Sheep Thumbs

I wrote this for someone else, but I figured I might was well post it here.

Four rhymes with eight,
Five rhymes with two,
Seven with nineteen,
and one rhymes with you.

For you are one person,
in an ocean of ham,
surrounded by giants,
who really like lamb.

If you didn’t grasp it,
that’s entirely okay,
but you’re an infantile ovine
in the pork-filled bay.

Things, as they are,
are looking rather bleak:
not being found
are the exits you seek.

How’er hope springs eternal,
and you persevere,
less out of the ‘foresaid,
than just out of fear.

Suddenly, rapidly, light from above,
and the cosine of zero descends (like a dove).
This being one, and that being you,
I can’t blame you for being confu-

-sed (that may have been cheating),
but your double saves you from an eating.
With doppelganger-ish magic abounding,
you think only of your reprieve from a pounding.

In retrospect, that may have been dumb,
for your erstwhile twin had removed twice your thumb.
With said digits he had absconded,
leaving you to a stalactite bonded.

While pleasanter than your previous plight,
you must admit, despite your small flight,
there remained one minor problem
the ravenous giants were about to gobble ’em.

(I know, I know, that was kind of a stretch,
but doesn’t my meter already make you retch?)
Deciding forthwith to sever your losses,
you left the pit to avoid the pit bosses.

Or, at least, this was done in your head,
in reality, future you looked quite dead.
Your plasma splattered out, and the rocks blood-red,
and your body quite failing, or so you had read.

But since I’m not Edgar Allen Poe,
this story has a happy ending, you know.
And instead of you back together to sew,
the unfriendly giants were laid out as so.

Some rescuers came, and they did not tarry,
except when they took the Number Five ferry.
With the aid of Gandalf, Batman, and Queen Mary,
you were unglued, made off, and made off, and made merry.

This now is why, though little you care,
sheep have no thumbs, and so do not dare,
to stand upon mountains, and thus be there,
because no number five phalange is said to be their(s).

There’s a good reason the rhymes get stranger in the last four stanzas. Look at them carefully.

On Free Will

“Siddhartha is a strange man, and he expresses strange thoughts. His ideas seem crazy.” -Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, 1922

Just a brief thought here. This is, as far as I know, OC to me. In proof of the existence of free will:

If, as is the primary argument of non-religious mechanism, all actions are inevitable, just events set in course by physics, then it is plausible to assume that at some point in human advancement (assuming we don’t kill each other to death in some way), we will create a device or algorithm capable of predicting all future events, by analyzing past ones, and solving the open-system problem. At which point, obviously, we would actually have proven free will, given that any person who sees that they are determined to one particular action by this device could simply choose to set themselves on a path towards the noncompletion of this event, disproving the mechanistic prediction.

Of course, this still leaves theistic mechanism intact. God’s actions can’t be predicted by a machine. (Noting that God is still not deterministic, making free will existent regardless, just not for us) But that’s metaphysics, so I’m going to leave it alone.

TL;DR: Free will exists because humans are stubborn and oppositional.

Orior

(In tradition of arrogance and slightly unnecessary obtuseness, that’s “I rise” in Latin)

Well, I’m back, a most likely happier and more balanced, as well as less pretentious, person, committed to not using so many parentheses and just in general being more readable. In the intervening months since I’ve logged on, not much has actually happened, except that I’m slightly tanner and am writing this on a new laptop. I’m still occasionally bat-shit insane, but the incidences are decreasing, so I’m going to give this another shot.

I wouldn’t really say I found myself in the intervening time, because people who say that are generally trying to give excuses for long periods of time doing nothing productive (e. g. this guy) and they had themselves all along, they just didn’t like what they were looking at, and wanted to pretend it wasn’t actually them.

Also (very late) shout-out to Kenneth Jobe for giving me a mention. (In December 2013).

Also new actual post over here.

A Brief Analysis of Contemporary Post-Industrial American Transportation

Author’s Note: I wrote a bibliography to match the in-text citations, along with a couple other addendum, but I didn’t feel the need to insert it. I did include the list of possible offended people, just in case. Oh, and see if you can find all the Catholic jokes.

