because of this humility that the subgenius actually is better than everyone else. the pink, the person who is not a subgenius, is not as humble, and is not willing to admit that all their beliefs are basically bullshit (excuse me, bulldada). the subgenius savior is j. r. “bob” dobbs, a fictional character just like god, who is admired not for his good traits but for his flaws, his sacred follies. as the saying goes, “bob” makes a million bucks every time he makes a mistake, and boy does he ever make a lot of mistakes. he is the greatest salesman who ever lived, or perhaps the greatest salesman who never lived. by worshipping “bob” in pursuit of slack, the subgenius abandons rationality and pursues stupidity, with complete awareness of what is going on, complete understanding of how stupid and pointless it is. there is no such thing as enlightenment or higher awareness or a spiritual realm or an eternal soul. god is actually called jhvh-1 and is an evil space alien from some corporate sin galaxy, and in 1953, in the divine emaculation of “bob”, j. r. “bob” dobbs saw a great vision while being electrocuted by an amateur television set of his own design, and made a covenant with the men from planet x, the x-ists, to have all the subgenii of the world liberated on pleasure saucers by alien sex goddesses on july 5, 1998 at 7:00 am. while this may seem like a stupid and ridiculous belief, at least nobody actually believes it, we just pretend to. so we are better than all those fools who actually believe nonsense like if they fly a plane into the world trade center they will get to fuck 72 virgins because allah loves mass murderers like the prophet muhammad, peace be upon him, wrote in the koran. you know, terrorists actually believe they go to heaven for killing innocent people, and they think their victims are the ones who go to hell. in reality, heaven and hell are both made up, and we need to find out who these potential mass murderers are before they kill, so we can kill them before they kill us. atheism is god’s honest truth. in fact, i am going to go out on a limb here and say that not only is god a fictional character, but so is “bob”! now i have committed heresy against my own religion! the punishment for heresy is sainthood, so now i am a subgenius saint. what other religion operates in such a peculiar manner? the church of the flying spaghetti monster? i am starting to think that maybe god does exist after all, though, because i just noticed that he has a blog. sure, god shares his blog with some other gods too, but i guess that just means they all exist. let’s all worship zeus, or thor, or ra! who cares? it is not like anything we do will change reality. whether or not any of these gods or bobs exist, nothing we do will change the situation of their existence of non-existence. and if there really were an all-powerful god, do you really think he would be dependent upon people believing in him for his continued existence? would he really have such a frail ego that he would require constant praise, and that anyone who questioned him would have to be severely punished? why should god even care about us? what have we ever done for him? he probably tells the terrorists to attack us and unleashes natural disasters on us for fun, just to enjoy watching our suffering. that is why i am glad somebody finally sued the bastard. i am just surprised it happened in nebraska, of all places. anyway, it is fucked up that the u.s. military is being privatized and our soldiers are quitting to join private mercenary armies like this blackwater group, and then our own state department hires this blackwater group of psycho assholes to be their security, and the blackwater bastards go on a couple killing sprees against innocent civilians, and then it turns out the blackwater people are not accountable to any law, not iraqi law or american law or even international law. why the hell does our government need to hire private mercenaries instead of just using our own goddamn soldiers like normal? these mercenaries are paid much higher salaries than our soldiers. there ought to be a law against the united states government using private mercenaries. we have a military so we might as well fucking use it. you know what? even god agrees with me. and so does “bob”. why should some psycho who inherited over a billion dollars from his wacko christofascist james-dobson-bankrolling daddy get to have his own private mercenary army with close connections to the republican party, and then have the u.s. government pay his conspiracy corporation taxpayer cash money in exchange for having the blackwater bastards shoot people dead? to hell with blackwater! i am glad the iraqis kicked them out! i hope the iraqis kick the u.s. military out of their sorry excuse of a country. it used to be a halfway decent country until we totally fricken destroyed everything. they have more than half the population unemployed, like maybe 4 hours of electricity a day, no clean running water, and everywhere there are people trying to kill you, no matter who you are! i guess the national rifle association is happy though. everyone in iraq has guns, so according to the wacko theories of the n.r.a., iraq is the safest country in the world, since everyone has a gun for self-defense. i guess that means gun control laws are bad and we should vote republican because jesus says so. then again, muhammad is telling us to be suicide bombers and blow up infidels. i guess that proves that religion is a good thing, and the 9/11 hijackers should be admired as heroes because of their religious faith. anyone who has plenty of religious faith, like a terrorist, is obviously a model citizen and someone who should be admired. that is why i love hearing presidential candidates talk about how faithful they are in their various religions. if only the presidential candidates had as much religious faith as the terrorists! then they could really be righteous, like james dobson, or the guy who owns the blackwater group, or fred phelps, or george w. bush, or osama bin laden! faith is good! since faith is the exact opposite of logic, and logic is an evil tool of the devil, faith is obviously good. praise god! i hope he wins that lawsuit against that evil heathenous nebraska state senator. remember, jesus votes republican, and god hates fags. praise “bob”!

