Political Theater Insults My Intelligence

In the race to the 2016 election for President of the United States, two major stories have been brewing as of late:

1- Conservatives disowned Donald Trump because of his most recent misogynist commentary.

2- Joe Biden is contemplating a presidential run, in no small part because his late son reportedly encouraged him to do so.  (How convenient that his son’s wishes became public!)

I would like to say categorically that both news stories are a load of BS.  Let’s review, shall we?

Mr. Trump is no newcomer to the world of misogyny.  The GOP knew about him before he was allowed on stage at last Thursday’s debate.    I could be kind of cynical and claim that they’re turning their backs on him now because it makes them look good in the face of Democratic assertions that they’re pursuing a “war on women.”

Stupid is as stupid does. (Photo credit: Michael Vadon)

Fortunately for you, I’m more cynical than that.  Right now, Hillary Clinton is widely assumed to be the eventual Democratic nominee.  And then there’s Mr. Trump who claimed at the first debate that his financial contributions to Mrs. Clinton have allowed him to call her when he likes and get whatever he wants from her.  If I’m the GOP, I want Trump around as long as possible but not as part of my organization.  It used to be the case that a third-party run by Trump would have cannibalized the campaign of any Republican candidate in 2016.  Now, however, keeping Trump relevant means the GOP nominee would have a very simple way of painting Mrs. Clinton as being under total sway of the wealthiest Americans.  Just play that debate video over and over as a political commercial and the Republican nominee most likely wins.

(Un)fortunately, Mr. Trump isn’t smart enough to realize that he undid his “leverage” over the GOP with that comment.  On the other hand, he might get his leverage back by eventually making comments about Hillary Clinton’s vagina.  Since Bill Clinton always seemed to be interested in every vagina other than his wife’s, comments by Trump might finally succeed in making her likeable.

Scary thought, huh?

Of course, Mrs. Clinton is not a sure thing to win the nomination.  DJ Gaffemaster Biden may defeat her.  Or maybe he won’t have to.

Let me ask you all a question: does anyone other than the Clintons seriously believe that the NSA has been keeping surveillance on all Americans EXCEPT Hillary Clinton?

Here’s a second question:  does anyone seriously believe that the Commander-in-Chief hasn’t contacted the NSA (part of the Department of Defense) to find out about all of the security issues that are presently being debated?

If Hillary Clinton did something that would make her unelectable, Obama and Biden are two of the only people who would know about it already.    The House investigation of Clinton is probably just political theater that’s trying to get information publicly that they already have.  And Biden’s preparations are probably a political necessity whether he likes it or not.   A credible candidate on the Democratic side (and Biden is credible in spite of everything) keeps the looniest of the loonies from winning a presidential election by default.  Sorry, Mr. Cruz.

Moral of the story: you don’t get the real story.  You only get the narrative that covers up whatever information cannot be released to the public at the present time.  Even if my speculations about Trump and Clinton are wrong, it’s still the case that all sorts of backstage shenanigans are more consequential than anything you “learn about” on the news.

Stop being a gullible sap.

Lethal Injection Insults My Intelligence

In recent years, the United States has witnessed numerous challenges to capital punishment on the basis of the method (lethal injection) being cruel and unusual punishment.  I have no interest in arguing over the maximum appropriate threshold of pain during an execution; the courts are already providing guidance on that matter.

“Don’t worry. The needle is painless.” (Photo credit: Armin Kübelbeck)

In fact, I tend to be suspicious of the death penalty because people are idiots and juries are made out of people.  Courtroom arguments have to be made at the average idiot’s comprehension level and that doesn’t exactly bode well for getting a good result.  I’ve even faced questioning for jury duty and one lawyer was clearly trying to screen education out of the jury pool.

But that’s beside the point.  As long as we have a death penalty, it ought to be performed within the bounds of common human decency.  With that in mind, I would like to propose several alternatives to lethal injection that would give convicts more of a warm and fuzzy feeling on their way out of this world:

1- Bring the convict to a garage.  Start up a car and close the garage door.  People die like this at home all the time without realizing how much carbon monoxide is building up, at least until they find themselves looking up from a very comfortable coffin.