Have you ever wondered why trains are better than planes? I mean, the question isn’t even up for debate. Trains are better than every object known to man. Statistics show that 243% of awesome things in the world known to man are trains, with the runner-up being something called “sex”, which comprises about 2% of the known body of awesome things (Hitler 239). Trains are better than anything ever designed by puny mortal man and are so far superior to planes that planes were created after them, rhyme with their sacred name, and have to fly to get people to use them.

Firstly, trains are in their own spiritual essence beings worthy of intensive cult worship. Their mighty power has been observed to destroy whole villages with the mere implication of a small child saying the word ‘train’ (Clinton 2387). For instance, there is a small but influential cult in an urban area of the Potomac River that has devoted its life to the worship of the almighty train and its lesser implementations. This cult spends slightly obscenely large time during their days sitting in a semi-circle with an arc of exactly 139.27 degrees taking it in turns to slowly and reverently stroke the burnished and powerful stainless steel of the physical representation of the entirely metaphysical Train-Lord (Cervantes 221). The high priests of Its Holiness the Train-Lord are some of the most successful men in the continental United States, including Elton John, Peter Parker, John Boner, and His Lordship the Duke of Michigan Leif Eriksson VIII, better known as John Quincy Adams (Cervantes 856).

This cult’s worship is, of course, very minutely detailed, for one must appease Its Holiness the Mighty and Terrible Train-Lord in every possible respect, lest he destroys your insignificant mortal non-Train life terribly and mightily with his colossal and nasty and fully automated fifteen train-arms of Destruction and Hades which protrude from his powerful and surprise-inspiring body with mighty and terrible prominence (Clinton 1512). For example, the ceremony to divine his mighty and terrible words consists of washing the cervical vertebrae of every present member of the cult in the blood of virgin albino rhesus monkeys combined with sulfuric acid boiled in the skull of a Blessed, but not canonized, Pope, in order to achieve true Trainal catharsis (Bryant 18). If in Virginia, Rwanda, or New Jewaware, the pelvis of somebody named Edgar Allen Poe who was not actually a depressing author, with the pelvic foramen filled with an even mixture of WD-40, wood glue of any kind, and pure freon should be used as the container instead (Bryant 22). Next, each member must don a hat in the shape of an isosceles tetrahedron with the area of a semi-sphere with a radius of 2π made out of pure tellurium studded with cubes of Li₃Br₅ with faces of length exactly one centimeter.

Only then can the sacrifices begin. Firstly, the Rwandan Ambassador to the parts of Rwanda that his government doesn’t control must be nonlethally skinned and then cloned (Bryant 45). Next, the High Priest and none other must wrap the ambassador around a group of four French mathematicians who have never been to Rochester and have a median IQ equal to the floor of the mean of the ceiling, the floor, the square root, and the cube root of the EM constant, cubed (Bryant 60) . This having been completed, they should be repeatedly injected with intramuscular ethanol every 18π minutes until death from starvation of the spirit, and their remains fed to a Afrikaans-speaking Asian woman after being deep-fried in bacon grease and lost souls. She should then be led into the presence of the Its Holiness, the Duke of Liverpool, Detroit, and Nevada, the Terrible and Mighty Train-Lord where she will maybe, possibly, if you’re very lucky and very amoral, begin to speak (Bryant 90).

Statistically, her speech will generally consist of 134% of the word “onomatopoeia”, 82% excerpts from screenplays which have been nominated for but have not won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, Original Score, or Supporting Actress, and 12% rants about people’s inability to properly use percentages (Hitler 2666). Generally, these things are interpreted simply as affirmations of the doctrine of Trainicatial, Traineriffic Trainal Trainiability, but specific phrases, such as, most recently, the article “an” and “would you kindly”, may require more metaphysical examination (Achebe 83). For instance, if the incomprehensible rants become a full-fledged proof of the quadrature of a circle the great one requires a stronger affirmation of faith from the High Priest, or It will come down with many shining and powerful hosts of brazen might and lay waste to peaceful villagers of yore with its mechanical arms of Famine, Fire, War, Plague, and Death (Achebe 125). Death, bitch. This is serious shit.

