the mad teabagging party

ok, so the mad teabagging party was held yesterday on april 15th. meanwhile, responsible citizens like me, instead of having teabagging parties, actually paid our taxes. and you know what? this year, i actually got money back from the state and federal governments, whereas in past years, i have always had to pay them money. the teabaggers claim to, among other things, be protesting high taxes, but didn’t barack obama just lower taxes for 95% of americans? seriously. unless you are part of the top 5%, you already got a tax cut. what are they protesting, the bailouts? well guess what? if the bailouts hadn’t happened, their precious private sector and large corporations would have all gone bankrupt by now, and we really would have socialism. the wingnuts and paultards keep crying socialism all the time, like the boy who cried wolf, and it is getting kind of ridiculous. if they actually saw socialism they wouldn’t recognize it. so this astroturf operation by the republicans, the teabagging parties across the nation, was originally started by the paultards, which is what everybody who is not a ron paul supporter calls wacko ron paul supporters when we want to make fun of them. remember the paultards also celebrated “v for vendetta” and its anti-hero who wore a guy fawkes mask with a “money bomb” of large numbers of contributions to ron paul’s presidential campaign on guy fawkes day. the anti-hero of v for vendetta was a terrorist, and so was guy fawkes, who tried to blow up the british parliament several hundred years ago. now the internet hacker/activist group “anonymous”, like the paultards, also is into guy fawkes masks, even more so, but anonymous is into them in an ironic way. the first member of anonymous to wear a guy fawkes mask was a stick figure cartoon character known as epic fail guy. similarly, the ron paul campaign was nothing but epic fail. basically, this teabagging thing was first started by paultards (and after all paultards are republicans, since you had to be a registered republican to vote for ron paul in most of the primaries or caucuses). then some republican bloggers and national republican organizations started to take notice and became official supporters of the teabagging parties, and soon republican fox news and republican talk radio were full of stuff promoting the teabagging parties. they renamed them “tea parties” from the original idea of “teabagging”, since the republicans did not want to be associated with oral sex, although current republican senator david vitter has publicly admitted to be totally into prostitutes... and now he is into teabagging parties. you know what is funny? according to the local newspaper, there were actually 3 of these teabagging parties here in broome county in upstate new york. today when i was going to work someone actually asked me for directions to this place, and i gave him directions, and after i got home and looked at the newspaper, i realized that the guy who asked me for directions was going to one of the teabagging parties. and i gave him the correct directions for how to get there, too! then later that night one of the radio hosts on the student-run radio station from binghamton university gave an on-the-air speech in favor of the teabagging parties and expressing regret that he had been too busy with his classes that day to attend the teabagging party that was held at binghamton university. i heard the dj’s speech live on the air and it actually seemed to make some sense. the dj was mostly concerned with government spending and deficits getting out of control, and said how great america is. and he, like the republican leaders, referred to these protests as “tea parties”, not using the original term that the paultards had called it back when they first got the idea of “teabagging” all the politicians in washington, d.c. yes, originally it was called teabagging, because it involved sending actual teabags in the mail to members of congress, and congress is always unpopular. the people who came up with the idea of teabagging knew exactly what it meant, and the whole thing was a big joke while at the same time having a serious message... the paultards felt tired of being screwed by the government so they decided to screw the government symbolically, with teabags sent in the mail representing the sexual practice of teabagging, while at the same time having some kind of connection to the boston tea party back when the american colonists were protesting british taxes. i don’t quite understand the whole thing and how it developed, but apparently when rick santelli on cnbc went into a sick rant and it became a viral video, this helped build momentum for this teabagging idea. or should i say, joementum, in tribute to joe lieberman and his myriad failings as a senator. obviously joe lieberman was not involved in this, except as one of the victims who received teabags in the mail along with everyone else in congress. i just like saying joementum, just like i prefer calling them teabagging parties to tea parties. so apparently the teabagging parties were not big gay orgies, despite being called teabagging parties. fox news and other right-wing media are portraying this as if it is the first great populist grassroots movement since... since what? since the great populist movement of the pumas last year, remember? the p.u.m.a. movement stood for “party unity my ass” and was another republican astroturf operation that targeted hillary clinton supporters and tried to get them to vote for john mccain in the general election. originally there were just a few pumas and they actually were democrats who supported hillary clinton, but once the republicans found out they created lots of puma websites and started trying to spread puma propaganda, and republicans effectively took over leadership of the puma movement, which petered out after hillary conceded the election to barack obama and endorsed him, turning out to not be much of a movement at all. some of the pumas called barack obama a dangerous left-wing socialist and said we needed sensible centrist leadership like hillary clinton or john mccain. other pumas called barack obama a right-wing neocon in disguise and said that electing him would be like 4 more years of bush so john mccain would be better since after those 4 years hillary clinton could come back as the great liberal savior who would finally end right-wing misrule. yes, some people actually thought obama was a right-wing neocon, just like some people think he is a left-wing socialist. the pumas never had a coherent message other than hillary clinton good, barack obama bad. the message of the newer astroturf movement, the teabaggers, is even more incoherent, since some of them want to throw out all the bums in washington in both parties, and others are partisan republicans who support republican politicians and oppose democratic ones. basically the teabaggers are against taxes, government spending, bailouts, big government, barack obama, the democrats, and liberalism. after years and years of liberals doing public protests and conservatives just supporting george w. bush and the republicans but never doing any protests or activism outside party politics, now the right-wingers seem to be actually doing protests for the first time in a long time. well, ok, the anti-abortion people have been doing protests all these years, but most republicans are not that into protests and think it is some liberal hippie silliness that no sensible person would ever be involved in. protests are usually full of silliness, but now all the silliness is at right-wing protests. those of us on the left still have protests (i think)... for instance lots of pacifist groups keep holding peace vigils and protesting the wars, even now that barack obama is the commander-in-chief and many of them voted for him. protests sure are silly, but these teabagging ones take the cake, except maybe when compared to the pumas last year, since the pumas were really quite ridiculous, especially harriet christian, the most famous of them, or lady lynn forester de rothschild, an ultra-wealthy banking heiress from european nobility who called barack obama an elitist.

