Author: Richard

Why I hope Joe Biden runs for President (and why you should too)

The country and the world would be in such better shape under a Biden, instead of Obama presidency.

Joe Biden ran for president in 2008, but his experience and policies didn’t make for appealing enough figureheads as having that center-left view come from a mouth that was attached to either a woman or a brown skinned guy so Biden was iced out and America missed out.

Any number of VP choices in a Biden administration in 2008 would have worked fine but I actually think a Biden/Obama administration would have done immense good for the country because while the frank speaking non-phony competent negotiator knowledgable elder statesman who actually likes working in politics was in the top position, the political neophyte that doesn’t like actually working in politics

Instead, the appropriate positions are reversed and the country has had 7-ish years of a petulant manchild president who doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t compromise, doesn’t care what his constituents actually want, is easily butthurt, wastes time, wastes money, and a completely wasted Vice President doing little outside of make an occasional gaffe or other screw-up. What a tragic waste of truly great potential.

Now, the country might get a 3rd chance to reject Joe Biden (he ran for president in the 80s as well as 08 and would face an uphill climb promoting what would be perceived to be a 3rd term to an unpopular Obama administration full of unpopular policies, minus the only thing about the administration that *is* consistently popular – Barack Obama).

I hope Biden runs even though I will feel bad for him losing. He’s the only potential 2016 candidate on the Democratic side besides Jim Webb (the fact that you just said “who?” says all it needs to in that regard) who isn’t either a phony (sorry, Hillary fans – Update: sorry x2) or fruitcake (sorry Bernie fans) and would add sanity and honesty to an otherwise circus style primary and general election that no one needs this year in particular.

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Update: Poll: While Clinton struggles with ‘liar’ tag, voters find Biden ‘honest’

Comedian Barry Crimmins inadvertently got me kicked off AOL in the 90s

A mystery in my life has been solved almost 20 years later and it turns out AOL was an even worse company in the 90s than I thought…

You younglings may not even know this but in the 1990s, before AOL (“America OnLine”) was a low-end video creator and distributor, it was the only way just about anyone could connect to the internet. As the biggest and often only internet service provider for what is now known as “dial up” but then was just known as “the only internet that exists”, AOL had a monopoly on access to the world wide web.

I was kicked off AOL at least 3 times. And by “I” that of course means my family since I was a minor using a screen name under their account. The stories of each kick-off is worth its own post but the summary is that they were forms of “spam” (soliciting invites through instant messages for people to add themselves to my free Jokes and humor email newsletter) and “harassment” (getting baited by someone in a chatroom picking a fight and then responding, only to have them report me while they got away with their more egregious use of bullying profanity). Those cases were ridiculous reasons to cancel my families internet service and force them to use a different name and credit card to re-ignite with new screen names at much inconvenience to everyone – but at least I was actually technically violating their stupid “TOS” (Terms of Service). The last time I got banned, I did nothing wrong. I just recently Sherlock Holmesed the reason why…

Barry Crimmins is a comedian who is the subject of a new documentary by Bobcat Goldthwait titled Call Me Lucky and while plugging it on the Adam Carolla podcast, he told a story covered in the movie that made me realize why I was kicked off AOL and how it is 100% his fault.

If the stupid reasons I was previously banned weren’t hinting enough: AOL was a supremely bad company in the 90s. It’s customer service was bad, its actual-service was bad, it raped you on fees, constantly had virus problems, let spam run nearly unfiltered into your email inbox, spammed your real-life mailbox with trial membership discs, and would ban you from their service if you said a curse word in a chat room or someone on instant message reported you after not liking what you said.

There was one niche they evidently serviced super well though, according to Crimmins: pedophiles.

I would get perverts messaging me all the time wanting to “cyber” which meant “cyber sex” which meant “type out sexual things and I guess masturbate in between typing while imagining what the other person is typing back at you” but Crimmins tells of darker experiences. Evidently AOL was a haven for not just the easy solicitation of sex talk but the actual dissemination of child pornography. The tale of Crimmins battle against the company is worth hearing in interviews and watching in the documentary but the point is that AOL was allegedly turning a blind eye toward child abuse because it made them millions. Pre-teen entrepreneurial douches like me were just causing a ruckus for other paying members so we were easy to kick off the service – but child pornographers were only sharing their filth amongst themselves so there was no disgruntled customer to report to AOL. But even when Crimmins went undercover and DID report the people trying to solicit whom they thought was a child, AOL still did nothing because there was just too much money involved in these people paying for their service to trade their kiddie abuse media.

GROSS: So you wrote repeatedly to AOL and asked them to shutdown these pedophile chat rooms.

CRIMMINS: Right, and they were making a lot of money on it, so they just filed a – because in – back in those days the modems were really slow. And so it took, like, a half-hour to upload a, you know, low-grade picture.

GROSS: We’re talking dial-up era.

CRIMMINS: Right, right, and so it took a long time to upload each photo and all these – and then if you’re on AOL for more than 12 hours or something a month, they started charging you $3 or $4 an hour. So when you find, you know, thousands of people that are, you know, in the same chat rooms all the time or you find that one of the chat rooms that are named thusly – I mean, like anyone else, when I first went in there I just said what – are you people out of your minds? And they started talking to me about the First Amendment and stuff. And as Andrew Vachss said, you know, you can mug somebody and try to call it performance art, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to get away with it. And I just realized – you know, I would go in there as an adult, you know, with my own AOL name and people would just start sending me child pornography immediately. Like, no sort of – they just, oh, that’s what you’re here for, here. And they expected you to send child pornography back to them. And so I immediately contacted AOL and they said, oh, thank you very much for being, you know, a bunch of corporate – good citizen of our community, blah, blah, blah. But as time passed and I watched the problem grow exponentially, their answers became, you know, they – the back and forth between us just became more and more ridiculous.