The results of the previous waste-laying can still be seen in modern downtown Tokyo, where the malignant spirits of the lesser members of Its mighty hosts still lurk, feeding on slightly obese white males looking for waifus (Orkheart 1231). Indeed, the central doctrine of Trainism is the words: “Train are love, Trains is life.” If one fails to life every second of one’s life with this phrase as one’s binding doctrine, one will be in grave danger of the destruction of one’s eternal soul and, indeed, the very essence of one’s being. This you and I must never forget, or you risk the eternal damnation of Its Holiness the Train-Lord, Duke of Liverpool, Detroit, Nevada, and Its other realms and territories, the Terrible and Mighty, by the Grace of Trains, Czar-Tsar of Communism, Arbiter of the Multiverse, True King of Ireland, Vicar of the Periodic Table, Supreme Conductor of the Universal Rails, Primate of New England, Sovereign of the continent of Africa, Defender of the HPV-AIDS Collaborative Effort.

Secondly, and less importantly, planes are dumb and unpatriotic. I mean, for the love of all that is sweet and holy, one killed three thousand good and upstanding American citizens at once once. If a citizen of this great country themselves did this, we wouldn’t stand for it, much less some undocumented immigrant taking all of our damn jobs! They take jobs from upstanding Trainist citizens and give them to these filthy goddamn preppies with their big shiny aluminum that’s Too Fucking Elitist for good, capitalist, American mercury for thermometers. For God’s sake, we invented them, they should at least show a little gratitude. All those big, polluting bastards have only ever destroyed our beautiful and proud New York City and let the Commie Chink cunts blow up our marvelous warships with their ratty little flying pieces of shit during the Big One.

As a political professional, I suggest that we take immediate steps towards the eradication of these dastardly traitors to the true cause from our beautiful capitalist nation of hope and prosperity. If we do not, they may be soon marching around our streets, painting Indian symbols of peace on the walls of our capitalism, giving the Bellamy salute, and poisoning and burning minority races. Admittedly, minor things compared to what most Democrats would do to the country if they ever got majority control of the government, but still a legitimate enough problem that one should take serious interest in dealing with it. Firstly, we should immediately ban the use of anything including the word “plane”. Hydroplaning was just a bitch word for sliding anyway, and that’s the only word, except of course for the actual word, I can think of at this moment that fits the aforesaid parameters. Then, and only then, may the real destruction begin. All of those who have ever flown a plane must be destroyed immediately, and with the highest prejudice. I also recommend the full dissolution of the Air Force, or they may later spread heresies in the government.

In conclusion, trains are better than planes, and planes are the source of most of the evil upon this earth, including the Nazi Party. The conclusion that we must draw from this is that….I just ran out of words to say. Oh, by the way, not only is this obviously not serious, it’s not even a serious satire of nationalism, or a criticism of the US Congress. Nationalism is fine by be, and there’s no original way to criticize Congress anymore. So just read it at face value…worshiping trains with gruesome rituals.

****

Kidney II: Lost of possibly offended people: The Catholic Church, Jainism, Kobe Bryant, Adolf Hitler, The Russian Empire, The United Soviet Socialist Republics, The People’s Republic of China, The State of Japan, The United States of America, William Clinton, Chinua Achebe, The Nazi Party, The United States Air Force, The Republican Party, The Democratic Party, The Libertarian Party, The World Trade Center, AIDS patients, HPV patients, The Republic of Ireland, Mitt Romney, Francis Bellamy, Humphry Davy, Jews, Adam Smith, Queen Elizabeth II, Miguel Cervantes, Bill Gates, The Beatles, Cory Booker, Harry Reid, Nevada, Detroit, Liverpool, The Academy Awards, The Republic of Rwanda, Shrek, The Communist Party, God, Saint John, Dmitri Mendleev, or George W. Bush. If you are offended, and are not included in this list, the author either didn’t care about offending you, or wanted to offend you so that this would be more widely read.

On A Meaningless Debate

“yams”

-Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

My opening statement for a debate on moral relativism, annotated.  Don’t care about the topic, being pragmatic, but I thought the notes might be interesting to weird people. Obviously, my notes are italicized.