on to more serious news, the obama family has a new dog named bo. it is a gift from ted kennedy and is a portuguese water dog, the same type he has as pets, and it is related to the dogs ted kennedy has, from the same breeder, and trained by the same professional dog trainer. this is possibly one of ted kennedy’s last major public acts, since after all he is dying of brain cancer, and probably has just months to live. if dying of brain cancer is not serious business, i don’t know what is. also, dogs might act silly, but they are our friends, they help cheer us up, and when we lose a dog, it feels just as sad and tragic as when a human being dies. getting a new puppy is sort of like getting a new baby, except babies grow up to become regular boring adult humans, while puppies grow up to become dogs that are almost as silly as puppies.

on to even more serious news... pirates! they keep kidnapping people, ships, and cargo off the coast of somalia. somalia is the only country in the world whose form of government for over a decade has been anarchy. some anarchist theorists actually claim that economic growth under anarchy in somalia has been better than it was during the years when somalia had a functioning government. and some even more crazy people sometimes claim that somalia actually has a government... what it actually has are a bunch of people who pretend to be a government but do not even control their own capital city, let alone any other territory. whenever someone mentions “the government of somalia” you know they are full of bullshit. that is like referring to the one world government. similar to the government of somalia, the one world government is pure fiction and does not exist. so according to market anarchists (who are like libertarian paultards except they take libertarian principles to their logical extremes), somalia’s anarchy is totally awesome and causes all sorts of innovation in the private sector, and things that ought to be legalized are legal in somalia because under anarchy there are no laws, which is exactly what anarchists want. anyway, one of the innovations that the people in somalia’s private sector have come up with, one that would be illegal in any other country, is hi-tech, 21st century piracy. yes, these pirates are hi-tech. they have machine guns, speed boats, and satellite phones that work out in the middle of the ocean. their operations are extremely profitable, and the pirates in charge of things stay put on land, keeping in contact with the pirates at sea by phone. it is basically somewhat similar to the mafia, drug cartels, or street gangs, except they do this stuff out in the ocean. while somalia is one of the poorest countries in the world, it is near the suez canal, where a large portion of the goods that supply europe go thru all the time, coming from asia. as for europe exporting stuff back to asia... well not as much, but i am sure they export at least a bit, and it probably mostly goes thru the suez canal. everything that goes thru that canal goes by the coast of somalia, and the pirates can easily attack any ship they want. under maritime and international law, non-military ships are not allowed to have things like machine guns, so it is illegal for the merchants shipping goods through the suez canal to carry weapons onboard the ships that are as powerful as the weapons carried by the pirates onboard their speedboats. shipping companies almost all have pursued strategies of negotiating with the pirates, giving them ransom, and letting them keep it and get off free, and now the pirate leaders of somalia are very wealthy, especially compared to everyone else in somalia. any would-be government of somalia that ever tried to form would not stand a chance against the pirates, who would be able to use their money to buy weapons for and hire as mercenaries large enough armies to crush anyone else in somalia who dared to oppose them. the only forces that are powerful enough to fight the pirates are forces from outside somalia, such as the united states military, or, believe it or not, the french military. yes, both we, the americans, as well as the french, have killed somali pirates in recent days to end hostage standoffs. i think all the non-pirates behaved heroically. however, the pirates are resolved to continue their piracy, and for good reason: they are making money hand over fist, it is the only way they have to make money, and they live in a country that has not had a functioning government for many years, filled with extreme poverty, starvation, and lots of violence and collapse of social order. islamists tried to take control of somalia awhile ago, but since they were loosely allied with al qaeda, the united states paid ethiopia money to invade and occupy somalia and support a fake somali government, which was toppled soon after ethiopia decided to withdraw its troops. now, to be honest, there are different parts of somalia that are controlled by different “governments”, each claiming to be legitimate, and some of these parts are more stable than others. after the ethiopian withdrawal, the islamists have gained control of more territory once again, for example. however, these “governments” are mostly just warring factions fighting over territory, and are not like real governments. the pirates in somalia are closely allied to one of the “governments” that controls a bit of territory along the coastline. it is easy for the pirates to ally with one of the warring factions that controls some territory, since the pirates are the ones with all the money they got as ransom payments for the ships, hostages, and cargo. everyone else in that country is dirt poor so the pirates can easily bribe the leaders of a faction into supporting them. the united states has been involved in somalia too, of course, but we have been supporting a bunch of losers, namely the so-called central government that is incredibly weak and does not control any territory, rather than supporting a rival faction that has a better chance at winning control of the country. that is why we had to pay ethiopia to invade somalia on our behalf, using the entire ethiopian military as a mercenary-for-hire proxy fighting service because the united states military was too busy fighting other wars. that mission did not exactly go as planned, although early on the ethiopians easily defeated every foe they faced. the ethiopians got tired of fighting on our behalf, and we were not paying them enough to make them continue, so they withdrew. we americans could easily conquer somalia if we wanted, but then we would face the same problem as in iraq and afghanistan: invading and occupying a foreign country, doing nation-building, putting in place a puppet government, and fighting an insurgency. the amount of money that such a military endeavor would cost is probably far more than the amount of money the pirates are making, so a more fiscally responsible policy would be to just pay the pirates the money they ask for, after talking them down to a reasonable sum of money. we are in enough wars already. maybe if some other country wants to fight the pirates, we could offer them some kind of support, but our military has enough other problems to deal with. by the way, according to market anarchists, having a government-run military is evil socialism, and gives the government a monopoly on the use of force to impose its will on others, and is therefore horribly oppressive. market anarchists believe in having privately owned militias that people pay money to in order to have protection. so, for all the teabaggers protesting so-called socialism, do you realize that the biggest socialist institution in the entire world is the united states military? why don't you send the military some of your teabags? oh yeah, no gays in the military, how could i forget. if there is ever a draft, i hope the no-gays rule is still in place, because i will need some way to avoid being forced against my will to fight for a cause i do not believe in, and if pretending to be gay is the only way to avoid having to serve in some unjustified war like the one in iraq, then that is what it takes. back in world war 2, i think men up to their early 40s were drafted, so i am not out of the woods yet at my age, since i am still in my 20s. just like the former hippies holding weekly peace vigils, i am pretty much a pacifist opposed to all war, so i could never in good conscience ever serve in a war. and if i were a soldier, my anxiety disorder would mean that either i would be a nervous wreck, too nervous to shoot