This might be THE idiot move of the day:

Look, I have been supremely unconcerned about Tropical Storm Fay. It’s supposed to hit Jacksonville, possibly as a hurricane, on Thursday and I could care less. Unless you purposely go looking to get killed, a tropical storm or a category one hurricane isn’t going to kill anyone. You get yourself a hurricane kit and a generator just in case, and brace yourself for a lot of rain. We get these hurricane leftovers in Jacksonville every hurricane season, and every year it isn’t really a big deal. Sometimes there are some downed power lines, some fallen tree branches. But as long as you’re smart and pay attention to weather updates, you’re not really in any danger, unless of course you live at the beach or in a flood zone, and even then, you should be fine. Watch the news. Stay informed. If they tell you to evacuate, evacuate. If they don’t, then there’s likely minimum danger. However, that does not mean it’s a good idea to go kite surfing in the middle of a tropical storm. I mean, you really have to go looking for trouble to get hurt in the middle of a tropical storm. And apparently, this idiot thought tropical storm conditions were ideal for kite surfing. REAAAAL smart.

As for me, someone did leave a comment asking what I was planning on doing about Fay. The answer? Absolutely nothing. If I lose power I’ll just head to my parent’s house, who have a generator. There’s no reason to leave. I live in an apartment, so I don’t have to worry about bringing in lawn furniture and such. If I had a house, I’d just tape up my windows and bring in anything that could blow around, although I doubt it’s going to get that bad. We’ve had worse hurricanes here, and like I said, you really have to go out of your way to get hurt by such a mild storm. We deal with major thunderstorms here in Jacksonville on practically a daily basis as it is. So, OK, we’ll have a lot of rain and stronger winds than normal. That’s fine. As long as Jacksonville residents are smart and take the necessary precautions, there’s really no need to worry.

Just don’t go be a jackass and try to kite surf at the beach. You’ll definitely lose.

My Obama fatigue is starting to set in. But I can’t bring myself to slam the door shut on some of these. Get the drum & cymbals ready:

“Obama bowled a 37 because he did not want to knock over the pins. He wanted to negotiate with them.”

“We live in a world where a soliloquy by Shakespeare makes you a bigot, but a monologue by a vagina makes you enlightened.”

“Here is how liberals can understand the severity of 9/11. When the nose cone of the plane entered the building, it created a hostile work environment.”

“This race is the August Senator versus the guy who has been a Senator since August.”

“Obama is so young and naive that Bill Clinton is hitting on him.”

“Of course we use 40% of the world’s energy. We have plugs. We also have things to plug into the plugs.”

I recognize that last one as a slight mod to Sam Kinison’s classic about people living where the food is (strong language warning). Whatever. The lining of truth is what makes it funny. Every city of any size has a suburb and a financial district. Define pollution in any way you want to, and there’s going to be butt-loads more of it coming from the financial district. And yet you wouldn’t propose doing away with the financial district, would you. You wouldn’t ramble on about forcing the financial district to live like the suburbs, would you. Of course not. That would hurt the suburbs, sooner rather than later. Yet somehow when we talk about the resources used by the United States in relation to the rest of the world, and how Canada and Sweden are cranky at us for spewing carbon and eating meat, somehow we imagine merit in thoughts like these…

Obviously, I don’t have the talent required to make these into punchlines.

Sayet does. Many more like those. Check ‘em…

As you probably already know, Cassy’s going to be out this week. And this isn’t her writing now; she asked if I could come by and do some “guest blogging.” I’ve been asked this before, by others, a few times over the years. I’ll have to confess to having made a hash out of it, for the most part. But I agreed to it this time because I notice Cassy has a lot of people commenting over here, and you guys have a good track record in my book for raising new perspectives on things. To me, that’s what makes blogging worthwhile, is the meeting of people. Also, I have a little bit more time for it now, and I see she’s tossing up a post or two a day…quality over quantity, in her typical style. Keep the fires burning for a week? Seems doable. Hope I don’t disappoint too badly.