Moral relativism is for children[dramatic opening]. This essay is written, of course, by one who, for the purposes of my opponents, is himself a child [shut that criticism up early], but he is simply commenting on what he sees in the world. One cannot seriously hope to sustain a relativistic view of truth while continually confronted by the absolutism of man’s actions [big words, early]. For instance, the same people who endorse the theory of moral relativism, are also all the while decrying the oppression of women in the Middle East [Islam implied]. Examine that fact. If morals, the bounds of man’s actions, are in fact relative, then why is that wrong? Why are the slaughter of children and the raping of villages wrong, when morals are only the product of society’s constraints [e.g. raping is okay if done in Antarctica]? One cannot seriously hope to set a philosophical standard of relativism (saying that standards do not exist), while decrying actions they see as arbitrarily immoral, based, essentially, upon the beliefs, laws and practices of their respective culture [implied colonialism, thus double hypocrisy]. There are, of course, some who do not have these scruples, and would indeed argue that these actions are perfectly permissible. These people, to most of the outside world, are known as psychopaths, indeed fitting exactly the clinical definition of a psychopath. They are the Hitlers, the Zedongs, the Stalins [the season 1 Jeff Wingers] of the world. They are people who are, indeed, decried by the same people who would claim to be moral relativists when asked about their views [you’re a hypocrite. Yes you.]. This inherent paradox eventually, when, examined in detail, leads to the collapse of the theory of moral relativity[PASS].

Oh, and if you’ve read the book, you’ll get the quote.

On Green Day

“The base of the process is constricted where it attaches to the body, so as to prevent displacement from the transverse ligament…Sometimes, however, the process does become displaced, particularly in children, in whom the ligaments are more relaxed:  instant death is the result of this accident.”

-pp. 38, Gray’s Anatomy, Henry Gray/T. Pickering Pick, 15^th Am. Ed.

I’ve been told that my writing style is annoying. So, in honor of those people who took time out of their very busy life to tell someone who’s been through years of classes where trained people taught them how to write that writing in giant chunks of text with three or four-deep nested parentheses is unattractive and annoying, and that they really don’t want to hear about the music they’re listening to or the cockroach on the wall, I’m going to indent the first line of this post, just to make them happy, and promise not to nest the parentheses more than too deep. Anyway, this week’s insightful analysis: don’t do drugs. Other than that, I’ve really got nothing, because even people with nothing more interesting and generally better to do than complain about the country while doing nothing to change it still run out of things to complain about. Not that I’m out of things to talk about, I just don’t really feel like excoriating anything/one right now. So, instead about complaining about politics instead, I’m going to talk about Green Day (Not to be confused with Green Bay, Wisconsin or Greenery Day, the Japanese holiday. I love Wikipedia.). I’ve listened to them for a long time (that is to say, less than half the time they’ve existed [still a while]) ,and they’ve had their ups and downs. I’m no nostalgicist, my favorite album of theirs is American Idiot. Nimrod comes in a close second. Their older stuff has never really caught on with me, except for a few songs like King for a Day and Basket Case. I didn’t really like 21^st Century breakdown, either, and the three albums they put out after that are even worse. And their titles aren’t exactly original. Before I go with this recordly short for me blog post, I have one thing to say about the epigram. If you ever confuse the textbook (source of that hilarious quote) with the awful, horrible, no-good shitdram, I will not find you and kill you, but you will be cursed forever, just saying.

TL;DR: Writing style advice and Green Day. Not really speaking ex cathedra right now, I’m just bored.

On Feminism and Rape

“Codeine, codeine, you’re the nicest thing
I’ve seen, for a while, for a while.
Well you hold my hand as I step into the room,
And all these people will all be fading soon.”
-Codeine, Blue Sky and the Devil, Trampled by Turtles, 2005