straight or function properly, or i would be drugged up on anti-anxiety pills, too drugged up to shoot straight or function properly. even if i believed in the mission and wanted to fight, i would not be capable, because of my emotional disorder of panic attacks. anyone who wanted me as a soldier would have to be crazy, since besides that problem, i was always the worst person at every sport i played in school, and i would just totally suck at being a soldier. maybe they could have me clean latrines or cook food for the actual soldiers, or do some other menial task. i dunno. maybe they might even decide to put my ivy-league education, high intelligence, and math and computer background to good use, and have me actually use my skills. naw. nobody would ever give me a job where i actually use my skills. hasn’t happened yet. that’s why the economy sucks, because nobody is behaving rationally. just look at all the teabagging parties... can you honestly name 1 person who is behaving rationally? and no, you can’t name yourself, since you are biased in your own favor, probably. the fact is, we people are never rational, since it is biologically impossible for us to achieve rationality. our brains are just not wired that way. now think about this: is it rational for someone to give himself up as a hostage and put his own life on the line to help save his ship’s crew? very brave and heroic, but not exactly rational. is it rational to give orders to shoot the pirates on a lifeboat with that very hostage, if just 1 missed shot means that the hostage will either be killed by you or by the pirate that is not killed instantly by a bullet, and if your mission is to save the hostage, not kill him? if you really think about it, nobody in this pirate debacle behaved rationally at all, not the pirates or anybody else. the only thing everybody had in common was irrationality. now computers are perfectly rational, so if we built robots to do stuff, the robots would be rational too if they had computer chips functioning in the same role as our human brains. imagine robot pirates taking a robot ship captain hostage, and then a navy of robots is sent to rescue the robot captain from the robot pirates. the whole thing sounds utterly absurd! robots would never behave in such a silly fashion! they are far too sophisticated... instead, the robots would all be having parties to celebrate how logical they are, and only the most rational robots would get invited. the less rational robots would just sit there and rust in self-pity, feeling an irrational sense of loneliness that does not make any sense for robots to have, since robots are not supposed to have any emotions. now, as for the pirate situation, the nation hardest hit by the piracy is of course egypt, since the pirate attacks are causing less and less merchants to ship cargo thru the suez canal, cutting into the egyptian government’s main source of revenue. so logically, egypt has a stronger direct interest in putting a stop to somali piracy than any other nation. if other nations like the united states encourage egypt to take care of this problem, perhaps the great pharaoh will be moved by our pleas and let our people go from the pirates who take them hostage. well ok, egypt has a president now, instead of a pharaoh, but he still needs to let our people go... not just let them go from the pirates, but how about letting us go thru the suez canal without paying him a toll? no, just kidding, of course egypt gets a toll, otherwise there is no incentive for them to crack down on the pirates. another idea is, maybe if we let the islamists take over somalia, the islamists would put an end to the piracy because it violates shariah law? who knows? the taliban is apparently profiting off the trade of afghan heroin, so i don’t think we can count on islamists to not want to make money off lucrative money-making opportunities such as somali piracy. or we could just ask our best friends, the israelis, to launch some of their nuclear weapons, and have the weapons aimed all over the coastal areas of somalia. then afterwards we would claim we had nothing to do with the nuclear attack by the israelis, and join the rest of the world in condemning their actions. what an incredibly stupid idea. we should probably just do absolutely nothing, and wait for the egyptians or someone else to solve this problem for us. besides, the suez canal is not used to supply the united states with goods; it is used for trade between europe and asia. if egypt does not deal with this, perhaps the europeans or asians will, but it does not really affect the united states that much at all. perhaps we just need to periodically make a show of force to demonstrate we are the world’s only superpower, and that is why we killed those somali pirates in a daring rescue of the captain. we have been paying out so much in bailouts, we could have easily afforded the ransom and not had to kill anyone, and it would have cost less than this naval expedition. or we could have just nuked the pirates ourselves. what is the point of having nuclear weapons if you never get to use them? i am just kidding. we need to eliminate all nuclear weapons from this planet because they are too dangerous. being nuked is almost as bad as being teabagged. ALMOST.

glenn beck is crazy

this glenn beck guy is seriously off his meds and needs to spend the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital:



time for the men in white coats to take him to the loony bin...

oh great

oh great, some jackass murdered a bunch of people here in binghamton. this is so messed up... nothing like this has ever happened here before. goddamn murderer. at least the guy who did it is dead. we have always had so little crime in this small tight-knit community before today. a very sad day for everyone. i am glad i was not at the civic center today. my job is just across the chenango river from that place.

right-wing stupidity

i often come across stupid comments right-wingers leave on the internet. today i truly found a gem: an entire thread full of comments by them denouncing the new york times and proclaiming how happy they are that it is going out of business. it actually isn’t going out of business, but these conservative lunatics have a very tenuous hold on reality, and as they make clear in their comments, they wish that the only media that existed were conservative propaganda outlets like fox news, right-wing rags like the new york post, washington times, and wall street journal, and right-wing talk radio (rush limbaugh, sean hannity, mike savage, etc.). ok, so here it is, take a look! just read the comments there, and you will see a huge number of incredibly idiotic comments by right-wing loonies, and a few sensible comments by people who are not right-wing lunatics. when i was in college at cornell i read every issue of the cornell review that was published during that time. it is the ultra-right-wing student newspaper written by complete lunatics at cornell, and it was founded by ann coulter when she was a student at cornell. anyway, reading the cornell review was a form of entertainment for me and many other cornell students, and the vast majority of us who read it found it to be full of nonsensical articles that are completely without merit written by people who seemingly inhabit some parallel universe where creationism is factually true, any sexual intercourse outside of a heterosexual marriage is an evil sin, unregulated free-market capitalism is the only economic system that works, the war in iraq is perfectly justified because saddam hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and evil godless liberals (who are all communists in disguise) were somehow ruining the country even at a time when conservative republicans controlled all 3 branches of government. so anyway, i have long observed that conservative republicans are completely disconnected from reality because they are so indoctrinated by their absurd ideology, and this seems to hold true both when they are in power and when they are out of power. they seem to think, for example, that ad hominem attacks against al gore for his personal energy usage disprove the scientific theory of global warming. the beautiful part about all this is, pretty much every republican politician out there calls themselves a conservative, and lots of democrats do too, but hardly any politicians are willing to be associated with the term liberal, because they are all scaredy cats when it comes to being associated with liberalism. this is because foaming-at-the-mouth