2- The guillotine was quick, effective, and cheap.  I cannot overemphasize “cheap” because so many states still face budgetary problems.

3- We all know that the appeals process can take decades.  We also know that bacon flavored desserts have become immensely popular.  Because of this, I suggest placing convicts on a strict diet of bacon grease ice cream from the moment they reach death row.  If the conviction is overturned, they can be given free medical care; if not, their heart attack should arrive by the time their legal journey ends.

4- Marijuana, LSD, crystal meth, booze.  All at once.  If you’re clueless enough to kill people, you’re probably clueless enough to think that this execution method sounds like a party.

5- Toss convicts from the Empire State Building and turn the event into a carnival.  People could place wagers on how far the blood will splatter and in which direction.  Guards could even paint a bull’s eye on the ground and play a game in which the convict tries to land on it.

As you can see, there’s no good reason to continue with the ever-so-controversial drug cocktails being delivered by way of a nasty little syringe.  Until such time as we eliminate irrevocable punishments that could be wrong, we ought to at least have a little fun with them.  “Fun,” by definition, cannot be cruel and unusual punishment.

And please pass me a bacon doughnut.

Restraint Insults My Intelligence

No, people… not “Restraints Insult My Intelligence.”  I’m not that crazy.

But, seriously, I do believe that the time has come to redecorate this blog.  I’ve been using the current design since April 2014 and it has this pesky little inability to be seen as-is on mobile devices.  Now that mobile users are the vast majority, I see no point in spending money to have a design that no one can view.

Unfortunately, I still have my paid upgrade until December.  I guess that means I’ll be having some fun.

Keep calm and don’t insult my intelligence.  The new design will follow boldly in the footsteps of what came before, or something like that.  In other words, the design will be more recent than the earlier versions.

I have been using the San Kloud theme since I started this blog back in May 2013.  Here’s the original background image I used with gray (yes, boring old gray) text boxes:

The San Kloud theme has a header menu plus a cartoon cloud that contains the blog title. This background image was designed to make the menu invisible and the cloud look like an oval. It worked.  Would you want to try reading a menu against this image?

That image is light, bright, cheerful, and obviously perfect for a blog about things that insult my intelligence.  Nevertheless, I decided to darken things up a couple of months later:

This was a saved file I didn’t delete. My first background image was photo edited from this one, not the other way around.  Actually, I think this was originally step six along the way.

So instead of white tread marks, I now had dark tread marks.  To get these images, I had tortured a close-up scan of an article of clothing.  With all those tread marks, you might think it was underwear.

Anyway…

The blog most of you have come to know, love, admire, and dream about has looked like this for over a year:

Those lines at the top left are remnants of the theme’s header menu. Eliminating those was one of the last things I learned to do with CSS.

Now, you may have noticed that I kind of skipped 5-6 months in my little chronology.  That was this blog’s psychedelic green period.  Instead of a bright blue (with orange borders ) header and text boxes, I used neon green with blue borders.  And the background image looked like this:

Pass the weed, man.

Despite the drug humor, that image has a clean origin: it was a resized and recolored scan from a box of bath soap.

And now that you’ve seen a little of this blog’s history, you may be wondering where the design is going next.  Well, I ain’t telling.  The design should be up sometime in the next week and hopefully it will be good enough that I’ll want to keep it beyond December.

I even remembered enough CSS to get a lot of things programmed already.  Who says that the unemployed can’t learn and retain new tricks?

And be forewarned: don’t expect much restraint in the new design.  As you can see, we don’t do restraint around here.

Feminists Insult My Intelligence

Everybody loves feminists but nobody loves feminists more than the feminists love themselves.  Unfortunately, most feminists are also highly educated and equally resistant to common sense.  This results in some dubious psychological endeavors.

Just to be clear, I do not intend to rehash accusations (such as those by Phyllis Schlafly) that assert an inability among feminists to engage in rational thought and argumentation.  I spent a long time in a Ph.D. program and learned that feminists are quite capable of high-level intellectual endeavors.  It just seems that they also have this unexplainable fear of revealing this capability in public.