everyone is resigning

so what is up with karl rove, alberto gonzales, and tony snow all resigning from the bush administration? and idaho senator larry craig is resigning too. larry craig, like michael vick, pled guilty to a crime. michael vick, of course, is an nfl quarterback that ran a dogfighting ring. and larry craig was trying to solicit gay sex in a public men’s bathroom in a minneapolis airport. karl rove is most notable for his divisive propaganda that excites the passions of a minority of the american populace known as the religious right. the religious right hates gays, and larry craig, like ted haggard, is a self-hating homosexual from the religious right. well ok... we do not know for sure that larry craig is homosexual. he could be bisexual, and be attracted both to females such as his wife as well as males that he meets in illicit sexual encounters in airport restrooms. now there is not anything wrong with being gay or bi, but there is something wrong with anti-gay prejudice like the kind that we see from the religious right. and why were republicans so quick to want to get rid of this larry craig guy from the u.s. senate? i think it is not because he pled guilty to a crime, but rather because he was publicly exposed as a self-hating gay hypocrite who practices homosexual acts in his private life while publicly being a staunch opponent of the gay rights movement. but it is not even the hypocrisy that republicans are upset about, i think. i think they are just upset about it because of their anti-gay prejudice. after the whole affair with mark foley and ted haggard, they are just sick of gay republicans that make them look bad. i guess that is the heart of the matter, that having someone like larry craig represent them makes them look bad. it is all about public relations and the public perception of republicans. they are more concerned about their poll numbers than anything else. now karl rove won elections by appealing to the religious right, to people who hate gays, with the whole issue of gay marriage, with all the gay marriage ballot initiatives across the country. it is shameful that the republican party relies upon stirring up the passions of hate and bigotry in order to win elections, and tries to divide people instead of uniting them, turning straight against gay, white against black, christian against atheist, man against woman. we ought to allow people of all sexual orientations, races, belief systems, and genders to participate in politics equally, and to unite with others who are different from them in support of common goals. it disturbs me how politicians keep talking about faith and religion and they keep trying to sneakily make christianity the official state religion of the united states just because the majority of americans are christians. in iran, the majority of people are shiite muslims. in india, the majority are hindus. in israel, the majority are jews. should governments officially support some religions and not others? this makes people who are not part of the majority religion feel left out, excluded, discriminated against, and politically irrelevant, like they have no power and nobody in power is listening to them or cares about them. i don’t want the government telling me which of the many religions out there is the correct one that i should believe in. i don’t want my taxpayer dollars going to “faith-based initiatives” to promote theocracy and indoctrinate people into belief systems i disagree with. if the government just stayed out of this business of interfering with religion, and left the whole issue of religion alone, things would be a lot better, and i would not find myself forced into the position of becoming such a staunch opponent of religion. i don’t want the government forcing religion down my throat. if people want to believe something i personally disagree with, and go to a church or synagogue or mosque or temple or shrine or whatever, that is fine, as long as they do not interfere with me and force me to do anything i don’t want to do. that is what freedom of religion is all about. but religion is not an excuse to hate people because of which sexual orientation they were born with. you see, although i am not a gay, i do not like how certain minority groups become the objects of hate, and society condemns them, and it becomes a divisive issue. when the majority is oppressing a minority, i will always take the side of the oppressed minority, because i am opposed to oppression. i do not believe in a government of wealthy white christian heterosexual males who only care about other wealthy white christian heterosexual males, even though i am a white heterosexual male too (but not wealthy or christian). it should be a government of all the people, of all the people, and for all the people. it is funny how these religious right types used to condemn “niggers” as inferior or say that all the jews were going to go to hell, but nowadays, they have reformed their ways slightly and have abandoned racism against blacks and anti-semitism against jews, in favor of hatred against gays, atheists, muslims, and