My name is Morgan K. Freeberg (LinkedIn profile: here; Blogger profile: here), and I’ll tell you right up front that I’m sick to death of talking about that guy Barack Obama. And that other hardcore left-leaning liberal John McCain. I can’t foresee what’s going to happen this week, but I tend to put a lot of effort into finding things worth talking about, that have nothing whatsoever to do with those guys. Trying to, anyway. Usually failing at it; it is an election year, after all. Events this week will probably force me to talk about those two chuckleheads again a few times. I dunno. We’ll see. Consider your input solicited, anytime. You can reach me with your praise, criticism and suggestions at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.

I started reading Cassy for two reasons. For one, she is a talented writer; I would put her right about on the line where “gifted” starts. It’s one thing to spell things right and get your grammar straight, it’s quite another thing to translate that into a bunch of words that can be read easily. If you’ve not tried to do either one of those, you can take my word for it. I succeed at the spelling-grammar thing, and fail at the easy-fun-reading thing, on a regular basis. Cassy is just about the furthest thing you can find from some comment on DailyKOS or some other left-wing site — you know what I’m talking about — where you have to read what’s been written, over and over again…three times, four times, five times…only to find out the whole point is to recruit you on some “Am I The Only One Who” bandwagon or “Can I Get An Amen Here” bandwagon.

The other reason I read her is far more important, though: Her understanding of what makes sense, and what does not, is exceptionally strong. She thinks for herself but still has a sense of decency, abiding by Isaiah 5:20, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”

This is an important point, one I think is worthy of clarification. Permit me the indulgence of rambling…

I’ll tell you why I think this is important. We have people who are “strong” and we have people who are “weak”; I do not mean, by this, that the “strong” people are people you’d want to have as your allies. I do not mean, by that word “strong,” anything even necessarily good. I’m talking about, in the disorganized, anarchistic hodge-podge of a process we call “life,” these are people whose ideas are likely to prevail. This is what Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt was talking about in the final scenes of that movie, where he says “I am weak.” His character made a critical mistake, confusing the ability to prevail in the trivial matters immediately under discussion, with the ability to survive; to achieve some measure of immortality. This is, I think, a mistake we all make at one time or another. So let me be clear on the meaning of “strong” here. I do not mean long-lived, healthy or robust. I mean, likely to prevail in the trivial matter immediately under discussion. Within an environment that is not dedicated to discerning validity or truth. This cosmetic, skin-deep sense of “strength.”

And then we have good people and evil people. Evil, tough as it may be to recognize at times, is fairly easy to define: It destroys, or preserves other things that destroy. So picture these divisions as quadrants within the human condition:

1. Strong-good people;
2. Weak-good people;
3. Strong-evil people;
4. Weak-evil people.

My point is, when we do not regulate ourselves, as we interact with each other this strong-evil quadrant begins to swell…the folks who are the subject of Isaiah 5:20, and can warp the prevailing sentiment to conform to their evil desires. We saw it with Bill Clinton lying, and all those “strong” people strongly getting in our faces, waggling their strong fingers at us — “It wasn’t a lie because it was indecent to ask him the question!” There are other examples of this, but listing them is pointless. That’s my favorite one. It’s my favorite because it was so ground-shaking and yet it took place in such a narrow frame of time.

In the summer of ‘98 we had one definition of “truth,” and by a year later we had an entirely different one. That’s a terrible thing. Don’t blame Clinton; the fault lies with us.

That is evil. It calls falsehood truth, and vice-versa. In so doing, it seeks to destroy that which creates or preserves, which is human intellect, and preserve that which destroys.

I view it as metaphorical — ancestral, I should say — for the kind of nonsense we’re enduring now. For example…we have to “responsibly redeploy” from Iraq. Deep down we all understand, I think, if the ideas underneath these tangled, complicated words were good for us, the words used to carry them wouldn’t be so tangled and complicated. We would say “just get out.” Well, we don’t say that because it is logically unsustainable to entertain that this might be a good thing to do. This is an example of the evil being strong; that idea, which we know is a bad one, has become a prevailing sentiment. There are pretty sound arguments being made that this will culminate in a disaster…yet the evil is strong…so into the cul de sac we go.

Popularity is on one side of the fence, reason and logic are on the other. That’s how it works, more often than not.