After a refreshing day which involved immersing myself in pure, unmediated filth (listening to Eminem, Hollywood Undead, and My Darkest Days) for hours (oh dear God….”This girl’s like a Mac, she’s riding my laptop”? That line just killed a little but possibly very important piece of my soul.), I feel like writing a blog post. Now the problem with that is that I have no topic in mind, and at this point not much of a mind to hold topics.[Five-minute brain-dead gap]. So, I’m going to write about rape.  Now, I have a feminist shirt I wear occasionally (kind of surprising they even make them in men’s sizes. After all, why would the inferior gender need to support the obviously superior one?) to elicit reactions, which vary from a compliment from the (possibly homosexual, must investigate) (yeah, I would have just said lesbian or dyke, but I wanted to slip in a Watchmen reference.) Starbucks barista, to middle fingers from people in rural areas of the Midwest. Huh. Anyhoo, this shirt (no fingers, not shit, shirt) occasionally leads to conversations, and the feminists I speak to are often less than pleased (I’m a misogynist perpetrator of the patriarchy?) to learn that I’m an equity feminist , which I consider rather ironic, considering the stated goal of feminism is to provide equality for all genders (as opposed to superiority for women). So, after that [mostly] unrelated tangent, here’s a few hydrofueled things to think on from my unenlightened misogynist worldview. One, I was recently in the bookstore and picked up a book about rape in the women’s studies section. It had this fun fact on the back: “Only 27% of rape victims know that they were raped.” Er, did I read that right? Just to make sure that I wasn’t completely off-target, I looked up some statistics, and the high-ball estimate for rapes with an unconscious victim (made unconscious by the perpetrator (y’know, Roofies)) was in the area of 40%, kind of a bit off from 73%. This, I guess means that the author of the book was literally saying that some women don’t know when they’re being raped, which honestly, in my opinon, doesn’t provide an overly impressive view of the overall intelligence of this population of women. Not that I’ve ever had anything remotely close happen, but I feel like as long as I were conscious, I would be aware of being raped. Second, the long, protracted, and just plain ugly argument over the “asking for it” clothes concept. Fragment. Fragment fragment fragment fragment fragment. Oh dear God, does anyone have Adderall? See, women always say that it’s not their fault because they wore slutty (for lack of a better word) clothes. Which is absolutely true, just like someone who walks down Grape Street with a large wad of hundreds in their hand isn’t technically responsible for it getting repurposed by a less fortunate denizen. However, women wearing revealing clothes are more attractive to rapists, and, believe it or not, men as a group don’t have any control over rapists and their actions, and therefore we can’t stop them for going after so-dressed women. Again, I’m not arguing for the rapists of women wearing revealing clothes to get reduced sentences. Castrate the bastards, they’re generally the scum of the earth. I’m simply saying that, if a woman doesn’t want to get raped, then maybe she shouldn’t wear those clothes. If however, she wants to risk rape, mental scarring, a long and painful trial process, and possible medical consequences just to exercise her freedom of expression, then she can go right damn ahead. Nothing’s stopping her.

TL;DR: I rant about rape , and give it a misleading title to draw attention to it. Don’t carry large amounts of cash on your person. Stay sober and all that jazz. Don’t drink antifreeze or state-of-matter plasma.

On Welfare

“…Oh, gosh I’m sure you remember what happened, Bob, the tortoise bit clean through the Chief of Medicine’s calf muscle, dragged him to the ground, where he and all the other turtles devoured him alive right there on the racetrack. It’s a disturbing children’s book, Bob, I know, but it’s one that stuck with me nonetheless.”