So what brilliance do most people get to see instead?

If a feminist finds your opinions unworthy, she (or he) is rather likely to simply turn her (or his) back and refuse to interact with you.  Let’s review, shall we?  Feminists believe that they can convert you to their opinion merely by depriving you of the pleasure of their continued presence.

We all know how well that works.  When someone starts acting like an insufferable asshole, I’m always willing to do anything possible to get them talking to me more.  Aren’t you?

Feminists aren’t very good at applying the lessons of Pavlov’s dogs. (Photo credit: Casey Bisson.)

On the flipside, they’ll often start interacting with you more when you start hinting at opinions that correlate more with their own.  When they do this, they think they’re using advanced psychological techniques to move you into their corner (or something like that).  The halfway intelligent person will respond to this by toying with the unwitting feminists.  You raise their hopes, then you let them down, and raise their hopes, and let them down, and on and on and on because many feminists aren’t bright enough to realize that non-feminists can recognize their tricks.

As for me, a very old friend recently told me that no one can be her friend unless they’re a feminist.  I’m not sure whether she thought I agreed with her but it’s telling that she sprung this on me while I was in her car as she drove us through the middle of nowhere.  I complimented her on her hair instead of  answering her comment and was able to avoid being stranded.

(Contrary to popular belief, feminists do care about their appearance.)

I’ll close this ever-so happy and enlightening post with an additional message to all the feminists who might still be reading this:  I love all of you.  The world is a better place because of all the diverse opinions out there.

Blogger’s note: My opinions veered closer to feminism until I went to graduate school and met real feminists.  Suffice it to say that those women (and men) inspired me to change my ways.  Who says you can’t find moral enlightenment at a secular university?

 

Beautiful Weather Insults My Intelligence

Today is a beautiful day.  I think I’ll stay inside.

Today is a beautiful day! (Photo credit: David Hagwood)

Today is a beautiful day.  The sun is shining.  My computer chair is very comfortable.

Today is a beautiful day.  The pond has come alive with frogs and turtles and ducks.  I think I’ll cook something.

Today is a beautiful day.  The pond water is warm and the children splash around playfully.  The mosquitoes have arrived!

Today is a beautiful day.  Mother Nature has a sense of humor.  The pharmacist has drugs.  My lemonade is tasty.

Today was a beautiful day.  My computer protected me from mosquitoes.   (The technology has no bugs.)

Tomorrow will be a beautiful day.  It will be cool.  It will be cloudy.  The noisy children will be at home with their mosquito bites.  I will have the pond to myself.

Exhaustion Insults My Intelligence

This is an odd time to celebrate the two-year anniversary of this blog. I haven’t been around much lately and I’ve more or less let my second blog languish.

These days, I am tired.  My job search has continued for longer than you could imagine and I’ve recently encountered a few other circumstances that have contributed to my energy drain.  I started this blog to vent frustrations and as a humorous diversion for myself but it’s harder to get into a humorous writing mood these days.

A gentle collapsing. (Photo credit: CrossfitPaleoDietFitnessClasses)

Everything will improve once we elect Rick Santorum as President.  (Fortunately, the humor isn’t entirely gone…)

Despite everything, I still manage to submit job applications and fulfill the obligations for my volunteer commitments.  Yes, that’s plural now.  It only took a few years to make that happen.  (See here for more details.)  I am also still able to eat without vomiting.

I can’t remember the last time I had the flu…

And the volunteering keeps me sane.

However, I do remember starting this blog.  I would look at bloggers who had posted their follower count and was astounded at the ones who had reached the 800-1000 range.  And this week I surpassed the 3000 mark.  WordPress doesn’t offer any nifty little digital trophies once you get that high… which would be okay if they offered a cash award instead.

Cheap bastards.

And so, as I look ahead to year three, I see an eventual continuation to year four.  Sometimes the best thing you can do is to keep going no matter what. That is the WordPress Way.

He who collapses is food for vultures.