Here’s another one we have now: Saddam Hussein “did not attack us.” The only idea in that vein that could strongly bolster an argument, would be “Saddam Hussein was completely harmless.” Notice, nobody is saying that. Nobody is even debating that anywhere. The outcome of such a debate would be unhelpful to the strong-and-evil, so we leave it alone. But here, again, by being unspoken, that argument has been all-but-lost. The prevailing point-of-view is that taking any action there at all was a bad idea — and yet nobody is willing to sign their name to the idea that the area could have been safely left alone. Nobody except clowns like Michael Moore. (More on him later.)

The earth is getting warmer and we all have to sacrifice! Eh, actually the facts say no, it isn’t; and the proposed sacrifice isn’t connected with any solution, except by means of vague platitudes. The platitude mumblers don’t actually sacrifice much. They sacrifice as much as they have to, not to save the earth, but to stay popular, and become more popular. Which isn’t much. Changing light bulbs in your house is IN. Riding a bike to work is OUT. We pretend to be saving the planet, but we’re really just incorporating a new sense of fashion sense and saving the planet doesn’t have anything to do with it. Yet again, that message has stuck. The evil have become stronger than the good.

Why does this keep happening?

I’ll tell you why right now.

Because an important sub-contingent within the faction of “evil,” is narcissism. Good weighs consequences; evil, caring only about itself, charges on ahead. The advantage of momentum, therefore, goes to those who do not weigh consequences — the evil. The Isaiah 5:20 people. The conflict comes down to something resembling a game of “chicken,” in which only one of the contestants is wearing a blindfold. A force of nature wins out over a force of reason and intellect, every single time. Those who observe, analyze, weigh, discern and evaluate, end up being just like Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt; their arguments do not prevail in the matter immediately under consideration. They must settle for, perhaps, prevailing over the longer term. Losing the battle and winning the war.

There are reasons to think they will succeed at this:

Thing I Know #62. Throughout history, very little of note has been accomplished by people who made a paramount concern out of what others thought.

…but there are reasons to think they will fail. We have a presidential election, and the front-runner hasn’t done anything, hasn’t said what he’s gonna do about anything without flip-flopping later, lacks basic background knowledge about even mundane things like how many states there are, is backed up by a menagerie of America-hating asshole friends, and doesn’t even seem to be that bright. In short, he does everything he does, by showing off. He’s embarrassed himself quite often lately but overall, it still looks like this is his year. And what’s worse, is he’s sort of a vanguard, if you will, for all others who function this way: Sidestepping reasoned argument, and as a substitute, seeking to manipulate the prevailing emotional flavoring. Result — they stand for nothing. But they run everything.

They get their come-uppin’s eventually, more often than not. But in the meantime they do a lot of damage.

And so Cassy is, to me, the kind of “bloggress” we need now. You wad up some sloppy ball of nonsense and toss it at someone like her…even something that finds a smooth pathway from cranium to cranium in these unenlightened times, like, uh…”if you are not actively serving in Iraq, you are not allowed to say anything good about anybody who is.” Or, “one of the big obstacles women face in achieving equal status in our society, is sexual abstinence education in the schools.” Or, “‘real patriotism’ has to do with finding the most anti-American position of any issue, and consistently taking it.” Yeah, something like those. And Cassy is one of the few people around who have the balls to grab the emergency cord, yank it hard, and say out loud in a strong firm voice, “that’s crap.” Even though some supposed “majority” might say otherwise.

I should say a word or two about my own corner on this, because Cassy invited me to do so, several times. And it occurs to me, this would help you to understand where I’m coming from.

My spot is House of Eratosthenes, known colloquially as The Blog That Nobody Reads. We are a contributing blog to Webloggin. Some of the nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, grumble a bit when I call it that. But they seem to like whatever consistency ripples through it, and I like the kind of folks who have been attracted by the themes and stuck around because of the themes.