After a public slog against the company involving a testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee., Crimmins evidently finally got AOL to take child rape seriously… and in doing so, he got an innocent mid-90s Richard kicked off the service yet again, much to his continued disgrace.

The last time I was banned from the America Online service it was for going in a chatroom. For years I was baffled at wtf happened and thought it had to have been a coincidence and that the AOL Feds had just caught me for some snarky comment or profane one-liner I had said in a chatroom prior to then. But finally now after hearing Crimmins tell his story and matching the timelines, it makes sense WTF happened to me.

I had heard from the kid sitting in front of me in school make the ludicrous claim that “if you go into private chatroom PICS, your account gets deleted”…

Um…right. This is so wrong it couldn’t be more wrong, I told him. That is dumb upon dumb. I knew first had that AOL had horribly fascistic policies on wantonly killing their customers accounts, but there was no way that entering a chat room would get your account canceled. I had heard of some chat rooms being banned in the sense that if you typed them in then it wouldn’t let you access the room, but there was just no damn way that you would be allowed in a room and then denied service on your whole account just for going to private room “pics”. That’s it. PICS. Not “Pics of government secrets” or “pics of death fantasies involving elected officials” – just pics. As in, short for “pictures”. Or maybe an acronym for something unrelated to photography. Who knows. You could make a private chatroom of any series of letters and numbers.

I couldn’t wait to prove him wrong so that day I got home, logged into AOL and after about 30 minutes of waiting for it to frigging connect, went to “Enter A Private Chat Room” and typed in PICS…

“GOODBYE” said the AOL voice as the software closed all windows and kicked me offline.
No… freakin… way…
Okay, so there was some kind of hack that someone in the PICS room used to kick offline anyone who entered. That had to be it. There was a thing called Punting that used a program that would bomb the instant messengers in AOL and that would disconnect them so I thought for sure it was a version of that.

No, dude. I could not reconnect. The dreaded “Please call this number” cancelled membership message appeared when I tried to connect. I was screwed. and this time I legitimately did nothing wrong!

Now, after hearing Crimmins tell his tale against the company during exactly that time, it seems way more obvious: The chat room was almost surely a meeting place for AOL pedophiles and AOL had just switched from a “90 strikes and maybe we’ll talk about you possibly being out” policy on rapists to more of a “Zero tolerance for anyone who does anything not identified with anything illegal but that a pedophile also previously did” and that chat room must have been infested with pedo-creeps and thus condemned. There is no confirmation that this is the case, but given Crimmins storytelling of the time, it sounds like AOL just started mass-deleting accounts with suspected activity instead of going through the trouble of doing word searches or an actual investigation or something that a company that wasn’t horrible might do.

So thanks for nothing, Barry Crimmins. In saving countless children from having their abuse flaunted on the internet, you ruined several weeks for a young Richard.

Loser Ted Cruz chides Romney for losing.

And dumb Conservatives cheer him on like dummies…

Here’s what happened… President Obama is proposing a uniquely and aggressively horrible deal with Iran that would give it – the most anti-American regime currently in existence – hundreds of billions of dollars, for nothing in return. Nothing. Just says “here you go. you use this responsibly though, okay?”. And just like with the lifting of the blocks between the U.S. and Cuba – Obama’s getting the country he represents nothing in the deal. The argument in favor of this ridiculous Iran deal is that it somehow delays instead of hastens Iran getting a nuclear bomb by 15 years, a concept that is wholly unfounded according to the details of the actual agreement signed by the Government of the United States.

In response to this awfulness, senator Ted Cruz, who is running for the 2016 presidential nomination, noted that this makes the Obama administration a financial facilitator of Islamic terrorism, saying:

“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz said during a round table Tuesday. “Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”

It’s true that the money Iran will get will likely be used to murder people and it’s true that Iran wouldn’t have this money if not for the Obama administrations agreement and it’s true that this was not a helpful thing for Cruz to say.

Mitt Romney, noted as such.

Which is the most sensible commentary a rational mind can have on the topic. Cruz’s comment isn’t wrong but the way it’s stated is so clunky that it hands Obama supporters a gift to turn a bad Obama policy into an opportunity to make Ted Cruz and Republicans the target of scorn. That is friggin horrible strategy but Cruz is notorious for being non-strategical. Which is cool if you want to drum up angst from your base but super horrible if your intention is to win elections. Romney helped his party by voicing his opposition to the deal while also noting that it most obviously hurts that oppositional cause for people like Cruz to be simplifying the dot-connections the way he did.

Cruz replied to Romneys criticism in typical Cruzian fashion (read: terribly):

Cruz, 2016 presidential candidate, fired back at Romney in a Thursday radio interview with KFYO’s Chad Hasty.

“So Mitt Romney’s tweet today said, ‘Gosh, this rhetoric is not helpful,'” Cruz said. “John Adams famously said, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Describing the actual facts is not using rhetoric; it is called speaking the truth.”

The senator recalled what he described as a critical moment during the 2012 presidential race: A back-and-forth over that year’s attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.

“Part of the reason that Mitt Romney got clobbered by Barack Obama is because we all remember that third debate where Barack Obama turned to Mitt and said, ‘I said the Benghazi attack was terrorism and no one is more upset by Benghazi than I am.’ And Mitt, I guess listening to his own advice, said, ‘Well gosh, I don’t want to use any rhetoric. So OK, never mind. I’ll just kind of rearrange the pencil on the podium here,'” Cruz said.