rabid conservatives have spread their infection to much of the public, making people think that liberalism is somehow bad, and thus only a small percentage of people have the guts to actually call themselves liberals. i am a liberal, of course, because i am not some dumbass coward afraid of the ramifications of admitting the truth. now let me discuss the merits of the arguments the conservatives were making in this thread at politico.com. many of them were saying “who cares about darfur?”, admitting to the public that they do not really care about the suffering of other people, even if the other people are innocent victims of a genocidal campaign of terror by a brutal dictator, namely sudanese president bashir who has been indicted for crimes against humanity. of course, i have always known that conservatism is based on selfishness and liberalism is based on actually caring about other people, and statements like this by conservatives only confirm this truism. i also read many comments rejoicing in the downfall of the new york times, claiming that it was full of liberal bias. i suppose that conservatives don’t care about facts, like the fact that the new york times helped lead the way in cheerleading for bush’s war in iraq before the war started, or that the new york times always has at least 2 staunch conservatives among its small group of paid opinion columnists, and whenever 1 of them leaves, they find another staunch conservative to replace them. if you look at a conservative newspaper such as the wall street journal or the washington times, you will find that every single opinion columnist is a diehard conservative, and no dissent from the party line is allowed. the new york times regularly criticizes both republicans and democrats, but republican publications such as the wall street journal and washington times are completely 1-sided on their opinion pages. the news pages of the wall street journal are respectable, but the news pages of the washington times are just as full of right-wing bias as the editorials, which is not surprising, given the fact that the washington times is owned by korean cult leader rev. sun myung moon, who served time in federal prison in the united states before he managed to use his political connections to become a free man once again. sometimes conservatives even accuse the washington post of being a democratic paper, which is far more ridiculous than saying that of the new york times, since the washington post is a centrist paper that usually favors the conservatives, not the liberals. the conservatives who comment on threads like the one i linked to get almost all their information from conservative propaganda outlets, except these internet conservatives tend to get most of it from conservative websites on the internet, not television, radio, or newspapers. i get news from the internet, television, radio, and newspapers... from all of them... even news-magazines like time magazine too. conservatism is insane because it is a form of fundamentalism that applies to all issues. conservatives are fundamentalist about religion, fundamentalist about free markets, and fundamentalist about pretty much everything, which means that they all have 1 point of view that they all agree on, regardless of any evidence to the contrary, and they stick to that point of view no matter what. being liberal, as a dictionary will tell you, has among its definitions being open-minded. as for conservative, the first definition is “disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.” the first definition for liberal is “favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.” another definition for liberal is “favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, esp. as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties.” another definition for liberal is “of or pertaining to representational forms of government rather than aristocracies and monarchies.” and liberal is also defined as “open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc.” in other words, liberalism means that people are open-minded and do not stubbornly stick to old ideas that don’t work and have been proven wrong, while conservatism means either wanting to preserve the status quo and avoid change, or to go back to a previous status quo that was traditionally followed in the past until recently. now, there are several arguments that could be made against these dictionary definitions, such as saying that the dictionaries are written by a bunch of liberals, or that liberal and conservative no longer mean what they traditionally meant several decades ago, but i am not going to get into a debate over that. i would just like to say that the definitions you get at dictionary.com are fairly accurate in my opinion, and they seem to portray liberalism very positively and conservatism more negatively. perhaps the most obvious flaw of conservatism is that conservatives often find themselves debating scientists, and saying that science is wrong. this glaring flaw in conservatism is why i think it is a form of lunacy. science is what has brought us all of the modern technology we take for granted nowadays. the scientific theories underlying many of the advances in technology are the very theories conservatives claim are incorrect, yet conservatives use the same technological devices as liberals all the time. for example, much of modern medicine is based on the theories of evolution, and most conservatives are not so wacky that they refuse medical care and seek out faith healers or witch doctors instead. most conservatives are at least sane enough to accept modern medicine and allow it to be used on them. they just disagree with the primary theory underlying the very scientific advances in medicine that save their lives, the theory of evolution. evolution, for instance, explains why bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, something that cannot be explained by so-called “creation science” or “intelligent design”. another atrocious thing about conservatives besides their complete disregard for science or logic in favor of ancient superstitions is the fact that they only seem to care about people who are very wealthy, and always try to change the laws to help out people who have much more money than they know what to do with, at the expense of everyone else. they even engage in blatant corruption like the awarding of no-bid contracts to halliburton, the company dick cheney was ceo of before becoming vice president, and they nakedly do this corruption in front of everyone, and have no remorse or shame about it. it is hard for me to find any redeeming qualities in conservatism, but i am liberal and open-minded enough to find at least two. first of all, if there is some old tradition that liberals want to change, and the tradition is actually good and the proposed change would actually be bad, then in this case the mindless impulse of conservatives to always want to preserve old traditions actually turns out to be the correct course of action. a stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say. secondly, we liberals want to fix problems, and often our open-minded thinking leads to bold proposals, but these bold proposals are not always correct. it is necessary to have somebody arguing the opposite from what we argue, arguing that our proposals are wrong, so that if we do come up with flawed proposals, the flaws in the proposals are made known and debated, and then hopefully the flawed proposals are either fixed or discarded. but in general, liberals do want to fix problems and conservatives want to leave them unfixed. that is just the general mindset of both groups, and conservatives do occasionally realize that a problem needs to be solved. usually, though, when conservatives want to solve a “problem”, the “problem” is just liberal policies that they disagree with, and not an actual problem. for instance, in the case of the new york times, conservatives view its existence as a problem, because the new york times generally favors liberal points of view over conservative ones, and despite the fact that there are far more conservative media outlets than liberal ones, conservatives cannot stand the existence of even one liberal media outlet. conservatives would like to shut out all debate and have their opinions be the only opinions allowed, which they make very clear in the comments thread i linked to above. they are really an undemocratic group of people, but luckily they have not ended democracy in our country yet, probably because democracy is a tradition