Those themes within House of Eratosthenes are multi-fold, and I’ll try to give each one of them it’s due without boring you to tears in the paragraphs below. The primary one is simply this: We point out things that “everybody knows,” that everybody knows for no better reason than that “everybody” already knows them. Nonsensical stupid things, things people bully others into believing but can’t state word-for-word, fastened on to any reputation worth defending. Things people “believe,” only because they’re worried about their continuing survival if they’re caught believing something different. Things like single mothers can raise children as well as married couples; if women run the world, war will become a thing of the past; God is fiction, we’ve evolved, there is no master design to our inner workings, and yet somehow we weren’t designed to eat meat. Things like, President Clinton told something that was virtually true because it wasn’t any of our business to ask him the question in the first place. Or that Saddam Hussein was a harmless teddy bear. Or that global warming makes it important for us to “come together” and “sacrifice” so we can “do this” — but it’s everlastingly trivial and unimportant and meaningless, somehow, to contemplate what exactly “this” is. Or womens’ equality has something to do with girls indiscriminately screwing a whole bunch of sub-standard guys.

Those things and more. I said, above, that this is Barack Obama’s year. As any thinking person knows, this is not a pinnacle of civilization or “progress,” but rather a low nadir of chaos. In our society, the intellectual “house” is a pigsty. It’s what you’d expect to find if you loaned out your house to a dozen frat boys for a month There are messes everywhere.

House of Eratosthenes is not here to clean up the messes.

It is here to point them out. Clean-up is an individual responsibility. We’re each responsible for keeping our “houses” in order, and clean the cobwebs, pizza boxes and dust bunnies out of them. There is no way for us to do this, short of respecting ourselves. We own the decisions we make, as individuals, whether we realize it or not. When we decide things in groups, we make a fustercluck out of it because the entity making the decision, the group, is distinctly different from the entity that owns it, which is the individual. Quoting Ayn Rand, in one of her snippets providing the greatest ease of understanding for strangers to the topic:

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

And so what we do, is to champion the decision-making power of the individual; and, just to keep our sense of humor about such a grave and complex matter of human relations — make fun of the decisions made in committee.

Because you know what? That’s exactly what history does.

All who would argue that point, might find it educational to review the story of why we use a funny name like “Eratosthenes.” We’re named after a guy who figured out the size of the earth about two centuries B.C.; the experiment is discussed in detail here. That’s because, when you ponder big questions like the size of the earth, and you don’t have any technology available to find the answer by conventional means, you have to arrive at some unconventional means. Therefore, you must think for yourself. Really think for yourself. We honor this experiment, because it is logically impossible in a whole fistful of ways for it to have been conceived in committee. The premise upon which it was based, alone — the earth might be round — would’ve been shot down in a heartbeat. Bah! Who are you to say? Scientific consensus, it’s flat! And so, what one guy managed to do a long time ago, seems to be something we can’t do anymore. It represents a style of thinking that is slowly asphyxiating.

Even the good decisions we make, nowadays — how did we make them? We got twenty or thirty highly-paid professionals in a room, wasted an hour or two, and then did what the “smartest guy” said we should do. Without inspecting it. So at it’s best, group-think really is just individual-think, without anyone taking responsibility for it.

There’s something else busted, too: The people who are best at doing that…the sitting in a meeting, pretending to pay attention, and then simply mimicking the “smartest guy”…are our “educated” types. And those are the ones who make the decisions about what viewpoints should prevail and what ones should not. Over the course of a lot of years keeping my mouth shut and paying attention, I’ve learned something funny about those people: Most of them aren’t really educated. Not functionally. They don’t have an education good enough to repeat Eratosthenes’ experiment. They’ll brag all day long how they went to graduate school and learned all about climatology; and yet, they can’t do trig. They can’t even carry a conversation too far, about how angles relate to distance. By the time you’ve finished the ninth grade, you should be able to explain the Earth-measuring experiment down to the smallest detail, and answer Q&A about it. That requires a commanding knowledge of geometry, powerful enough to enable you to figure out how things work. To come up with an experiment of your own — that requires the ability to produce a list of procedures, not simply follow one.

And if you’re running around spewing nonsense about Saddam Hussein being harmless just because that’s what the other guy said, this goes well beyond what you’re doing.

