Quick Hitts

More than a half century ago Emma Goldman said “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal.”

Now we’re all being encouraged to vote vote vote, rock the vote, get out the vote, make your heard, push for change, to blah blah blah blah blah…

I used to think people who didn’t vote had no right to bitch. I was wrong. Voting is to self government as security is to the TSA. It’s theater. It’s the illusion of participatory government. The only place it really makes a difference is on local elections. Sometimes.

It might make a difference in some close states, but I live in NY, and Obama is a foregone conclusion. My vote will make no difference at all. And what’s the alternative, vote for McCain, which may very well be a vote for a Sarah Palin presidency? No thanks.

Neither of the presidential candidates intend to:

• Restore our lost civil liberties by repealing the Patriot Act, FISA, or abolishing the TSA.
• Reduce the size of government. They’ve both made noise about eliminating pork, which isn’t going to happen, and neither of them have pledged to get rid of a single government agency. We could easily eliminate about 90% of them and have more money and more freedom. Apparently, this has never even occurred to either of them.
• Stop, or at least modify, the War On Some Drugs. I never heard either of them mention it, even briefly. So we can expect more of the same – more of our citizens imprisoned for non-violent crimes, more corruption fueled by drug money, more crime putting innocent lives at stake, and military style police raids killing innocent people.
• Abolish the Federal Reserve, returning the control of our money to the government, and return to the gold standard, which would dramatically reduce inflation.
• Allow capitalism to work, instead of giving government handouts to financial intuitions. Both candidates voted for the bailout.
• Bring the troops home. Not just from Iraq, but from most of the 120 countries where we have military bases.

If either of them had plans to do just one of those things, I’d vote for them. Any one of those things would be a huge improvement in our situation. But no, we’ve got the same old same old, two candidates whose differences are mostly superficial. Either one will give us bigger government with more laws, regulations and restrictions on our personal freedom and civil rights. Either one will directly and indirectly cause us to have less money in our pockets, money that will be increasingly worthless.

I will vote, but more out of habit than any sense of obligation, and with no illusion that it will make a difference. I do want to vote for one congress weasel because she had the guts to vote against the bailout, twice, and her opponent has shown himself to be a major slimeball. As for the rest, I’ll make a list of incumbents and vote against them on general principal. I’ll be writing in Ron Paul for president. (Talk about a fruitless endeavor.) And when I leave the voting booth I won’t be feeling like A Great American who has participated in the grand scheme of things. I’ll just feel a heightened disgust for the scam, the illusion that we have any real choice.

Here’s another viewpoint from one of America’s greatest philosophers:

My company just laid off about 20% of their workforce, and I was one of the causalities. Now I get to go job hunting in an economy that’s sinking faster than Palin’s image as a folksy soccer mom. Oh joy.

This is the reality of working in IT. For every IT worker who has been in a job for a long time there are a dozen of us who skip from one job to another every year or three. It’s not that we want to – it’s the nature of the business. When big companies cut back IT is usually first on the chopping block. Startups are the best source of new jobs, but they’re notoriously risky, and often make just one or two big mistakes that kill them as soon as things get tough. In my last IT job the mistake was having one client. A big huge mulit-billion dollar client, but still, just one, and when they hit a rough patch and needed to cut expenses we were one of the cuts. I had just received a great performance review and a nice raise and them Bam! A solid kick to the nuts. I spent a couple of years barely getting by at lousy paying non-IT jobs, and was exploring new careers, when this job came along. They had plenty of clients, (that was one of the first questions I asked in the interview) but made other expensive mistakes I’m not at liberty to discuss. And now it’s a year and a half later I’m back on the streets.

I like working in IT. I like support. I like ferreting out solutions to tricky problems and turning frustrated customers into happy clients. I like training people to use complex products that ultimately make their business more profitable. I like discussing marketing and SEO and web design with my clients. But damn, I do not like looking for a new job every year or two or three.

When I was younger it was a bit of an adventure – an annoying one, but still, an adventure. On more than one occasion I was out of work for less than a week. But now jobs are much scarcer, and I’m competing with young puppies who are willing to work for less, foolishly believing that their fate will be different.

I honestly wish I had chosen a career as an electrician, or plumber, or carpenter – jobs with a constant demand. When was the last time you heard of a plumber going out of business?

And what makes it even more aggravating is seeing my tax money being used to pay enormous salaries to “experts” who are largely responsible for the rapidly dwindling value of my rather pathetic 401k. We, and by that I mean you and me and our kids and our grandkids and probably their kids, are paying more than a trillion dollars to schmucks who continue to make more money in a year than we’d make in several lifetimes.