and they feel bound by traditions. now i may come off as biased, and of course i am quite biased, obviously, but i do often wonder about whether there are intelligent, thoughtful, open-minded conservatives who are capable of considering other opinions and defending their own opinions in a logical manner without resorting to absurd arguments or arguments based on claiming the factual authority of things like the bible. there are a few conservative columnists and pundits that occasionally seem to be sentient beings, but just when i start to have faith in humanity and think that maybe conservatives aren’t all bad, my new favorite conservative always has to go back to spouting absurdities without logical justification, and i have to stop liking them, since the whole basis of me liking them was that they seemed to be logical and make sense and not be total wackos. as for liberal commentators, there are many that i like. for instance, i like paul krugman of the new york times, which you may find surprising, given that paul krugman has said that barack obama’s economic plan will not work and that i also like barack obama a great deal. i also like the columnists at the nation magazine a great deal. my main news sources that i look at each day on the internet are the huffington post, cnn.com, and the drudge report. yes, i know, the drudge report is conservative, but, i am a liberal and we are open-minded. my mind is always open to new ideas, even now. for instance, when it comes to things like bailouts, i am not sure whether they are a good idea or a bad idea. i do not trust the government or large corporations, but the government is far more trustworthy than corporations since at least it is accountable to voters. corporations are supposedly accountable to shareholders who own common stock and can vote, but in practice, this does not work at all, and corporate leaders are basically not accountable to anyone except the government, and only sometimes, because there is selective enforcement and double standards. bernie madoff was the former chairman of the nasdaq stock exchange, the 2nd largest stock exchange on wall street, the one where most of the tech stocks are, and he pulled off the biggest ponzi scheme in history. the person in charge of the stock exchange is the highest level you can get to in wall street, so the corruption in wall street goes all the way up to the top, bernie madoff being proof of this. and of course the government cannot be trusted, since after all, we have gone through 8 years of having george w. bush run the government, and it is still full of many conservatives he put there, some of whom are bound to sabotage things that the obama administration tries to accomplish. ok, that is just one of many reasons not to trust the government. another more obvious one is that governments can never be trusted under any circumstances, which is obvious if you look at history and see how all the governments have been untrustworthy in the past. any large enough institution becomes to some extent a malicious entity that strikes out against those who oppose it and tries to suppress information that makes it look bad, regardless of whether it is a public or private institution. part of being liberal and open-minded is being skeptical and not believing in things 100% unless you have absolute proof, so a true liberal, even if they think obama is great, is still somewhat skeptical, since you can never be too sure about any politician. if you are not skeptical about your own opinions, and you are a bit of a fundamentalist about them, then you are really just like the conservatives. you have to at least think twice about things, consider other points of view, and have some doubts about your own opinions, or else you are not truly a sentient being, but merely an overrated animal that knows how to walk and talk but not how to think. yes, humans are animals, unless you think it is better to categorize us as plants, fungi, bacteria, or something else, but of course calling humans animals is controversial to many conservatives, despite it being a scientific fact. to me, anything that conflicts with science conflicts with reality itself, and has zero credibility. science, logic, and mathematics are the foundation of all human understanding of reality, and any understanding of reality that is not based on them has no real justification at all. for years, conservatives have argued that if you cut taxes on the wealthy, this can actually increase government revenue. that is an example of something that completely violates all mathematics and logic and has basically zero validity whatsoever. pretty much everything conservatism is based on is fundamentally illogical and nonsensical, which is why the end result is the same. garbage in, garbage out. it is much more popular for people to call themselves conservatives than liberals only because conservatives are masters of sticking to the party line and staying on message, creating a vast echo chamber of conservatives who all agree with each other and spread the message to other people who are not conservatives. also, since conservatives favor the wealthy, the wealthy have a natural interest in favoring conservatives, which means conservatives have a major source of campaign contributions as well as people who own media conglomerates that will spread the conservative message for them. liberals favor the poor and middle class, who are not really in charge of anything, despite the fact that the vast majority of people are poor or middle class. this means lots of potential voters, but those potential voters can easily be won over to the other side through the ubiquitous conservative misinformation coming from so many media outlets. and the conservatives want to silence the few media outlets that do not treat their ideas as equal to or better than liberal ideas. now think about this: many major cities, such as washington, d.c. or new york city, have very liberal populations, but their newspapers and other local news organizations do not share the same views as the public in those areas. new york city does have the new york times, but more people read the new york post, a conservative paper, since it is cheaper and has a tabloid format aimed for mass appeal, and there is also the wall street journal, another conservative paper that is quite popular. in washington, d.c., neither the washington post nor the washington times is liberal, although the residents of the city are incredibly and overwhelmingly liberal. the washington post is centrist and the washington times is very conservative, neither of them reflecting the views of the people of washington, d.c. i think this fundamentally indicates the cozy relationship between wealthy media barons and conservative politicians whose policies benefit the wealthy. for anyone who still believes the myth that the media has a liberal bias, i highly recommend the excellent book what liberal media? by eric alterman, which thoroughly debunks that myth. it turns out that even the new york times is not as liberal as people think it is, and it only seems liberal because all the other news outlets are so conservative. of course, the book what liberal media? was written prior to msnbc deciding to become a liberal network, but its thesis and many examples documenting how the media is actually conservative are still valid in my opinion. msnbc, for instance, is owned by a large corporation, general electric, and while its evening lineup may feature the liberals keith olbermann and rachel maddow, the warmup act, chris matthews, is a centrist who used to be a supporter of george w. bush, although nowadays he pretends that never happened. msnbc prominently features pat buchanan and other conservatives, and it gives hours of airtime every morning to conservative joe scarborough. in the past, msnbc gave shows to mike savage, tucker carlson, and don imus, among others, helping to spread the conservative message. the mike savage show, which was called savage nation, was especially awful. as for cnn, until recently they had glenn beck, and they still have lou dobbs. it is hard to make the case that cnn is liberal, and in fact they have a bias towards conservatives that is documented in the book by eric alterman. anyway, my point is, conservatism is basically an extension of fundamentalist religion, and arguing with a conservative is not really a political argument but a theological dispute, even if you do not even believe in their religion, because to them it is a theological dispute. it is pretty much a form of mental