He added that the 2016 presidential candidates need to speak up or they will fail like Romney.

I’ll get to why Cruz doesn’t know what he’s talking about here later in this post, but first a factual correction: Cruz’s claim never actually happened. As I’ve shown before, Romney expertly trapped President Obama on the Benghazi issue in the 2nd debate by going 3 rounds on the subject and giving Obama every inch of rope he needed to hang himself on the issue. Romney noted that Obama not only did not treat the terrorist attacks in Benghazi as such, but actually took great lengths to deceive the American people about the nature of the attacks, instead blaming a Youtube video for them. Obama, knowing that he was getting trapped in having to either lie by claiming he did something he did not do or obfuscate the question merely said “check the transcript” of his rose garden speech on the subject, in where he knew he could point to the word “terrorism” being present and then spin that as having taken responsibility for the attacks as being terrorism (successfully avoiding the messy explanation of the ensuing phony claims about a Youtube video instigation). In an unprecedented move, the debate moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and falsely claimed that Obama was correct in his claim about labeling the act terrorism and even though she walked it back later and the truth was verified by fact checkers, the damage had been done on live tv. To blame Romney for not attacking the issue he actually attacked in the most perfect of strategic ways is nonsense.

However – Republicans are just not smart enough to understand this and many agree with Cruz that Romney’s reason-for-loss was that he wasn’t tough enough on the President.

Here is how Rush Limbaugh summarized the positions of both men:

“Both Obama and Romney have called Cruz’s remarks inappropriate.” What has Cruz done? He’s “maintained that [Obama] would become a leading state-sponsor of terror if the agreement it struck with Iran makes it past Congress. He and others have argued that Iran would use a windfall from sanctions relief to finance terror abroad.” He has said on that basis alone this deal ought not get done! And then Romney piped up and said in a tweet (paraphrased): “Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful. Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful!”

Cruz fired back: “You’re telling me what’s not helpful? You got clobbered by Obama for a reason! You got clobbered because you backed off. You got clobbered because you didn’t have the guts to keep going.” So this is… I like this, folks. Whatever Trump’s responsible for it or not.

 

The truth is that both Cruz and Romney lost competitions to Obama but in very different ways…

In 2012 Mitt Romney ran for president against Barack Obama and lost.

In 2013 Ted Cruz led a strategy from the Senate against Barack Obama’s signature legislation “Obamacare” and lost.

Romney’s strategy was verifiably better at every level. Victory was in sight – the numbers just didn’t add up at the end since his side was fractured from a year of in-fighting and bad press while Obama’s side was boosted and mobilized during that time (and as I’ve pointed out before: the key to winning elections is to fracture the OTHER side and unite yours).

Cruz’s strategy in the senate was verifiably guaranteed to fail at every level as there was literally just no path to victory outside of President Obama just deciding to become a Republican overnight one day.

Cruz’s tactic of denying funding to Obamacare that caused a deadlock with the Democrats who refused to negotiate on the matter, resulting in a government shutdown that ultimately got Cruz absolutely nothing but scorn from the media and public at large.

So both men lost in their matches with President Obama, but one fought valiantly and one  fought irresponsibly with literally no strategy to actually win.

Alternate headline: Defeated-by-Democrats-TedCruz lectures Defeated-by-Democrats-MittRomney on why the GOP gets defeated by Democrats.

Doesn’t sound like such bold talk when you put it that way now does it. Yet that’s exactly the case.

The only difference is that Romney actually had a chance of winning.

Reminder: Holocaust victims weren’t killed in ovens…

I hate to go and ruin the fun in historical acts of genocide, but this seemingly minor detail of a myth is one worth straightening out: victims of the Nazi’s weren’t killed in ovens.

This historical correction comes on the heels of a quote getting buzz by critics of Mike Huckabee who, in a condemnation of the Obama administrations nuclear deal with Iran (a nation dedicated to “wiping Israel off the map” in one way or another).

The actual quote isn’t anything remarkable, but got a lot of coverage because of the specific holocaust reference he used.

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal. It should be rejected by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and by the American people. I read the whole deal. We gave away the whole store. It’s got to be stopped.”

As a political story, this doesn’t interest me because there’s no reason it should. The Left tried to exploit it as a big deal. It was misconstrued as every Nazi-related analogy is. Other 2016 Primary Republicans had to play the “agree or disagree with what the Left says is a big deal” game (Rick Santorum said right-on – Jeb Bush said tone it down). Huckabee doubled down on the sentiment. blah blah blah.

But what no one is mentioning in any of the coverage is the misleading history in the comment. Jews weren’t “marched to the ovens” in the holocaust. Ovens weren’t a method of slaughter.

It’s an easy mix-up to make since the holocaust is known for mass killing and mass body burning, so skipping over the part where the bodies were dead and mashing it with the part where people were murdered in unconventional methods is a common jumble. I used to be one of the mixer-uppers. Around 2008 when I was baking a pizza and I opened the lid, causing the wave of heat to hit me in the face, I had an immediate empathic PTSD-style flashback of how holocaust victims had to have felt dying this way. Everyones worst way to die is burning, and even if you’re not claustrophobic – the addition of being in a casket sized space is a tremendous horror. Everyone who has had a loved one cremated has had their mind go to the morbid “what if” thought of their own death being misdiagnosed somehow and waking up just as they were being put into the crematory oven. *shudder*


Survivors of the Dachau concentration camp demonstrate the operation of the crematorium by preparing a corpse to be placed into one of the ovens. Dachau, Germany, April 29-May 10, 1945. Credit.