Girl Scouts Insult My Intelligence

I’ve been struggling for the past several weeks.  You see, I came up with a better idea for my last post right after publishing it.  The problem is, my “better idea” will be even harder for people to stomach than “Dead Puppies Insult My Intelligence.”  In the interest of artistic freedom and general bad taste, I have decided to publish that other idea now.  If you are capable of being offended, please do not read any further.

Since these girls are no longer girls, I guess the image is safe to use here. (For copyright information, go here.)

The following is a public service announcement from the writer of this blog.

If you or your loved ones happen to discover the flattened carcass of a girl scout lying on the road, please do not touch, eat, or otherwise disturb it.  God put roadkill on this earth so that the flies and vultures might prosper, for He loves the smallest and ugliest creatures on this earth as much as He adores the cute little girl scout.  The car that squished the girl scout is an instrument of His will.

God Bless Chrysler.

In keeping with the girl scout’s theological purpose, please wait for the county’s professional sanitation workers to properly dispose of her.  It is government’s proper role to serve as God’s right hand and clean up the mess He occasionally makes, no matter the odor you must endure while waiting, no matter how many children start weeping upon seeing the dead girl scout, no matter whether the girl scout would have consented to being part of this spiritually bureaucratic undertaking.

And while you wait, please be so kind as to remove the girl scout’s poo from the sidewalk.  It is unpleasant to look at.

Moral of the story: Most shocking blog posts can be made even more cringe-inducing by replacing the main character with a girl scout.

Dead Puppies Insult My Intelligence

The following is a public service announcement from the writer of this blog.

If you or your loved ones happen to discover the flattened carcass of a puppy lying on the road, please do not touch, eat, or otherwise disturb it.  God put roadkill on this earth so that the flies and vultures might prosper, for He loves the smallest and ugliest creatures on this earth as much as He adores the cute little puppy.  The car that squished the puppy is an instrument of His will.

God Bless Chrysler.

In keeping with the puppy’s theological purpose, please wait for the county’s professional sanitation workers to properly dispose of her.  It is government’s proper role to serve as God’s right hand and clean up the mess He occasionally makes, no matter the odor you must endure while waiting, no matter how many children start weeping upon seeing the dead puppy, no matter whether the puppy would have consented to being part of this spiritually bureaucratic undertaking.

And while you wait, please be so kind as to remove the puppy’s poo from the sidewalk.  It is unpleasant to look at.

No dead puppies to see here. Please move along. (Image credit: Adam Gerard)

Bad Writing Suggestions Insult My Intelligence

I have nothing interesting to say today.  Call it writer’s block if you like.

Of course, people often say that the best way to overcome writer’s block is to sit down and look for inspiration from whatever words manage to come out of you.

Okay, I’ll try it.  Here’s the random smattering of ideas that are running through my head:

Sleep is fun.

Pollen is not fun.  Achoo.

That’s a very nice stapler sitting over there.  I forgot I had it.

I believe that worms have a right to dig holes in the lawn until a chicken crosses the road to eat them.

And now for something completely random:

Rand Paul looks like he was born with a spittoon on his head.

The Greek gods are dead because, as it turns out, feta cheese is carcinogenic.

Mogwai!  Mogwai!

I’m done now because I still have nothing interesting to say today.

Your Blog Insults My Intelligence

I would like to welcome the new bloggers who are reading this post.  I’m sure you’re all excited to start writing and build a large and loyal audience.  The thousands of you starting today all believe that you have something special to offer the blogosphere: unique insights, original jokes, or perhaps an especially poetic way of writing that will win you the adoration of people across the world.

By now, you’ve probably noticed that your blog’s traffic statistics aren’t what you had hoped for.  Since you’re searching in vain for that magic bullet that will generate the awestruck readership you desperately feel you deserve, I’d like to share a very important secret from the blogging world:

Your blog sucks.

I’ve seen your jokes before and your personal stories have been told hundreds of times by people with superior storytelling skills and writerly competence.  Of course, your tales do contain one unique element: instead of choosing a fun name for your dog, you call him Fido.