illness, one that is contagious, and one for which there is no known cure. most people who suffer from conservatism will have it for the rest of their lives. i hope that someday we can find a cure for this dreadful form of mental illness. the once great republican party, whose first president, the great liberal abraham lincoln, freed the slaves, has over about 150 years steadily gotten more and more conservative, and is now worse and more malignant than ever before, when the republican party was originally a source for good in our country. it is quite a sad tale how conservatives came to dominate the republicans, and when all the dixiecrats left the democratic party to become republicans, along with “reagam democrats”, the republicans successfully peeled away almost all the conservative democratic voters, and later most of the liberals who had voted republican in the past (such as for nixon or reagan) switched to voting for democrats like bill clinton. every 4 years, each presidential election seems to have the ideological split between the 2 parties become more rigid than ever, and there are always a number of former members of one party who “see the light” and switch parties, changing all their beliefs too. this gradual process has purified the essence of the democratic and republican parties so that both parties are now dominated by bases of voters whose views do not agree with the views of the majority of the public. the republican party, however, is much more strongly dominated by its conservative base than the democratic party is dominated by its liberal base. the democrats do not really have to do much to appease us liberals, and they can often govern as centrists and get away with it. republicans, on the other hand, have to be staunch conservatives, or else they will find ultra-conservatives running against them in primary elections the next time they are up for re-election, and they will be replaced by ultra-conservative radicals. this is why republicans in congress are so staunchly conservative and in lockstep with fox news and right-wing talk radio on everything. they have eliminated dissent from within the ranks of their party, and they have proven that they do not really have any governing philosophy other than victory at all costs and trying to pander to the base as much as possible without alienating moderates. they seem just like a fanatical cult of brainwashed zombies, except they have no leader, which has thrown them into chaos recently. at least they can agree on one thing: opposing liberalism and democrats, and trying to obstruct everything that liberal democrats try to do. perhaps i should feel sorry for them, but i cannot feel sorry for such intolerant, hateful people who think everyone who had different beliefs from them will end up in hell for all eternity, yet who do not even care about the genocide in darfur. i don’t think they would want my pity either, but that is all the more reason to give it to them: because it would piss them off, and they deserve it, after giving us 8 years of hell under george w. bush. conservatives make the most absurd arguments, like back before obama was even elected, back in october, some of them were already blaming the economic recession on obama, claiming that the stock market went down in anticipation of obama winning the election, and that businesses were already laying off workers and cutting production in anticipation of a future obama win and future tax increases on them. to prove this point, these republican commenters claimed to own businesses themselves and be laying off workers and cutting production in anticipation of a future obama win that they thought would mean higher taxes on small business. this proves the depths to which the republicans have fallen. they have seemingly hit rock bottom, so perhaps the only direction they can go from here is up. and that is what frightens me. that is not to say that i am not also frightened by what is going on in our country, right now, even with my fellow democrats in charge. these bailouts are quite disturbing, and i also have a lot of problems with other aspects of the economic policy, such as the large deficits, even though i know that large deficits are supposedly a necessary evil when you have a recession, according to most mainstream economists. having taken 4 semesters of economics in college, i do not consider economics to be an actual science. it is a “social science”, or in more realistic terms, economics is a form of applied mathematics used to advance ideological points of view by making dishonest oversimplifications and assumptions about reality in order to lie by using statistics. even economists who want to tell the truth and think they are telling the truth cannot really do so, in my opinion, because the field of economics itself is fatally flawed. we saw evidence of how it is fatally flawed with alan greenspan’s reaction to the current recession: he was completely shocked and had not predicted it at all. billionaire hedge fund manager george soros, who also happens to be the biggest donor to the democrats, did predict it, and made a lot of money because his predictions turned out to be true, and you can read his theories about it here. you should take it with a grain of salt, though: he might just be trying to advance policies that would benefit his hedge fund, although i think that is unlikely and he seems sincere. the other reason to take it with a grain of salt is that economics is basically bullshit, even when it makes a correct prediction. it is like trying to predict the weather. we have theories to explain the weather and scientific models, but we still cannot predict weather, and disasters like hurricane katrina can catch us unprepared. economics is far less of a science than meteorology, since economics has become part of politics, economists are divided ideologically, and the scientific method is not the basis for this so-called “science”. it is impossible to do a controlled experiment in economics, and controlled experiments are necessary for doing real science. so in the absence of facts, opinions prevail, to the detriment of everyone, since everyone is part of the economy and everyone suffers because of failures in the economy. there is really no way economics could ever be fixed, other than simply having several hundred more years of human history in advanced technological societies during which economic data is monitored and kept for future generations to study. in each generation, conservatives argue in favor of the world being like what liberals in the previous generation argued in favor of. that is human progress. and liberals never want to go back to the old ways. we always want to achieve greater things than have ever been achieved before, rather than going back to the dark ages, the 1800s, the 1950s, or any other time in the past. the fundamental basis for conservatism is being stuck in the past and wanting to keep everyone else stuck back in the past with you. i suppose it is natural for people to be afraid of change and want to stick with the old ways of doing things that they are comfortable with, so there will always be plenty of conservatives, regardless of how irrational conservatism is. i know the failures of conservatism much better than most people, because in my personal life i am afraid of change and i stick with the old ways of doing things that i have always done before, and i have found that this does not lead to any progress in life, yet i am unable to summon the courage to change things in my life. this is the problem with conservatism, except instead of feeling that way over their personal lives, people feel that way over government policy. and i know firsthand that it just won’t work, period. like they say, doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and that is why conservatives are insane. of course, that is not the dictionary definition of insanity, so if you want to be picky about it, conservatives are not necessarily insane any more than anybody else would be insane, but that is only if you are obsessed with going by the dictionary definitions of things, which means you are obsessive and therefore insane. as i have shown by my earlier obsessive use of dictionary definitions in this post, i am likewise insane, so you should take everything i say with a grain of salt. therefore, conservatism is 100% true. just kidding, belated april fool’s joke. being obsessive is not a form of insanity either, technically. it is a natural personality variation, just like being right-wing or being stupid.

