If you eat meat, neither of these people will have sex with you.
They call themselves Vegansexuals, because they wouldn’t want to call themselves something ridiculous, and think they’re making a point by refusing to have sex with carnivores.
Can you think of a better reason to order a thick, juicy steak?
The woman is the one on the left. Probably.
The setup: An old guy decides to ride his old-guy scooter on the highway.
The cops tell him to pull over. He swears at them and cranks it up to it’s maximum speed: 8 MPH.
The punch line: He got away!
Yesterday the department of agriculture put their hands in the pockets of their overalls, looked rather sheepishly at the ground and kicked a clump of sod. Then they admitted they’ve paid over a billion dollars in subsidies to farmers who were, well, dead. The result is my second favorite quote of the year:
“It’s unconscionable that the Department of Agriculture would think that a dead person was actively engaged in the business of farming,”
My favorite quote, of course, is “We have not released giant badgers in Basra.”
No, that is not a misprint. Congress is trying to implement a tax increase that will be 20,000% in some cases.
State, federal, and even city governments have been screwing cigarette smokers for decades. In some cases those taxes are over 800%. (The Boston Tea Party was a protest against a 4% tax.) Cigar smokers get screwed by states who typically charge a 35-75% tax, but federal taxes have been about a nickel a cigar for quite a while.
That could change very soon. The Democrat controlled congress wants an extra $35-billion to $50-billion for the state children’s health insurance program. The program distributes payments to the states to help buy coverage for kids not poor enough for Medicaid. In other words, they want to expand socialized medicine. They plan to raise the money by adding a 53% tax on cigars with a cap of $10 per cigar. A $100 box of cigars will now cost $153, and that’s before the states slap their taxes on.
Cigarette smokers, don’t feel left out. You’re going to get screwed too, as the federal tax rate goes from thirty-nine cents a pack to a buck.
And it gets worse. The tax will apply to existing inventory, so tobacco store owners will be hit with a huge tax bill. This is the same trick Rob Reiner pulled when he helped pass the meathead tax on tobacco on California a few years back. It put hundreds of small cigar shops out of business. The tax was earmarked for some children’s cause, a government organization that told parents how to raise their kids, but there’s some question if any of it ever made it there.
When you call your congress weasels to tell them to vote against this bill, suggest another law to them: The Taxhole Act.
The Taxhole Act
You’ve probably seen the commercial for Live Free or Die Hard. It shows a car spinning through the air toward Bruce, who ducks between two other cars while it smashes down just inches from his head. This is followed by a shot of another car flying through the air and smashing into a hovering helicopter.
Both of those scenes are in the beginning of the movie. The slow part. It picks up from there.
I seldom go to the movies, because I think they’re way overpriced, but some flicks just have to be seen on the big screen. This is one of them. There is a bit of a story in there somewhere, but fortunately it doesn’t interfere with the chase scenes, vehicles smashing into each other, gun fights, acrobatics, martial arts, smart ass jokes, and lots and lots of stuff blowed up.
I love Stuff Blowed Up movies, and haven’t seen a good one in quite a while. This one explodes cars, trucks, helicopters, kittens, planes, rooms, buildings power plants and just about anything else that’s not locked down.
Just kidding about the kittens. Bruce would never hurt a kitten.
If you’re looking for some mindless fun and lots of action, see this one on the big screen while you still can.
I used to do movie reviews regularly. You can find them here.
Most medical journals have eagerly swallowed the junk science and outright lies of the anti-smoker crowd. This makes it nearly impossible for the opposition to be heard. One exception is the American Council on Science and Health.
Michael McFadden and Dave Kuneman authored a very comprehensive study that shows the conclusions of the widely publicized Helena study are nonsense. They used widely available public data to show that smoking bans have no effect on heart attacks if the sample size was reasonable. (The Helena “study” had a sample size of forty people, and none of them were asked about their exposure to SHS.) Yet their submissions to medical journals have been either ignored or rejected. ASCH saw fit to publish their story.
Now all we need is for a medical journal to stand up to Big Pharma and publish the study itself.
If you’d like to Smartenize® yourself about the Helena “study” start here.
I warned about this more than seven years ago. The only surprise is that it took this long.
Susan McBride, a whiny bitch from Detroit, is suing her employer because people wear scents to work. She imagines this violates her rights under the Americans With Disabilities Act. She wants all her co-workers to stop wearing any sprays, perfumes, colognes, lotions and deodorants because she’s sooooo sensitive.
She hasn’t used the magic words “Multiple Chemical Sensitivity” in any of the articles I’ve read, but that’s what she’s describing. MCS is, of course, an entirely imaginary illness. It is nothing more than extreme hypochondria.