Among the secondary themes, one of the most popular ones is the girls in skimpy outfits. That started out being just for fun, but then we realized quickly that this secondary theme had a lot to do with our primary theme. We’d put up a picture of Erica Chevilar in her red bikini, the Google hits would spike, our traffic would zip upward for a little while, and then someone somewhere would start sounding off about all the things that are bad about nice-lookin’ girls in red bikinis, without being able to explain what’s bad about ‘em. And that’s our central purpose. The bullying. The “That’s Just Bad, Can I Get An Amen Here?” stuff. The nonsense. We’re going to make rules about girls wearing more clothes, and department store mannequins being thicker, so our girls don’t develop eating disorders. Sports bars are oppressive to women. Women who work in banks should be fired if they wear swimsuits for calendar shoots on their personal time…in the name of “womens’ choice.”

Another theme is lamentation and alarm over the various subtle and veiled attacks on plain old-fashioned manhood. This, too, dovetails in strongly with the primary theme of people not thinking for themselves. We’re a little bit chicken to harp on it often because some may misconstrue the message — but boys and girls are different, and men and women are different. Women are better at establishing and preserving protocol. Men are better at stepping outside of it, should the need arise. Part of thinking for yourself is keeping track of what’s moderate and what’s extreme, and part of the damage we’re doing to ourselves nowadays is creating established protocols for everything; as if, any human activity that isn’t cloaked in a rigid agreed-upon social convention, is some kind of unfinished task. One trope you’ll find in our pages on a recurring basis is (roughly paraphrasing here), “if you can’t state the idea without using the word ‘every,’ ‘never,’ ‘always,’ ‘all’ or ‘none’ — it isn’t a moderate idea.” In 2008, our standard of living is very high compared with the years past, and we have a tendency to identify toxins, strip them away, measure the residue, strip it away some more, and when we’ve gotten rid of it all call ourselves “moderates.” Carbon dioxide is a great example of this. The residue-toxin can also be something intangible, like probability. The likelihood your kid might scrape his knee on the playground; extremists are trying to get rid of that, and calling themselves moderates as they do so. There are other phony toxins. They all have to do with getting rid of the exigencies associated with life — therefore, they have to do with getting rid of life itself.

Thing I Know #130. The noble savage gives us life. Then we outlaw his very existence. We call this process “civilization.” I don’t know why.

Another theme is just a big ol’ hodge-podge of things that are “red state,” that we happen to like; anything that ends up being under attack by these evil-strong prevailing-viewpoint bullying-not-explaining people. Guns. Meat. Barbeque sauce recipes. Really big powerful internal combustion engines with multiple turbochargers. Beer, wine, practical jokes, James Bond movies and robots.

The list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the one really deadly thing we’re REALLY supposed to hate, without understanding why we hate it: The woman who loves her man and does nice things for him. We obsess over the seemingly meaningless gesture of bringing her man a cold beer — simply because that ticks off the feminists faster than anything, and they themselves can’t seem to coherently explain exactly why. But here in Northern California, the strong-and-evil feminists have emerged triumphant in molding the prevailing sentiment. We’re supposed to look with disdain down upon women who bring their men beer, and show some kind of fawning respect to women who do not. Even the fellas are supposed to do this. Therefore — men are supposed to be nice to women who are mean to them, and mean to women who are nice to them.

You know, prevailing sentiment that may be, but I don’t think that dog’s gonna hunt.

So who am I, to dare to point this out?

I’m just a middle-aged guy who writes long, windy, bloated essays like the one you’re reading now. I’m concerned about the “Strong Good” quadrant. It is anemic, and it should not be. As Edmund Burke said,

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

The primary concern there, is the primary concern here. When the good remain silent, everybody else slowly departs from the kind of thinking that energized Eratosthenes’ experiment two thousand years ago, the kind of thinking that powers “The Blog That Nobody Reads”; and they start to babble away with all their foolish nonsense.

Things you say for the purpose of getting attention. How quickly we are seduced when we say things to get attention. And that is the key reason why we call ourselves The Blog That Nobody Reads; as a reminder. If you’re still unclear on how that works, you could review the List of Things People Say To Get Attention, which is a little compendium I’ve been putting together of self-inflicted injuries, of the public relations variety, perpetuated by celebrities, politicians, authors of letters-to-Editors, and other folks drunk on their own glamor. It is not meant to be exhaustive; the point isn’t how long I can make such a list, the point is that there is always a fresh supply of such incidents rolling in.

People don’t think when they’re showing off. It’s a simple fact of human nature.