demonizing autistics

my last post was about a very strange woman who has autism. today, i bring you a different case of autism, one far more sinister. the son of salon.com regular contributor ann bauer has autism, and while she has written several articles about other subjects, about half of her articles for salon.com have been about her autistic son, whose name is andrew. her latest article is where to start, describing how he has turned into a violent “monster”. it is the fifth article about her autistic son andrew. here are the previous articles (read them after the fifth one if you are actually interested, but the fifth-one is the only must-read out of them all): first, second, third, and fourth. now i found her latest article to be incredibly shocking and disturbing, as i have asperger’s syndrome myself, and asperger’s syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder and is often thought to be the same as high-functioning autism. she even says that her son has high-functioning autism. then i started reading all of the many, many responses to her latest post, and some of them made me feel even more upset. ann bauer is blaming her son’s autism for him being violent, but plenty of men (and women too) who do not have any autism whatsoever are also violent. most people with autism spectrum disorders, such as me for instance, are not violent. while her latest article is quite personal and i am sure accurate (ann bauer even admits that she has been stockpiling lots of sleeping pills and planning on committing suicide if her son ever kills anyone), i think that it sends a dangerous and misleading message about autism spectrum disorders (which are sometimes also called pervasive developmental disorders, a less explanatory name). the most dangerous form of mental illness is, in case you didn’t know, antisocial personality disorder. anyone who has antisocial personality disorder is pretty much guaranteed to be a criminal, and very likely a violent one, since people with it have no morals, do not care about anyone except themselves, refuse to follow any authority or rules, and are impulsive, often in violent ways. as for my asperger’s syndrome, i think my case of asperger’s is quite mild, and mostly it is just social anxiety disorder (that later worsened into panic disorder when i started having panic attacks in college), combined with avoidant personality disorder. i am not 100% sure whether i actually have or don’t have asperger’s syndrome or avoidant personality disorder, but what i can be 100% sure of is that i have panic disorder, since i sure as hell have had some nasty panic attacks. panic attacks are caused by the “fight or flight response”, which, in the case of panic, is the flight response (wanting to escape from a scary situation). sudden violent outbursts are the other side of the “fight or flight response” coin: they are the fight response. my brain seems to be hardwired for anxiety, not fighting, when i find myself upset. so perhaps the violence of this autistic man andrew can be explained as a fight response. or maybe he is intentionally malicious. it is difficult for me to speculate about what may go on in the mind of someone with more severe autism than the incredibly mild version that i probably have. i am so much more like normal people who don’t have any form of autism whatsoever than i am like people with severe autism. still, i feel badly for them, and the ones that behave badly give the rest of us who are on the autism spectrum a bad name. i do not understand them at all, but that is a problem for all of us on the autism spectrum: we do not understand other people. the mother of andrew, ann bauer, seems to have a bit of mental illness of her own; in fact, i can say it as a factual matter that she suffers from mental illness, because she is suicidal and that is by definition mental illness. perhaps her mental illness is simply plain old depression, or depression mixed with anxiety (i have anxiety too, like i said). in any event, somebody who has no mental illness cannot be suicidal, because of the way mental illnesses are all defined and because psychologists and psychiatrists pretty much all agree that being suicidal indicates mental illness. anyway, depression and anxiety are mood disorders, and are not actual insanity. insanity, or, as it is now called in the psychological and psychiatric professions, psychosis, involves a person being disconnected from reality, and the most common type of psychosis is schizophrenia. autism spectrum disorders, personality disorders, and mood disorders are all outside the realm of insanity and psychosis. people who have them are still sane; they observe the real world, they can think logically unless they are too retarded to do so, and they are not lunatics. autism is a rather curious condition then, and it is primarily social retardation along with a few quirky eccentricities. i suppose that andrew, if he is autistic and does not have any psychosis, is most likely someone who is just frustrated with his life and the way things have turned out, who hates himself, who cannot understand other people, and is just very very upset. what people without autism spectrum disorders often fail to understand is that people who have autism spectrum disorders are mostly people that want to be social creatures just as much as everyone else, if not more so, but they find themselves unable to be social, and instead they fail utterly in this regard. throughout my lifetime so far, my experiences have been exactly that: wanting to be just as social as others, if not more so, but finding my own social abilities and my social courage to both be severely lacking, to the point where i have had very little success socially. i also understand why andrew would be upset: as a young person who his loving mother kept insisting was intelligent and had a bright future ahead of him, he most likely had set up very high expectations for himself, and when he ended up in living conditions where he no longer had any freedom, he probably became quite upset. however, i also think andrew may have antisocial personality disorder, as evidenced by his criminal activity (such as eating at restaurants and not paying, or assaulting women). he may very well have developed antisocial personality disorder “comorbid” with his autism, meaning that he has both conditions at the same time. when you read the articles by his mother (including the other articles on salon.com by her that are not about her son), it also becomes clear that she led a very chaotic life, including a rather chaotic divorce with her first husband, and then a messy series of relationships and periods of being single, ultimately resulting with a second marriage that seems to be going well so far. the mother seems quite obsessed with her autistic son and helping him out, and while it is natural for mothers to want to help and protect their offspring, it is perhaps advisable to remember that there can be too much of a good thing. while, as i mentioned earlier, we who have autism spectrum disorders often want to be social, we also often want to be left alone, just like regular people often want people who are bothering them to leave them alone. autistic people are not especially different from normal people except for things like the lack of communication skills. of course, severe cases of autism are often comorbid with mental retardation, and i think the reason for this is that the learning process, wherein one person teaches new information to somebody else, is in some ways a social interaction, and someone severely disabled socially as well as with communication may be unable to learn things from other people. in this case, such a person would need to learn everything on their own, and they may not be lucky enough to possess a keen enough intellect to figure things out without the aid of others, the end result of this being retardation. or perhaps in the severe cases, the mental retardation exists from the beginning. anyway, if you look at the comments for the article, you will run across a number of people who have worked in jobs where they had to interact with people with autism on a daily basis, and both people who dealt with autistic children as well as those who dealt with autistic adults said that some of them could be quite violent. so a great deal of people are actually coming forth with firsthand accounts of how they witnessed violence carried out by people on the autism spectrum. a lot of people talk about people with autism as if they are animals or just things, and some of them recommend castration as a solution! we are being objectified and treated as subhuman, as animals, by some of the people who commented on this article. i certainly do not have full-blown autism, but these are human beings we are talking about here! men with autism care just as much about their balls as any other men, and sure as hell don’t want a bunch of assholes castrating them. castration used to be done to the mentally ill, but luckily that horrific practice was stopped. if you take away a man’s testes, his manhood, you may as well just take away his life and kill him... and in fact some of the people commented that the most humane solution might be to euthanize people with autism. other people commented that there should be some kind of eugenics to prevent anyone with autism from being born in the first place, as if autism is some kind of horrible disease that needs to be eradicated, and