mexicans. political correctness seems to only apply to bigotry against blacks and jews but not any other groups. and as for sexism, it is open season on feminists, and everyone likes to attack the so-called “feminazis”. it sure is strange how arbitrary it is which groups of people cannot be criticized and which ones everybody is strongly condemning. can you imagine what it would be like if people were not constantly criticizing islam, and had the same attitude towards “islamophobia” that they have towards “anti-semitism”? now, the word “islamophobia” is poorly chosen, if it is supposed to get people not to criticize islam. we have every reason to have a phobia towards islam and fear islam. after all, islamic terrorists keep attacking and killing people all across the world, from the 9/11 attacks in the united states to the attacks in london to the attacks in madrid to the ones in indonesia to the ones in morocco and the ones in turkey and in russia and almost every country in the middle east. you would have to be insane not to be afraid of islamic terrorists. now it is true that only a small percentage of muslims are actual terrorists, but is that really a good reason not to be afraid of them, not to have islamophobia? we have no way of knowing which muslims are terrorists and which are not. like in england, doctors actually became terrorists! and these are people who put in years going through medical school and everything, people you would expect to act civilized, people who were living in a wealthy, industrialized country with good jobs. when your enemy is attacking and killing you, it is insanity not to have any fear. so this term “islamophobia” is quite poorly chosen because i think pretty much everyone ought to have some degree of islamophobia, even most muslims. i mean in iraq, muslims are killing other muslims because shiites and sunnis hate each other. and now, there is actual fighting and killing by shiites against rival shiites. if i were an iraqi, i would almost certainly be afraid of these gangs of vicious killers who happen to be muslim. now is this fear of islam itself or just fear of murderous terrorists that happen to be muslim? it seems like a matter of semantics to me, because you cannot tell which muslims are terrorists. you could be a patient at a hospital in england and have a doctor who is muslim who later on turns out to be a terrorist... it happened earlier this year. but i suppose it might be better to focus on being afraid of terrorists in general rather than being afraid of muslims in general. now anyway, so what about the people who resigned? like larry craig, who said he is not gay? larry craig does not have a lot of credibility. after all, he pled guilty to a crime and then claimed he was innocent, even though he signed a legal document that states that he is guilty. so by claiming he is innocent now, he is contradicting himself. as for alberto gonzales, he was an incompetent yes-man who wrote an infamous torture memo and basically had no idea what he was doing, answering “i don’t know” to almost all the questions people in congress asked him, demonstrating that he was clueless and had no idea what was going on in the justice department he was supposed to be in charge of. an incompetent fool who had no idea what he was doing, just like former fema boss michael brown. the government should have the best and the brightest in charge of things, not blundering idiots like these fools. and back when tony snow was hired as white house press secretary away from his job as a fox news anchor, he put the final nail in the coffin of the myth that fox news is “fair and balanced”. fox news is republican party propaganda, plain and simple. if only people like bill o’reilly and sean hannity resigned from fox news, maybe someday fox news might become a legitimate news organization, instead of a pravda-esque partisan propaganda machine. but i think at the end of the day, the republicans were right to call for senator larry craig of idaho to resign. after all, with his lying about not being guilty of a crime after he pled guilty to it, larry craig showed that he has less honor and integrity than michael vick, the nfl quarterback that ran a dogfighting ring. at least michael vick apologized to everyone and admitted he was wrong, rather than maintaining a holier-than-thou attitude like larry craig. people with big egos like larry craig really get on my nerves. i much prefer people with low self-esteem who dislike themselves, because at least those people have realistic attitudes about themselves and are not pretending to be better than everyone else. now tony snow said he was resigning because he was running out of money. his salary is $168,000 a year. what the hell is this assclown wasting so much money on, that he goes broke on such a high salary? i make less than one tenth that salary and i can still manage to pay my bills, somehow. my message to tony snow is pretty simple: if you are running out of money, quit spending so much of it on stuff you don’t need, you idiot. it’s pretty simple. in third world countries people survive