Hey congress, what about me? Give me a million bucks. That’s all, just one million, and I won’t ask for another dime, ever. I’ve got about another twenty years or thirty years on this planet. I’ll make it last that long. I’ll live off the interest and just a bit of the principle each year, and supplement it by working at jobs I like that don’t necessarily pay that well. You don’t have to pay my medical bills. You don’t have to pay me unemployment. I won’t get food stamps or go on welfare. You can even keep the IOUs you’ve got in “my” social security account. You spend more than that every second. Just give me one lousy second’s worth of the national expenditure and I’ll be happy. I’ll even stop bitching about your waste and stupidity and greed. Such a deal!

A million bucks, just once, that’s all I ask.

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Here’s a list of things atheists didn’t do over the past month or so.

An Atheist did not set fire to his 11 year old niece for wearing lipstick. She has burns over 90% of her body and is not expected to survive.

No atheist decreed it was OK to kill the owners of Satellite TV stations that broadcast “immoral” content. That was a Islamic Cleric who also said Mickey Mouse should be killed. Atheists know that Mickey Mouse isn’t real either.

Atheists did not vandalize the homes of a half dozen politicians in Minnesota. They didn’t spray paint threats and a reference to Psalms 2 on their homes.

Atheists didn’t rape a nun in India. That was Hindus, who have also killed 30 people and left thousands homeless in their attacks on Christians.

Atheists did not gun down an aid worker in Afghanistan. That was, of course, Muslims. But hell, she was a woman, so they probably only consider it half a murder (which means they’ll have to work harder to fill their monthly quota.)

No atheist announced that women should now be limited to a one-eyed veil. That as an Islamic holy man.

It wasn’t an atheist court who sentenced a man to death for asking about woman’s rights in class. That was, of course, a Muslim court. But they changed their mind, and now he’s only sentenced to twenty years in prison. Allah is merciful.

Atheists don’t punish women for being raped. But if you’re an Islamic rape victim who can’t find four men to testify they witnessed the crime, you’ll be beaten if you’re single and stoned to death if you’re married. Imagine how nasty the punishment would be if Islam wasn’t the religion of peace.

No atheist teacher burned crosses into his students arms. And I’ll bet you a fine cigar or the refreshing beverage of your choice that the students that rallied to support him weren’t atheists either.

Meanwhile, what do you get from atheists? Tasty, tasty bacon!

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I’ve always loved explosions. Some of my fondest childhood memories involve blowing things up, sometimes with commercial fireworks, sometimes with homemade fireworks, sometimes just by misusing common devices and/or chemicals. (Back then, there were real chemicals in chemistry sets.) If you’re a male you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Back when I did movie reviews one of my ratings was “Stuff Blowed Up.” (The other ratings were Stars, Plot Holes, Chick Flickyness, Snore factor, and Gratuitous Nudity. (The latter was a positive thing.))

MythBusters not only appeals to my skeptic side, but to that part of the male brain that loves seeing things being blown up.

I’ve always wanted a cable channel that was nothing more than explosions. Big explosions, small explosions, real explosions, move explosions- just endless explosions. It would be called The Stuff Blowed Up Channel.

When a show called “Smash Lab” was announced, I thought it might fill the bill, but it turned out to be slow and lame, with hardly any explosions.

But the Discovery channel has made up for that fiasco with their new show “Destroyed In Seconds.” There is no plot, no characters, nothing but stuff blowed up, blown over, burnt down, and rapidly smashed. Airplanes not only crash on runways, but head on in mid air. Speedboats flip, shatter, and explode. Race cars burst into flames. Factories full of fireworks or propaine tanks light up the sky. My only complaint is that it’s just a half hour long.

These are all real clips – no movie magic here – and while they don’t all involve explosions, each episode has enough stuff blowed up to satisfy that little kid who, decades ago, loved to spend a week building a model car just so he could stuff it full of firecrackers and destroy it in …well…seconds.

The narration is competent – not too hyperbolic – but that’s the one thing I’d like to see improved. The show would be even more entertaining if it were narrated by Wanda Sykes.

New York City Mayor, Uber-nanny and full time scumbag Mike Bloomburg stood by term limits – until they would have affected him.

He put hundreds of venues and thousands of employees out of business with a smoking ban. Then he went after restaurant menus. But two terms hasn’t been long enough enough to suck the life out of the city. Although he spouted off about how wonderful term limits were, when it came time for him to retire he found enough sycophants on the NYC councel to change the law.

I wonder how many of them were as pathetic as John Slattery, who is actually described as a reporter in this article. If someone ever gives Boomberg his long overdue kick in the ass they’ll break Slattery’s nose.

I’m not even looking for these stories.  They’re so common I’ve been stumbling across them without effort. 

Via Windypundent here’s yet another story of a Thug in Blue shooting a dog for no reason.  The dog runs up to him, which is what dogs do when a stranger comes on his property, but doesn’t look aggressive or threatening. 

Warning, this is a graphic video that shows the thug shooting the dog.