What else can I say by way of introduction. I’m often told a sign of a civilized society is one that gets rid of the death penalty. To me, a death penalty is one of the fundamental things a civilized society keeps in place.

What are my less popular views…

I think the word “totally” should be banned.

The best movie swordfight of the twentieth century was at the end of The Phantom Menace.

I’m in Dr. Savage’s corner on this whole autism business…mostly. Not completely. I think he committed a sin for being both a doctor and a shock-jock, demanding credibility for one of those roles, and then speaking in the capacity of the other. He was tactless; to date, I don’t think he’s suffered any punishment that he hasn’t deserved. But in my book, his point was a valid one and it’s overdue for some critical inspection. We are not thinking like Eratosthenes on our Four A’s (autism, aspie, AD(H)D and allergies). This is group-think at it’s most damaging and millions of children are suffering for our mistake. Some of them, perhaps permanently.

And I don’t smile for photographs. Ever.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. My resume is full of Information Technology stuff, twenty years’ worth. Most of my positions held, especially back in the younger years, had to do with software development. I’m afraid that’s why my treatises are a bit bloated — in software development, of course, if anything is left undefined, the whole damn thing ain’t gonna work. People ask if I’ll start a writing career; I like the idea of being able to do something for money, late in life, with one foot in the grave and writing is just about the only thing that would fit that. But I harbor no delusions about becoming a great one. Ever. You have to have empathy to do that. You have to anticipate what the audience already knows, and leave it out. Like lots of nerds, and children falsely diagnosed with the 4 A’s, I’m empathically-challenged. Hey, maybe someday some one will come up with some disorder label for that. Then nobody will ever expect a damn thing out of me. We could call it P.E.D.D. for Persistent Empathy Deficit Disorder.

Kiddin’.

I have no college education, and my high school GPA is medium-to-dismal. I’m one-time married, divorced for sixteen years and almost seventeen; I have a live-in girlfriend who loves doing things for me. And yes, I do things for her. I have one son who is eleven years old. He’s weird in all the ways I’m weird, and then some. The schools tell me he’s off-the-charts intelligent but they don’t know how to relate to him. That’s what a lot of people say about his Dad. I’ve pretty much figured out why they call the boy intelligent. Why people call me that, sometimes I have to seriously wonder.

I’m a South Park Republican, I think. I don’t like seeing religion used to inflict guilt, and I tend to part company with my more fundamentalist right-wing brethren on this point; becoming more horrified every single living year with the decisions that are made in groups, and how they are made, I just can’t bring myself to go to church anymore. Haven’t gone in quite some time. But the liberal hierarchy of “values” is really offensive and odious to me. I think that fits the definition, or overlaps with it anyway…

I hate conservatives, but I really f—–g hate liberals. — Matt Stone

I believe in God. I wasn’t too sure about Him until my son was getting ready to get born. I was encouraged, in those oh so civilized, sensitive, enlightened Clinton years, to take an active role in all tasks that had to do with the pregnancy. Darwin just left waaaaaay too much unexplained. So when the know-it-all atheists can get condescending and snooty, I can be condescending right back, and I can rattle off exactly what is left unexplained by the gnostic atheist viewpoint. No, I’m not talking about that silly creationist-banana thing. Better stuff than that. YES, there’s a God. It isn’t open to question, except for patently absurd, silly questions. The kind of surreal strange questions socially desperate and strong-but-evil people ask, not to learn about anything, but to show off and get attention.

I don’t imagine this leaves you hungering for more by way of introduction. But there’s always the possibility that I may have been guilty, again, of clarifying one thing, when the curiosity of some may have been focused on something else. So consider the following as reference material — take what you like, leave the rest:

Things I Know
Things I Doubt
Things I Don’t Get
What’s Wrong With the World?
The Oath of Eratosthenes
House of Eratosthenes Glossary
Yin and Yang
What Is a Liberal?
Seven Steps to Insanity

Anyway. Plum pleased to be here. Cassy says she’ll be back inside the week. In the meantime, I’m going to do my darndest to make sure, in the week ahead, this is the longest single thing you ever have to read outta me…

Germany wants to know.