But if there’s a bright side to horrific senseless mass murder, there is the comfort that this didn’t happen in the concentration camps of the holocaust. Back when I had my pizza vision, I looked up how many people died this way and could only find one or two instances of a prisoner being put into a crematorium oven alive as a special punishment.

I blame for this myth, the intentionally-offensive joke regarding exactly this connection between the best thing on earth (pizza) and the worst thing on earth (burning alive) that goes “Q: What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A: the pizza doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.” Womp womp. But you’ll be shocked to find out that the normally reliable factually rigorous nature of anti-semitism has, in this instance, failed on accuracy. Idk about you, but I did Nazi that coming.

But for real, guys: Victims murdered by the Nazi’s were shot or gassed to death en masse. Their bodies were carried to crematoriums afterward. Yet a lot of people, evidently a 2016 Presidential candidate included, seem to think mass oven killing went on in the holocaust.

While Huckabee didn’t explicitly state the historical inaccuracy, it’s implied in the term “marching to the door” and he continued the implication that people were murdered by ovens when commenting on the comment afterward:

“When I talked about the oven door, I have stood at that oven door,” he said. “I know exactly what it looks like, 1.1 million people killed. For 6,000 years, Jews have been chased and hunted and killed all over this Earth, and when someone in a government says we’re going to kill them, I think, by gosh, we better take that seriously.”

It’s the Iranians who used the word Holocaust first, Huckabee said, and refused during the negotiations to recognize Israel’s right to exist.”

“They refused to tone down their rhetoric and said the Holocaust did not exist and that they’re going to wipe Israel off the map,” he said. “When people in a government position continue to say they’re going to kill you, I think somebody ought to wake up and take that seriously.”

Not withstanding dopiness of his Appeal to Authority fallacy in saying he saw the ovens in person (and I saw them on a Bing search alongside disturbing juxtapositions of actual ovens. So what?)…

 

-the rest of what he said is at least accurate. Iran brought up the holocaust first so if someone thinks the Obama deal with Iran empowers the enemy-state (as it does) then it’s not a wildly off base comment – just in-artfully stated (he should have said that it potentially makes such a march, not that it does).

 

This Selfie-Drone will be following me in the air next year

Finally someone started making the “flying camera that follows you” that I invented 10 years ago.

I bought one but it won’t ship until February 2016.

I’ll be interested to see more of the cam in actual action and testing but so far most searches turn up videos of girls name Lily singing songs I never heard of, dogs named Lily with GoPro’s strapped to them, and various less-wholesome cam related activity.

The Tim Burton Superman movie starring Nick Cage that almost was

A $30 million Superman movie that was planned to be made and released in the late 1990’s but never got completed has been the subject of interesting rumor for years and is now the subject of a crowdfunded documentary finally released. I have been following the rumors for years and the making of the documentary since it was announced last year and just finally watched it.

My reaction is that I would have utterly hated Tim Burtons vision of Superman, but I desperately wish he got to make it. I hate all the Superman movies, so that’s no big D. I would have hated this one for the same reasons I think the Christopher Reeve versions are campy garbage and the 2000’s attempts are melodramatic wastes trying too hard to suck the joy out of a fun character and go for a “realistic” emotional disaster drama. Yawn.

The movie would have focused on a version of the Death of Superman story, which in the 90s was a big deal and would have been a big draw on film. In the comics, Superman is confronted by a new character named Doomsday who, like Soops, is similarly indestructible but bent on killing everything. They fight for awhile, weakening each other in a meta-bar room brawl similar to the way Soops vs Zod was depicted in the most recent iteration Man of Steel until finally they punch each other to death in a mutual loss. Superman is buried and then there’s a couple offshoot storylines where a kid, a cyborg, and a couple other pretenders to the throne try to take the mantle until Superman comes back, now with long black hair and a black uniform. Turns out Superman was only dead-in-name-only by being beaten into a recovery hibernation mode and was able to be revived in the Fortress of Solitude and returned at a weaker power mode to save the day like always.

For a good depiction of the story, I recommend the animated 2007 film Superman: Doomsday.

So in 1996 Warner Bros gave Kevin Smith the opportunity to write a screenplay for either a movie version of The Outer Limits (a forgettable Twilightzone ripoff), a Bettlejuice sequel titled “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” (finally answering the questions posed in the first Beetlejuice of “but what would he be like in a tropical setting?”) or friggin Superman (an American icon and comic book legend). Smith picked that one and wrote a script where the alien Brainiac invades the Fortress of Solitude (fighting polar bears in the process) and deprives Superman of his powers, allowing the whole come-back thing and so on.

Tim Burton signed on to direct and retooled the vision entirely ditching Smiths script for a more….Burtonesque approach.

The comics at the time had Superman looking like this:

Long haired sortov mullet, buffed out, boxy Termantor style chin and cheek bones.

This is what Tim Burton had in mind:

It sucks that we were so close to getting a Superman Scissorhands movie and it all fell apart with its budget going to the 1999 Will Smith flop, Wild Wild West.

Warner Bros really dropped the ball here by that fact alone. Because even if Burtons Superman movie flopped, 1) it wouldn’t have been as low as Wild Wild West, and 2) it would have had decades long staying power as an item of interest (where as WWW faded to obscurity outside of notation of its financial and critical negative reception). It would have been the utmost of cool to have the 90s Batman movie series directed by Burton cross over with Superman in a combo sequel like Warner is trying to accomplish with Batman vs Superman in 2016.

And to make it even more deliciously bizarre, the Man of Steel was to be played by real-life SuperWeirdo Nicolas Cage, of whom test footage exists to drool over.