not just a natural personality type that many people happen to have. it was very chilling reading people’s reactions to it, how so many people dehumanized not only andrew but everyone with autism, and how they seem so ready to deny the basic human rights that we hold so dear to people with autism spectrum disorders just because a small percentage of autistic people end up violent (probably around the same percentage of non-autistic people who end up violent). it makes me think of how the jews were discriminated against by the nazis, and i know that whenever anyone brings up hitler and the holocaust, this is supposed to indicate that they have taken the argument to an absurd level and therefore lost the argument. i am not saying this is anything like the holocaust whatsoever, just that it made me think of the holocaust, and it made me frightened for my own safety, as someone with an autism spectrum disorder. of course, no action anywhere near that bad has been taken against us on the autistic spectrum so far by angry mobs with pitchforks and torches, and if i think about it realistically, i sincerely doubt that anything like that ever would happen. but just reading what some people write about people with autism frightens me. then again, i am frightened easily, since after all, i do have panic disorder, the one disorder i can be completely sure that i have, because my numerous severe panic attacks over the last 9 years are proof beyond any reasonable doubt. it is pretty obvious that i am overreacting to this article by ann bauer about her son and the comments posted on salon.com about it. i feel badly for both her and her son, as well as everyone else who has been involved in any way (anyone her son did bad things to, for instance). in the case of her son, it is clear that andrew is a menace to society and cannot be allowed to roam free or to ever have the chance to physically attack someone who is weaker than him. i hope he can be rehabilitated somehow so that he is no longer dangerous, but otherwise, he ought to remain behind bars, in a mental institution preferably, or else in jail. being autistic is no excuse for his behavior, and even if it is a valid excuse, that does not mean society should just let andrew continue attacking people. however, he is just one person and every person is different. we should not generalize about everyone with autism just because he is a violent criminal. the virginia tech killer was asian, in fact south korean; however, we have not seen asians or south koreans demonized as a bunch of crazy killers... i mean, we actually have seen that, but it did not last very long, and it was just a few people on the internet anyway. i suppose there are groups of people that continue to have an image problem when it comes to violence. men, for instance. black people. arabs. muslims. all have been stereotyped as violent. however, if you look at the statistics, men really are more likely to be violent than women, and african-americans are more likely to be violent than european-americans (i am using that to refer to white people since, after all, we white people are of european ancestry and are not native to america like native americans; also i am hyphenating both with americans to indicate that i am only referring to people in the united states, since i am going by those statistics). i need not go into the various debates over why violent crime is more commonly carried out by african-americans than european-americans, because those debates are unrelated to the subject of this blog post, so suffice it to say that i think the primary reason is economic inequality. as for the level of violence carried out by arabs or muslims, the overall number of people killed or percentage of people who are violent or kill people is not something i know the statistics for, but certain types of violence, like major terrorist attacks, are almost exclusively done by muslims, usually muslims of arab ancestry. this does not mean that muslims are more violent, since after all, non-muslims have plenty of ways to kill people, such as using military force. anyway, that is not the main topic either, and i was just trying to point out that sometimes people with autism spectrum disorders are demonized, and that is not cool with me at all. that type of discrimination is like racism, sexism, homophobia, age discrimination, or any other type of evil bias against those who are different from you. many of history’s greatest geniuses are thought to have had asperger’s syndrome, the milder autism spectrum disorder that i have. this includes people like isaac newton and albert einstein, among the many great names. among people alive today, we have stephen spielberg, bill gates, and al gore, just to name a few. and ok, i have to mention the encyclopedia dramatica entry on asperger’s. everything on encyclopedia dramatica is meant to be as insulting, negative, and offensive as possible, regardless of who or what it is about. the first time i read that article, maybe 3 years ago or so, i was very very upset, and the article was actually quite different then but just as offensive and insulting, mainly just with less pictures and videos, and not as long. i did not quite understand the purpose of encyclopedia dramatica or what encyclopedia dramatica was all about. now that i have read a whole lot of articles on encyclopedia dramatica, and enjoyed most of them, even learning a lot from them, i know that the article at encyclopedia dramatica is all in good fun and they insult everybody, and i just need to have a sense of humor and not take it too seriously, because encyclopedia dramatica is a fake encyclopedia full of offensive humor designed to produce “lulz” such as my initial reaction to the article about asperger’s. lulz are basically laughing at someone else’s misfortune, as encyclopedia dramatica explains quite clearly. since the entire purpose of encyclopedia dramatica is lulz, it makes no sense for anyone to take anything on that site seriously, and it is good for everyone, especially those of us on the autism spectrum, to have some sense of perspective and a sense of humor, and not take things personally when they are just jokes. the article on salon.com and its responses, however, are not jokes or lulz, and are what the humorists at encyclopedia dramatica refer to as serious business. so when someone is serious about demonizing autistics and denying basic human rights to fellow human beings, when people talk about castration, euthanasia, and eugenics, and talk about people who are different from them as if they are subhuman animals, that is when i have a serious problem with them. it would be bad enough reading comments like that on some wacko conservative website, but salon.com is a haven for liberals, and it appalls me to think that my fellow liberals would have such discriminatory and intolerant attitudes towards autistics. salon.com does allow people of all political persuasions to comment, however, and it does have its fair share of libertarians, republicans, independents, and other non-democrats among people who comment, although they are very much in the minority. more than half the comments were ones expressing sympathy, which is good, and some of the comments were ongoing arguments between various commenters there who hate each other and argue all the time. there was some foolish bickering between a wacko who hates psychiatrists (but is not a scientologist) and people who actually are psychiatrists... he seemed like one of the libertarian ron paul supporters. anyway, amid all of those comments were the ones that i personally found disturbing, the ones that threatened bad things for people with autism. i would have left a comment myself, except i do not have an account at salon.com or any of these other websites where i look at the comments. it is too much of a bother to register at all these stupid websites, just to post comments. so i don’t do it. i only register at a website if i have a good reason to do so, and if there is not a way around it. so anyway, i doubt any of the people from salon.com will find my response here, but at least people who read this blog entry can find what i am responding to, since i linked to it at the beginning of the entry. i am not sure if anyone will read this or even care, but frankly that does not really matter to me anyway. i just felt like saying all this, and i don’t too much care whether this blog is a private journal that nobody reads or a really popular blog that everybody reads. my preference, if there is one, is that a few people read this blog, more than 1 or 2, but not like thousands or anything, because that would probably be too much. anyway, i think i made my point in this post and i am getting kind of lengthy and repetitious so i should quit while i’m behind. also, i need to sleep. now. good night, or whatever time it is now, wherever you are. you are probably on earth, but who cares? it would be cool if an astronaut looked at this blog from the international space station, i guess, but whatever. i am not sure whether astronauts have the internet up there, but who cares? that is just something completely irrelevant that i just brought up at the last moment because i am tired and my mind is wandering, and it has nothing to do with anything. my thought process is non-linear. in keeping with my thought process, let me briefly pretend time is going backwards, for the sake of silliness: hello and welcome to this blog post.