As promised there is now a Quick Hitts podcast that provides an extensive review of Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” It’s the Moore Nonsense” episode (#56) and you can find it here.
“When correctly viewed
Everything is lewd”
- from “Smut” by Tom Lehrer
The City of Keizer, Oregon, put up cement posts to protect pedestrians from traffic. But some residents are complaining that they look like. . . boys things.
The solution – they’re going to fit them with collars and connect them with chains. No, that won’t look more suggestive.
If that doesn’t work the mayor, rather than telling the idiots who are complaining to grow up, is ready to remove and discard the barriers, wasting $20,000 of the tax payers money.
They should be happy they don’t live in Amsterdam.
Thanks to the members of the Jref forums for pointing out this story.
There is something almost magical about the social aspects of Cigars and Pipes. The simple act of lighting one changes your demeanor, relaxes you, and makes you more willing, hell, more able, to consider other points of view. Conversations among cigar and pipe smokers are different and better then most smoke free conversations.
As the Nicotine Nazis continue their relentless mission to stamp out all things fun, this simple pleasure is becoming more and more difficult to enjoy in the presence of friends.
Dr. Max Whisson sent this letter to The Weekend Australian Magazine in response to their article about the artist David Hockney. They haven’t printed it, if they ever do they’ll likely edit it, and it deserves to be published in it’s entirety.
English artist David Hockney is quoted as saying “passive smoking is nonsense” [“Master Class” June 30-July 1]. Such statements are rare in the media these days. Hockney is also reported as referring angrily to his “purloined rights”.
Having spent much of my professional life in some of the world’s leading cancer research institutes I cannot resist making a comment. Readers may be surprised to learn that until a few decades ago every laboratory had ash trays and almost all of the best scientists smoked cigarettes, pipes or cigars. In the 1980s, as a senior research worker, I lived through the introduction of bans on indoor smoking. Almost overnight I witnessed the destruction of the deep incisive discussions of both scientific and social questions, and, as the bans spread to pubs and restaurants, the break-up of social groups and the virtual extinction of the stories and jokes which were the lifeline of local cultures.
These negative social effects have received almost no publicity and, to my knowledge, no funding. Whilst billions of dollars have been spent trying to prove that passive smoking is dangerous, research laboratories capable of genuine research are starved of funds.
Many claims are made about the dangers of passive smoking but a close look at the scientific literature shows that artist Hockney is spot on. It is just nonsense. In my view it is a disgrace that some of my colleagues have gone along with this stuff, even with the best of intentions.
Yes, the passive smoking story has persuaded many to stop smoking but there has been a serious downside, including I believe an increase in the use of much more dangerous psycho-active drugs. Worse still, the objective in some well-funded quarters seems to me to be not public health but the fostering of a compliant easily manipulated population.. Certainly that was the main aim of the pioneers of the anti-smoking movement, the Nazis of the 1930s.
Dr. Max Whisson
Western Australia
America no longer exists, but the United States is still a pretty cool place, so the Fourth is still worth celebrating.
Big fireworks displays are great fun, but they’re still a passive experience, and Lee Greenwood sucks. So be sure to blow off some of your own fireworks. Make some noise. Blow stuff up. It’s against Big Brother’s nanny laws, so it’s the most American thing you can do.
There is much to despise in Michael Moore’s “Sicko.” Like all MM films it features a plethora of half truths and misleading numbers, a few outright lies, and it completely ignores many very important facts. Sometime in the next few days I’ll have an extensive review of it, along with a podcast. But I couldn’t wait to point out what I thought was the most disgusting thing in the film.
After his staged visit to one of the few good Cuban hospitals, he waxes rhapsodic about enemies helping each other, and then proceeds to tell us how wonderful he is:
“That’s when I heard that the man who runs the biggest anti Michael Moore web site on the internet was going to have to shut it down. He could no longer afford to keep it up because his wife was ill and they couldn’t afford to pay for her health insurance. He was faced with a choice of either keep attacking me or pay for his wife’s health. Fortunately, he chose is wife. But something seemed wrong about being forced into such a decision. Why, in a free country, shouldn’t he be able to have health insurance, and exercise his first amendment right to run me into the ground? So I wrote a check for the twelve thousand dollars he needed to keep his wife insured and in treatment and sent it to him anonymously. His wife got better and his web site is still going strong.”
“I sent it to him anonymously” is an interesting sentence. It can be true right up to the moment you say it out loud - then it becomes a lie. Moore didn’t make an anonymous contribution - he made an unidentified one, while he was filming his movie. It’s fair to assume he did it with the full intention of bragging about it in a futile attempt to make himself look good.
If it had been truly anonymous, it would have been a fine and noble thing. But broadcasting it to the entire world makes him a first class schmuck.