All this and more is in the previously mentioned documentary “The Death of ‘Superman Lives’: What Happened” which I just watched. It’s okay. There are animated recreations of storyboards and concepts from the original treatments that I wanted to see much more of, the story isn’t told in an easily discernable beginning-middle-end like I would have appreciated, and the directors distracting head nodding while his interview subjects speak on the topics raised could have been drastically cut for my tastes, but the base material is good and its a good watch for comic, Cage, Smith, or Burton fans.

Here’s the trailer:

https://youtu.be/_5Q1j0XJQPI

If that sort of thing appeals to you, watch the first 10 minutes below and consider buying the full doc itself:

Image credits: the Death of Superman Lives

Why This Stupid Confederate Flag Debate is Stupid

The Confederate flag should not be praised by the government and it should not be banned by it either. There’s nothing inherently wrong about the flag but it has been used for bad causes, giving the symbol a negative connotation. Thus the answer is the first sentence of this paragraph: Government is right to not endorse its use and hippies are wrong to blanketly demonize its use.

There. I solved your stupid non-problem.

How did I accomplish such a marvel? Behold, the rudimentary use of facts + situational reality. Tada!
The truth is that the flag is used as mind-numbingly ignorant symbol of un-american attitude of separation, segregation, hate, ignorance, and bad ideas in general, but also — none of that… Because the other truth is that it’s used as a legitimate symbol of history and heritage without any racial connotations whatsoever.


Dukes of Hazzard stuff is now banned due to history revisionism about the Confederate flag in the past week.

I think “pride” in the flag, or any other exclusively regional symbols, is dumb. But who cares? You’re dumb for caring. Or more likely, just ignorant. I’ve been interrogating Confederate flag supporters for over a decade trying to understand why any toolbag dummy would embrace it and while I disagree with the rationale I always receive, it’s not fair to lump the common arguments in with bigots, haters and truly evil people that include murderers and violently wicked humans.
Most often I hear displayers of the Confederate flag talk about pride in history. Which would be fine, except that history is about a war that caused an obscene amount of death that was largely over a dispute regarding the allowability of the ownership of human beings as property. and it lost. So… you’re telling me you’re proudly representing a period of historical bloodshed in the name of legal enslavement of humans that caused immense suffering and negative historical repercussions despite being an ultimate failure because….your family tree at certain points in history lived in the geographical area in which this horrible event took place? Are you THAT friggin tribal and stupid?

That’s *my* reaction at least. even though I know some of it is fairly dubious, such as the more ambiguous role that slavery played in the Civil War. My position on that has always been that yes, the war was about slavery, but yes, it is factually accurate to note the real-life conflicts of the issue and reason there was a separation attempt and ensuing war.  But despite acknowledging the nuances of the historical record – the fact remains that slavery was AN issue if not THE issue and since it’s immoral – why would you want to fly a flag that went to war to defend against encroachments into that immoral institution?

It shows you the heart of anti-americanism in the Hippie mind when they call Confederate Flag wavers racists but defended the fighters in Iraq with the emotional relation appeal trope, saying “what would YOU do if Iraq invaded YOUR city?”. So to some dummies, it’s only okay to fight and murder encroachers into your immoral bondage of innocents if you’re not American. To everyone else – we think that regardless of the prudence of resuming the Iraq war of the 90s again in the 2000s, that like the south in the Civil War – the people defending their state were resisting forces that are there to make things better for everyone. So yes we get why they feel put upon – they’re jerks. What jerk loves to be corrected or told they have to follow the same rules of decency as everyone else? Why would you lionize a losing team that fought in protection of a thing you recognize is bad?

It seems painfully obvious to me but the response I get to this reaction raises some points, not all of which are illegitimate. Bearers of the flag always tell me that no, they are not celebrating the causes of the war or it’s goal, but yes they are representing their geographical location and that that area of the globe and heritage, losing side or not – regardless of the immoral reason behind it – was the center of a lot of death and horror that people suffered through, not all of which because they were adamant supporters of slavery. I think geographical representation is dopey, but no one else does, so if you don’t think it’s horrible to feel a sports-team style kinship with your state, then there’s no reason to do so in a collection of states.

And that’s all the confederate flag is. The problem is not what it *is*, it’s what it *can be*. And it *can be* a symbol of racism, “white pride”, pro-slavery, and any other number of subsets having to do with unjust separation of races. This is why there is a conservative and liberal divide over the issue: Liberals see things in black and white (despite liking to think of themselves as doing otherwise) and thus anything that they view as possibly racist IS racist and unless it is exterminated it is contributing to “racist culture” which a large government must remedy by force. Conservatives, being less collective and more individualistic, see things more individually and draw generalizations from patterns instead of starting with a blanket rule with which to retroactively apply to everyone in all time periods. It’s how Hillary Clintons and Barack Obama can get away with being firmly against re-defining “marriage” to include same sex unions just 3 years ago but now act like only Hitler would ever say such a thing. Likewise with the flag, people selectively choose at what time a trending buzz about the meaning of a symbol dominated and retroactively apply it to all time. Only when it’s politically expedient to try to marginalize it’s opponents as bigots in order to gain power does the Left suddenly realize a position or symbol is unjust. Many people go along with it because following the herd on an issue is most natural when there are emotional appeals involved that don’t motivate resistance or opposition research. Everyone else points out the group think of the herd and is perplexed that people are actually just going along with the history revision that the flag unequivocally means horrible things. Never mind that that unequivication is brand-new (causing awkward blind-eyes to have to be turned about that time Governor Bill Clinton commemorated the Confederacy Star in the Arkansas flag or that campaign supporters for both Bill in 1992 and Hillary in 2008 distributed completely non-controversial Confederate Flag promotional items).