on less than $1,000 per year. tony snow is making 168 times as much as that and he still can’t pay his bills? what a retard. you know, the gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger and bigger all the time, and it is not a meritocracy at all. rich people do not earn their money. they do not deserve their money. their money is not earned based on merit at all. many of them are actually idiots who have no clue what to do with money. i mean, just look at all the big businesses that go bankrupt after getting lots of loans, or after giving out lots of loans to undeserving people who obviously would not pay the money back. i think the companies that gave out subprime mortgages were run by idiots and had bad business plans and they deserve to go out of business, and anyone dumb enough to invest in them deserves to lose their money. the government should not intervene at all in something like the subprime mortgage market collapse. and now that home prices are finally going down and the housing bubble is bursting, we are finally seeing some sanity restored to the market. people shouldn’t act like idiots and think this is the end of the world or anything like that. it is good when housing prices go down, because it makes homes more affordable to buy, and people don’t have to pay so much in taxes on their homes. i keep hearing news stories about this where people are all worried about the price of homes going down, and i don’t have any sympathy for people who are worried about something so stupid. people don’t get worried when the price of gasoline goes down or the price of food goes down or the price of computers goes down. people usually worry when the prices of things go up. when stuff gets cheaper that is almost always a good sign. and as for people who suddenly have to pay a lot more on their variable-rate mortgages that used to be much cheaper for them to pay... again... they are idiots. they should have known what they were doing when they signed up for it, and they should have realized that interest rates could not stay so ridiculously low forever. if someone has no clue how to manage money, and they screw everything up by buying stuff they can’t afford, they deserve to lose all the stuff they bought on credit that they could not afford in the first place. people should quit whining about self-inflicted problems and asking other people to bail them out because of their own stupidity. i work hard at my job and i only buy things i can afford, and i can only afford to buy very little because my job pays such a small amount of money. if some idiot works as white house press secretary and makes more than ten times as much as me and still can’t pay his bills, he should do what i do and not waste money on things he can’t afford. i hardly think it could be that difficult. it is an insult to me and other hard-working low-paid people for a wealthy person such as him to claim to have difficulty paying his bills. and then he and other republicans don’t want to do anything to help out us poor people, to help raise our standard of living and shrink the gap between the rich and the poor. rich people do not deserve their money. they ought to pay higher taxes. i wish i had lots of money like them. they ought to share the wealth and stop keeping it all for themselves. there are tv shows where wealthy celebrities show off their mansions and all the expensive stuff they wasted money on, and it just disgusts me to see people showing off their wealth, as if that makes them better than everyone else. no it does not make them better than everyone else. it shows off their selfishness and their lack of caring about people who are less lucky and well-off than them, and demonstrates the fact that they do not deserve their wealth at all. their materialism disgusts me. if people want to spend lots of money on things, they ought to at least spend it on things that are useful and can serve some sort of purpose. what is the point of “pimping your ride”? people who are dumb enough to waste money on silly pointless things do not deserve the money in the first place. anyway, i do not think any of the people who resigned deserved to have their jobs in the first place. there ought to have been democrats in those jobs, not republicans. and of course, the democrats who should have had the jobs of karl rove, tony snow, and alberto gonzales ought to have been working for a democratic president, rather than the the most incompetent fool of all, george w. bush. now democrats are not immune to this problem of hiring incompetent fools for top positions. john kerry’s top campaign adviser for the 2004 campaign was bob shrum, an incompetent fool who had mismanaged a large number of previous presidential campaigns that all lost miserably. bob shrum’s track record of nothing but failure should have barred him from being the top campaign adviser to john kerry, and john kerry should have instead hired someone who actually knows how to win elections. politicians need to stop rewarding failure, and hire people who actually have talent and know what they are doing! you know, people like me!