-Dr. Cox, Scrubs

This is a story of a man (You read the title? Pretend you didn’t.). A man who worked his way up from nothing to become a great man. He defeated a corrupt political machine that used…err….corrupt  tactics …to attack him using only his common-people,  down-to-earth approach (not as in they attacked him with his own approach (Although they actually sort of did. And also, I’m really awful at good sentence formation.)) . Well, okay, that “nothing” is more like “rich adoptive parents”, but still, the point stands. Sort of. Yes, before you ask (or don’t ask, because you think I’m talking about myself or Martin Luther KingJ (it being today and all that)(minus the rich, adoptive, parents), I’ve been watching the Cory Booker documentary. Now, I realize that that film is completely biased towards Booker, and that he must have a bad side (although his Wikipedia article seems to completely adore him), but I’m going to completely ignore that in favor of bias and only show his good side. Just kidding, I’m actually going to write about welfare (and you thought the tangents were bad. Watch me completely drop the Blog Post Train onto different tracks five or six miles away (Although at least you, the unfortunate passenger, saw it coming, and are able to depart in a curiously ethereal way. Right this way, Ghostly Internet Browser.) (With godlike powers of psychokineticism, and train schedule coordination, since I’d rather the train didn’t hit another one.)). Welfare is…well..there’s not really one succinct word to describe it (evil? Lovely? Overemployed? Autistic? Cabbage?) . Simply put, the government can’t pay for everyone. I have no problem with disability payments to those too crippled, for whatever reason, to find a job. However, if someone has two legs, two arms, and a liver (to stop those pesky toxins (like high fructose corn syrup)), they can get by in the world, at least if they live in an urban area (I have no idea about the employment conditions in rural areas, as the only time I willingly go somewhere with a population of less than 100 grand is when I’m already being paid to do so. But I feel like you could probably find hand work at a farm (admittedly probably for $100-150 a week, but possibly also including (shitty) room and board.)). Anyhoo, you can eat nutritiously for something like $20 a day. Find MREs at a military surplus store. Shelter is provided by many places. 24-hour store’s bathrooms, under bridges, and inside construction vehicles are good. (Yes, I have done this before. Don’t question what you don’t unnerstand. (Yes, I do see that red squiggly line, before you ask.) ). If you can find a blanket, so much the better (in cold places, it’s more like a necessity). Bathrooms are free, water is free (in small quantities). But my point is that, in my state, $20 is a little over two hours of work at minimum wage. Certainly not eight. You could work at Walmart. Since there’s three or four in every major city in the US, there’s a very good chance one of them will hire you, short of you being a convicted murderer or rapist. Um…looking back on this, its turning into a tutorial on how to be homeless. That’s not really how I envisioned this (then again, I envisioned this as a post on Cory Booker). By the way, I’m not homeless, and I’m not writing this on a Public Library computer (Hate those. They block all the porn. (And they’re as fast as a feasting American (That was a pun. Think. Don’t get it? You’re stupid.))).  Welfare has its uses within the structure of government, but it should be a function provided by the states, not the incredibly debt-burdened federal  government.

TL;DR: A completely useless rant, and the tutorial on being homeless you’ve always wanted. I need to stop combining coffee, loads of sugar, and meds (Obviously not Ritalin), since this shit is the result. And yet I’m posting it, mainly since WordPress just sent me a reminder email that I hadn’t logged on in two months, and I felt slightly guilty.

On Immigration

“‘Ned, have you been drinking?’ ‘His throat hurt from smoking.'”

– Fay/Henry, Henry Fool

Marco Rubio should run as an independent. (I love succinct opening lines so much. Ughhh, I’m becoming one of them.(The blogosphere)). The party he’s attached to obviously doesn’t know how to do PR. Well, at least those of them in the House. For God’s sake, you’ve got a charismatic Hispanic candidate lined right up for 2016. You can grab some of the 75% of Latinos who went Dem last election. All you need to do is to enact a bill on immigration in which you pretty much win everything you want (increased funding to border patrol, more fence, no auto-amnesty), but Democratic lawmakers will, for some reason, support. Or….you can, against all reason, and against the advice of every single sane conservative in the universe (and some insane ones), stubbornly reject it. Oh, God, someone jumped the fence to find a job he can afford to feed his family on! Better make sure he can never ever ever ever ever become a citizen, even if he pays a fine he can’t afford, and goes to the back of the years-long queue for citizenship. God forbid that. He might steal a job from a hardworking American citizen. Oh, he would be a citizen too, you say? Not on our watch! That would be amnesty! (End sarcastic interlude.) Amnesty. Right. Yeah, if I park in a handicapped spot and chip out $250 bucks and get jailed for some reason, that sure feels amnestial (87.951% sure that isn’t a real word.). Dude, I am just rolling in amnesty. And seriously? They aren’t going to steal our jobs. They’d just be doing the same jobs illegal immigrants already do, because the ~11.8 million unemployed won’t do it. Because they’re college graduates and that stuff’s beneath them. They’d just be getting higher wages. Now, at this point, if I were a typical blogger, I’d go on a tirade about how the evil corporations are paying off the GOP to keep the poor victimized Latino’s wages low so they can squeeze more profits out of the poor people. (Don’t even lie. I’ve read you guys’ posts on the immigration reform clusterfuck (Is so a word, spellcheck! Oh, so now you’re telling me that spellcheck isn’t a word? Well, you can go jump in a nuclear waste disposal site. Fuckin’ mook. Trying to argue with a human.), and they are all that and more.) But I’m not a typical blogger (Yes, I am being just a bit (|————–|) defensive.), so I’m just gonna say that hey, everyone’s out for their own best interests. And that brings me back to the issue of why the GOP House is being so damn dumb. Their own best political interests would indeed be to pass this bill, but they aren’t, confusing political analysts, supposedly “unbiased” news anchors, and me (Oxford comma. Yays.). Well, if they want to dig their own grave (slightly late idiom alert), that’s their problem. But I’d advise Marco Rubio to get the hell out. Hey, I’d vote a Rubio-Christie 2016 ticket. And their party could have a cool new color. Like purple. Or turquoise. Epigram: Note on style. When multiple people are in a quote, they’re attributed in order of speaking, e.g. Fay said the first part and Henry said the second. Oh, and for reference, Ned is five, and he’s Fay’s son. Not Henry’s.