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In the reality of cold-hard-facts, there isn’t anything actually wrong with the flag. It’s not a synonymous symbol with racism or hate or the KKK – it’s a symbol of region of the country during an event that happened that was a massively big deal, forever affecting the country and what it is and what it stands for and thereby affecting world history in a major way. Remembering that with visual representation is not a bad thing. Yes, one has to deal with the fact that haters, racists, and the official organization of the KKK cult do in fact use that flag in all of those bad ways. They fly it not because they give a fig about remembering an event or because they’re such southern-state pride-ists that they want to display a symbol of their home – they see that flag as a symbol of a glorious event in where brave men gave their lives for the noble cause of keeping the negro in chains where they belong. Since that association isn’t a direct parallel, the problem becomes “what do we do when a symbol is co-opted?”.

As with every case where a symbol is used by a group, the rest of us have to decide how to respond. The Republican party is represented by an elephant. That doesn’t mean Democrats can’t enjoy a nice National Geographic special on pachyderms. Gay pride is represented by a rainbow. That doesn’t mean we forever have to associate rainbows and rainbow colors exclusively with homosexuality. The reason is because the factual reality is that groups don’t own symbols that pre-existed them. The sociological reality is that people associate things with what is familiar to them.

There are dumb reasons that are no more dumb than reasons of history and pride that aren’t objected to, and no we shouldn’t give in to any one group claiming exclusive representation to an image or symbol (and especially not if it’s a co-opt to a bad idea like Racism), but who cares?

The whole non-issue and it’s debate is stupid. The people acting like it’s a big deal whose repealing will have any affect over anything positive whatsoever are being dumb and the people who act like the importance of proud display over it is a big deal whose act is accomplishing literally anything positive whatsoever are being dumb.

My diagnosis: Stop being dumb.

Repeat after me:
The Confederate flag should not be praised by the government and it should not be banned by it either. There’s nothing inherently wrong about the flag but it has been used for bad causes, giving the symbol a negative connotation. Thus the answer is the first sentence of this paragraph: Government is right to not endorse its use and hippies are wrong to blanketly demonize its use.

It’s painfully obvious: More, not less guns, are the solution to gun murders

It’s getting hard to respect people who don’t realize that more, not less guns, are the solution to gun murders in America.

In other smaller, less free nations without equivalents to the 2nd amendment there may be different and better ways of going about pursuit of solution. The stats would appear to disagree with that, considering the gun deaths in other nations seem to rise in response to more gun restrictions, but no one seems to want to explore that very much. In England for example, gun deaths went up after more stringent gun laws were put in place, but that stat is ignored by the popular consensus to instead just focus on the fact that England has lower gun deaths than the United States. This is a comparison I’ve never understood the relevancy of when applied to America ever since Michael Moore used it in 2002’s Bowling For Columbine, but it remains appealing to people for whatever reason.

The answer to bad things people do in a free country is more freedom for civilians to police the bad things, not less freedom in attempts to stop bad things.

Did you hippies learn nothing from Star Wars? Lea tells Governor Tarkin that the more he tightens his grip, “the more star systems will slip through your fingers“. Where there is abhorrent speech in a country without government restriction on free speech, the Right answer (coincidentally both the “right” answer as in “correct” but also “right-wing”) is more speech to correct, shame, and ultimately overwhelm it. The Wrong answer is the Left’s answer, which is to remove speech they deem abhorrent, or potentially abhorrent, or just not 100% Leftist (thereby allegedly eliminating the path to potentially abhorrent thought or speech). It’s crazy totalitarianism when it comes to thoughts and speech but it’s downright dangerous when it comes to deadly weapons and self protection.

If your country has a right to firearms, then similarly like a country with a right to free expression – the answer to the bad parts is more good parts. More guns don’t automatically, mathematically equal Less Crime, but in the context of a free firearm owning nation the formula is solid.

Yet consistently, whenever there is a highly covered murder where guns are used, the emotional/politically-Leftist side of the country calls for more restriction on gun rights. The emotional appeal is obvious, but logically bananas (nonsensical).

At the time of this writing, the latest issue to spark this debate is a racially motivated murder of 9 people at a church in Charleston South Carolina. How would more gun laws have stopped this murder?
-By banning “assault rifles”? Nope; An assault rifle was not used in the murder.
-By instituting more strict gun registration laws? Nope; The gun used in the murder was not registered in accordance with the law.
-By outlawing the right to carry a gun? Nope; South Carolina doesn’t have concealed-carry laws or any carrying of a firearm without a permit.
-By banning guns inside churches (where the murder took place)? Nope; guns are already not allowed in churches in South Carolina.

I don’t know why this is shocking to you hippies, but: Murderers break laws. It’s unfortunate, but true. The bumper sticker “if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” is undeniably accurate since laws only affect the people who abide by them. When people break those laws, the knee-jerk reaction to make more laws to break is not intelligent. The proper response is to make breaking laws a horrible risk for lawbreakers in proportion to the crime. When the crime is murder, the risk of your attempt being thwarted by your injury or death should be raised, not lowered. The only way to raise the risk of injury or death to someone using a projectile weapon is to have other projectile weapons ready to be used against that rogue A-hole.


(Sign that appears at an Arkansas Christian Academy with armed teachers)

There is only one answer: Restricting the right to firearm ownership all together. This obvious point of mine was even echoed by none other than Karl Rove sparking a whole new debate but the base of it is true: you can’t have a country with an engrained right to firearms and no firearm deaths.

You have to repeal the right or reduce the deaths with safety and a balance of powers from armed law abiding citizens to balance the armed criminals. Those are the only options. Since repeal isn’t in the cards – more, not less guns are the answer to rampage shootings.