I see little reason why anyone should want to read your work, unless of course they’re reciprocating for the visits you give them.  Is that what you dreamed of?  Cashing in (minus the cash) on other people’s sense of obligation?

The trophy is clip art from Power Point. As you can see, I’m trying to be as vapid and unoriginal as you are.

And then there are the unfortunate people who work for WordPress and other similar companies.  The only way they can stay in business is to convince gullible saps like you that your work has value and deserves the added oomph of paid upgrades and services.

Of course, you’ll quit within a few months… after buying a year-long upgrade.  For that, I thank you.  Like people who buy a gym membership who actually use it, I benefit from the reduced costs associated with using a service that many people pay for in advance and quickly give up on.

The less you write, the less bandwidth WordPress has to pay for.  That means I get more free goodies.

I would also like to remind you that today is April Fool’s Day.  You are a brilliant writer, just like everyone else who has a blog.  You should also know that the various blogging companies make no attempt to manipulate your blogging self-esteem and/or comfort in an attempt to maximize their profits.  They exist for your happiness.

With that in mind, I’d like to close with a song:

If you’re happy and you know it, beep beep boop
If you’re happy and you know it, beep beep boop
If you’re happy and you know it
Then your face will surely show it
If you’re happy and you know it, beep beep boop

Christmas Trees Insult My Intelligence

Christmas should be every day, sort of. (Photo credit: Mount Pleasant Granary)

I came home last night to find a festive bundle of decaying holiday joy shining through the window of my neighbor’s house.

Too many punchlines come to mind.

Because of this, I would like to wish everyone a Merry March Madness and present a list of the top ten reasons you finally need to get rid of that Christmas tree:

10- Unlike the lovely holiday sweaters you received, you can’t regift the tree without investing a lot of time and money into the effort.

9- If you wanted to arrange dried pieces of firewood so that they could achieve inferno status in minimum time, you couldn’t do much better than to build a Christmas tree shape.  And by the way, the warranty on those lights you bought in December has expired.

8- In December, you said “we shouldn’t let secular distractions infringe on a religious holiday.”  Now that Easter is coming, I’d like to return the favor.  We’re all going to notice your tree and not your religious exhortations.  (On the other hand, maybe the tree can last a few weeks longer…)

7- The electricity company’s Christmas special is no longer running.

6- Unlike the frankenturkey, your tree cannot be revived.

5- What fun is a Christmas tree if it no longer has needles for you to clean off of the floor?

4- That’s not penicillin growing at the base and your dog will get sick if he decides it’s tasty.

3- You could shove the top of that tree up an angel’s underside because the angel isn’t real.  Your pet rabbit is getting worried that you’ll try to change the tree’s theme for Easter.  Expect a revolt.

2- That is a tree, not a bush.  If you wish to display political advertisements for Jeb, this is one of the few methods that makes you look less intelligent than the Tea Partiers.  At least the Tea Partiers recycled their trees.

1- No one is bringing you any gifts.  Get over it.

Reading the Stories Insults My Intelligence

These days, I rarely write a new post on two consecutive days.  However, you may know of some critically important international crises that deserve immediate attention.  We must discuss them now and we must discuss them well.

Well…

Because the situation’s so urgent, we must visit the most respected informational source in existence: Playboy.

And guess who’s being featured in Playboy…

Confront your fear of Playboy. I dare you. (Image credit: Valstein0)

No, not Miley Cyrus.  Playboy is an intellectual publication and only produces material to engage the most significant of minds.  That said, you surely will not be surprised to discover Dick Cheney’s picture if you click on this link.

Actually, you’ll find three pictures of the former Vice President… and he consented to this.

Your dreams have finally come true.

Side note to readers:  As a man, I feel the natural obligation to explain how I ever-so-innocently happened upon the Playboy website.  I clicked on a headline and I didn’t realize that such a scandalous publication would be involved.  I cast thee to Hell, Playboy, and I hope my female admirers are satisfied with that gesture of solidarity with whatever it is I’m showing solidarity with.

I really did visit Playboy to read a story.