TL;DR: Vote Rubio/Christie 2016. The GOP House is dumb for real. And I’m becoming defensive about being different. Time to shake things up.

In Which Hobbes Excorigates Retarded People

“The Record trial contradicted the results of a 2007 analysis of multiple studies by Cleveland Clinic doctors, which showed a 43% heart-attack increase.”

-Glaxo’s Avandia Wins FDA Victory, Thomas M. Burton, The Wall Street Journal, 6.7.13

Well, this is going to be one of those nasty introspective posts (The kinds, if I come across them in Freshly Pressed, I skip them and go read about fun stuff like a random blogger coming out and saying that they were the recipient of a sex change operation (I was going to link to this, but I somehow lost it.) (I don’t know if she’s approved my comment yet (or ever), but I never got any angry or offended replies, so I doubt it)). I suppose since my goal here is to be honest, I should write posts that show emotions other than cynicism (That counts, right?), despite the fact that some of my (pretty close) real-life acquaintances might be legitimately surprised if you told them that I had emotions. Anyhow, here’s the post. For a little more than the last month, I’ve been living in the same house with a 40-year-old woman with pretty severe Down Syndrome. And, when I go, I won’t be sorry to see the back of her (whatever, it’s an expression). She didn’t exactly improve my living conditions here, for various reasons, but I’m not here to complain, I’m here to…er…introspect. The amount of pure, unmitigated dislike I felt for her at some points led me to question whether I don’t, perhaps, have some sort of subconscious stereotype against retarded people. Pretty much my number three goal in life is to avoid mental bias of any kind, since I hate it with a passion (Goals number one and two, respectively? Survive and reproduce. Basic evolutionary theory. Goal number two conveniently explains Freudian bullshitpsychology.). I’ve been trying to figure out, at what point you can apply standards similarly to retards and normal people. There’s some obvious divergences. For instance, applying the same standards for table manners is hardly fair, at least according to my observations. But should we apply standards similarly for their off-topic comments about others, and if not, how much latency should we give them? For instance, it ticked me off when me and my crew came in after working outside in 95 degree heat for an hour and a half, to grab a drink of water, and she starts grumbling about how “the boys are standing around inside being lazy” when I’ve seen her outside a grand total of two times for no more than five minutes each time (To be fair, heat index has regularly been breaking 130 here, and dew point has been around 75 and up most days. It is a bit hellish.). ( She also laughed whenever I messed up at all and she noticed, but I’m chalking my annoyance at that up to narcissism.)I know literally nothing professionally about genetic retardation, so I can’t speak for it. Also, what kind of relative standards do you apply for privacy? It’s a little unnerving when you’re sitting in your room in the evening, and she just comes by and stares for five or ten minutes, saying nothing, and not responding to your confused inquiries. I’m not exactly a sensitive person that way, but I do have ADD, and it sure makes it hard to concentrate. Well, I said I wasn’t here to complain, but here I am sitting around bitching. Of course, there’s always the other shoe to drop. I often found myself thinking things like “Heh, she talks to herself out loud, she’s such a freak.” Then, of course, I realize that I talk to myself audibly quite a bit (when I’m alone). So really, she’s just more honest about it. That’s about all I have to say on this topic (I suck at writing conclusions, as you may be able to deduce from reading some of my posts). Obligatory epigram note: Yeah, I wasn’t joking about being out of reading material. Oh, and the title’s sarcastic. You seriously couldn’t figure that out?

TL;DR: Everybody’s a hypocrite. And if you’re pissed off about my use of retard/retarded, may I remind you that , firstly, that is still official medical terminology, and second, you may well want to get checked for oversensitive dumbfuckitis.