5 Things That Didn’t Cause the Charlseton Shooting

For some reason, crazy people with unstopped pathways towards violence finally committing that violence isn’t a satisfying enough explanation for why crazy people with unstopped pathways towards violence finally commit acts of violence. So they look for scapegoats. Here are 5 bad ones. The 21 year old murderer who killed 9 people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church made a series of conscious decisions stemming from a mix of ignorance, hate, feelings of victomhood, and chemical imbalance.

Here are 5 things not responsible for the massacre:

 

1- BLACK PEOPLE / ANY BLACK INDIVIDUAL

This is a different dynamic than the previous deaths of black individuals that were falsely attributed by race-hustlers and well meaning but brainwashed and ignorant hippies as being murders. The massacre in Charleston was an unprovoked, unjustifiable, unnecessary, murder of completely and totally innocent human beings. It’s an important note for contemporary and long-term history, especially given the misreporting and continued ignorance of previous high-profile deaths of black individuals amidst criminal activity.

This was not Treyvon Martin attacking a neighborhood watchman who was following him and then getting a single fatal shot fired through him at close range amidst bloodying the shooters skull into the sidewalk only to be misreported as a case of a peaceful boy getting gunned down just for being black.
This was not Michael Brown being approached by a police officer for walking in the middle of the street after he had assaulted a clerk in a store he stole cigars from and then amidst trying to grab the officers gun, was fatally shot in the scuffle, only to be misreported as a peaceful black man being hassled for no reason and getting gunned down despite putting his hands in the air and saying “don’t shoot” (the most persistent lie of these cases that was most widely believed even after being debunked).

This was nothing like those previous high-profile cases. This was a group of religious Americans exercising their rights and tradition of congregating peacefully, welcoming in a newcomer with open hearts and minds, and then having their loved ones senselessly targeted and slaughtered by him for no reason outside of the killers deranged hateful blood lust.

Yes, there have been previous high-profile instances where people did regrettable things that caused them to get killed and yes a bunch of people became falsely convinced that they were murdered because of racism. This isn’t one of those cases. 9 Americans in Charleston are in the ground for no reason other than one evil sicko premeditated a day of murder fueled by his racism. No one in that church had any culpability in the unjustifiable bloodshed that befell it and no retaliation violence, protests, or hate came in the wave of response (as opposed to the previous 3 dubious examples). Instead, the church members forgave the murderer and asked God to have mercy on him for stealing their loved ones – an act I don’t agree with, but recognize as amazing.

 

2- A’MURKAN RACISM & GUN CULTURE

The Charleston murderer was a racist – therefore racism is an epidemic problem that requires social upheaval to correct? Some people wish that was the case, but thankfully it isn’t.

Ideology can convince people to commit acts of violence who otherwise wouldn’t and people with a propensity to commit acts of violence can be drawn to or invent ideologies as vehicles to do so. I’m specifically avoiding showing images or using the name of the piece of human debris who pulled the trigger that ended those innocent lives, but if you look at him – the dude looks not-sane. He looks a lot more like the Batman theater murderer than he does a competent sane person driven to kill. But fine, sure, I admit that having a stupid haircut and looking a little bananas isn’t exactly forensic evidence that would stand up in court, proving that a person has lost touch with reality. What I *do* know is that this fruitcake douche was going against the grain of America, not with it.

There are groups in America that make a good living out of making certain classes of people victims and so in order to justify their profit model, they need to perpetuate myths about alleged behemoths you need them to turn the tides against. The truth is that the popular sentiment in white America is that race is unimportant, not that it’s so important that dark skinned individuals need murderinz. Everyone hates this guy. He has no support. The lunatic rantings of the killers hate rants are supported by less than one half of 1% of the population of this country. Fringe freaks exist, its true. They congregate and share propaganda. It’s not an epidemic. American racism against blacks was not the reason 9 people are dead in Charleston.

It’s also not unique to America. Despite President Obama’s claim that “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” – doubling down to repeat “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency.” – it does. Unless of course he meant “this kind of [low] frequency”. Then he was right… Finland, Slovakia, Israel, Switzerland, and of course Norway (which suffered a massacre of 77 in 2011) all have a higher per capita rate of rampage shootings than the United States, which itself is closely followed by other “advanced countries” like Belgium, Germany, the UK, Canada, and France.

But what is more important than the Presidents slander of his own country vs others is that even without the comparison to others – rampage shootings are not common in America. That’s why they’re such big news items when they occur.  Every one is one too many and it’s frustrating that most of the recent high-profile ones could have been prevented with the right actions from those around the killers but it’s still factually false to cite a pandemic or support to these universally condemned shootings. It’s doubly false to blame a culture of anti-black hate.

 

3- THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

The church murderer had posted a picture of himself with the confederate flag, another picture of him burning the American flag and others still. While this sparked a return to the legitimate debate over the prudence of the possible implications South Carolina’s flying of the Confederate Flag over the State House, it also re-ignited an illegitimate debate over the voodoo powers of the Stars and Bars, which had no culpability in this church murder.

A renewal of focus on South Carolina’s flying of the Confederate flag makes sense but it’s legitimacy of display or lack thereof was not a catalyst for the murder of these 9 people. Whether or not the symbol that represented the region of the country involved in the American Civil War who lost the most lives (over 600,000 vs the Norths 100,000+ deaths) is good to display by individual or government is a debate that has nothing to do with this act of violence which was not inspired by, facilitated by, boosted, or in any way aided by the design on that particular piece of Civil War memorabilia. It’s a symbol that’s been used by racists, not an ideology that influences racists to BE racist and/or commit acts of hate, violence, and murder.

Even if the murderer had written manifesto’s on how awesome the Confederate flag is and the history of what it means and why he’s killing in it’s glorious name (he didn’t) and/or how it specifically drove him to kill (it didn’t) – we don’t typically take a crazy murderers motives seriously when they spawn from totems or other objects. Trying to ban a historical symbol because it was co-opted by murderers is only a fraction of a degree crazier than banning dogs because David Berkowitz (aka the “Son of Sam” killer) said he was driven to murder because his neighbor Sam had a demon possessed dog that demanded it from him.

 

4- LACK OF GUN RESTRICTION LAWS

If you don’t like guns, as I don’t, then it seems too good to pass up to not use mass killings with a gun as examples of why there need to be more restrictive gun laws. Hoever… Nothing about the murders is attributable to gun laws that allowed any of it’s components to happen.

The murderer had a felony (making it illegal for him to poses a firearm), the murder weapon used was a gift – given to the murderer illegally (so improper registration laws can’t be to blame), South Carolina does not have concealed-carry or unconcealed firearm carrying rights without a permit (which the murderer obviously didn’t have with his illegally gifted gun), and you can’t bring a gun legally into a Church in South Carolina anyway.

Lack of gun laws did not facilitate this evil person to get ahold of a gun he could and did use to murder innocent people. They existed and were broken. Creating more laws to be blithely ignored by criminals ignoring the arguably more important law of “don’t murder people” is not the barrier required to stop such acts from happening.

 

5- FOX NEWS OR SOCIAL COMMENTARY

Just when you thought the goofiest scapegoats had already been pinned, Democratic State Rep Todd Rutherford told CNN that the murderer committed his crime “because he watches things like FOX News” and hears “coded language” that is actually “hate speech”. This is just stupididy that actually is on the level of my previous half-joking example of blaming the dog for the Son of Sam murders. At least the Confederate Flag has actually been used as a symbol of racism by racists, but claiming a cable news channel is secretly broadcasting “coded” advocation of racial murder is fruitcakery that shouldn’t be whispered by dummies in a bar, let alone broadcasted by elected representatives on national television.

Rutherford claimed that the broadcasts on FOX “talk about the president as if he’s not the president. They talk about church-goers as if they are really not church-goers. And that’s what this young man acted on. That’s why he could walk into a church and treat people like animals when they are really human beings.” Somehow the right-wing watchdogs failed to pick up all those reports by FOX about “some guy at the Whitehouse” who isn’t really the president and/or how people don’t go to church and thus it’s totally cool to murder people who go to church. Or something. Wtf? The reality is just the opposite – commentators on FOX are more likely to give President Obama more, not less, power in their analysis of his allegedly criticism worthy actions, and they put too much emphasis on religion in America, not less. In fact the Daily Kos attacked FOX for allowing the commentary of the shooting being an attack on religion (because the Daily Kos wants to keep the discussion focused exclusively on blaming a culture of racism).

When asked by FOX News host Bill O’Reilly about the comments, Rutherfords defense was… not so good. He said that the “not really the president” comments were about the Birth Certificate conspiracy (which FOX News debunked, not endorsed), admitting that he had no evidence that the murderer ever watched FOX News (reiterating that he said “things *like* FOX News”, whatever that means) and continued to claim without example that unnamed outlets *like* FOX (but not specifically FOX I guess?) report on non-news in order to smear black Americans as inherently violent rapists, tacitly condoning murder of anyone with dark skin. I wish I were exaggerating…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEXZZ1w_sHA

 

These dubious scapegoats are a problem. When people murder for ideological reasons (as opposed to situational motivations such as personal gain or targeted animosity like in mobs and gangs), the ideologies are never to blame unless they were force fed cult-style to the murderer without access to the reality that debunks the hate-propaganda. So unless a murderer is doing their killing spree because of their life teachings in a hate-sect of a Mormon desert (doesn’t happen) compound or one of the Al Quaeda branches or partners (happens), the inspection of the symbols, culture they associated with, and literature they wrote or endorsed are all not causes of the murder (if one is to think of it as a virus we’re discussing in order to stamp out) – they’re symptoms of the murder disease.

These are distractions and damagingly foolish ones at that but have you noticed the pattern? These 5 scapegoats are scapegoating from what?… The individual.

Post Transgender Revolution: What else can people re-assign about themselves?

Transgenderism isn’t new but the backlash against anyone who doesn’t fully applaud it as a totally normal celebratory stage of human evolution is.

This is odd because as society shifts towards the newly accepted norm that a person is whatever gender they identify as (and you’re a hateful bigot if you say anything otherwise), science remains the same. So if surface surgical procedures that don’t change your biological reality is now an acceptable identity…What other scientific realities can people change?

It’s not a “slippery slope” argument – it’s a real question?

If i’ve always felt I was black. Can I undergo racial reassignment surgery? Under this new Transphobic doctrine I can, but would I receive the same support as a transracial person as I would if I were a transgender person? Why applaud a man turning their hotdog into a donut in order to live a life as a woman but condemn a person getting a permanent tan and hair crimping in order to identify as an African American?

I’ve always felt I was 17. Can I undergo age reassignment surgery to young-up my face and then be accepted by society as a 17 year old? Then, just how it’s bigoted and obscenely hateful to note that a man who undergoes surgery to look like a woman, it will likewise be such for anyone who doesn’t accept my I’m actually twice that age

It’s time to Edward Cullen this bitch up.

UPDATE: This post was written just 1 week before the story of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who was exposed for posing to be black and stuck by her identification as a personal identity, broke in June 2015. I’m not psychic – I was just going off the logical extension of the premise of societies view of gender reassignments.