Dozens of German politicians have tabled a new law to extend voting rights to babies, toddlers, children and teenagers.
The bill, which has won the cross-party backing of some heavyweight German politicians, would wipe away decades of “exclusion” and “discrimination” against minors, according to its supporters.

Currently the voting threshold in Germany is 18, with an exception in some states, where 16-year-olds are allowed to cast a ballot.

But that does not go far enough for the new law’s backers, who want to ensure voting rights from cradle to grave. If the bill gets adopted, babies will have the same powers to voice their opinion on government handling of macro-economic performance in a global downturn enjoyed by their parents.

Toddlers will be able to take a stand on issues such as whether German armed forces should be deployed abroad.

According to the head of the liberal Free Democratic Party ­ traditional coalition partner of Chancellor Merkel’s CDU party ­ the constitutional change would enfranchise 14 million people.

“Unfortunately in Germany, 17 per cent of the population, namely the children and adolescent, are excluded from political decision making,” said FDP chief Dirk Niebel.

“This is a situation we cannot accept any longer. We generally have to pay more attention to their interests.” The law is proposed as part of a review of voting rights which its champions hope will be in force for the federal elections in Germany next year.

“The Constitutional Court has ruled that election regulations have to be reformed anyway, so we should take advantage of the occasion to enforce children’s right to vote,” he said.

History is not his side however, with a similar motion failing to win parliamentary approval in 2005.

So, apparently this is not the first time this idiotic idea has been tried. Who in the world thinks that a four-year-old can understand the complexities of foreign policy? And of course, it is the German liberals wanting to let toddlers and children vote. They have the same logic, reason, and decision-making capabilities, after all, so I guess it makes sense.

Hat Tip: Moonbattery

Ah, San Francisco: the perfect little microcosm of liberalism in action. If you want to know what America would look like if liberals took over, then all you need to do is look to San Francisco, the place Nancy Pelosi calls home.

The newest example is the free ride service for illegal Honduran crack dealers, funded by city taxpayers.

San Francisco juvenile probation officials - citing the city’s immigrant sanctuary status - are protecting Honduran youths caught dealing crack cocaine from possible federal deportation and have given some offenders a city-paid flight home with carte blanche to return.

The city’s practices recently prompted a federal criminal investigation into whether San Francisco has been systematically circumventing U.S. immigration law, according to officials with knowledge of the matter.

City officials say they are trying to balance their obligations under federal and state law with local court orders and San Francisco’s policies aimed at protecting the rights of the young immigrants, who they say are often victims of exploitation.

Federal authorities counter that drug kingpins are indeed exploiting the immigrants, but that the city’s stance allows them to get away with “gaming the system.”

…

Barred by state law from sending drug offenders to the California Youth Authority and bound by a 1989 city law defining San Francisco as a sanctuary city for immigrants - meaning officials do not cooperate with federal immigration investigations - juvenile officials settled on an unorthodox strategy.

Rather than have the drug offenders deported, they have recommended that Juvenile Court judges and commissioners approve city-paid flights home to Honduras for the offenders with the aim of reuniting them with their families.

The practice, federal authorities say, does nothing to prevent offenders from coming back, while federal deportation legally bars them from ever returning. Federal officials also say U.S. law prohibits helping an illegal immigrant to cross the border, even if it is to return home.

…

Joseph Russoniello, the U.S. attorney in charge of the San Francisco area, said he was “flabbergasted that the taxpayers’ money was being spent for the purpose of ferrying detainees home. You have to have a perfect storm of dumb moves to have it happen.”

Must be nice to know that your hard-earned money is funding a free plane ride for crack dealers. Of course, this is all done in the name of the children, with city officials crying over the “abuse” and “exploitation” of the crack dealers who police suspect aren’t really juveniles, but adults masquerading as such. A city official, William Siffermann, says that this approach is being used because deportation could keep the lovely illegal immigrant drug dealers from becoming citizens in the future.

Well, duh! That’s the whole point! Why in the world would we want to make convicted drug dealers and criminals citizens? These aren’t the kinds of people we need to be welcoming into the country. We’ve got enough criminals as is without opening our arms to MS-13 gang members and Honduran drug dealers. These sanctuary cities seem to just love these criminals and want to make them citizens, though, for reasons I just cannot understand. Wouldn’t you normally want to keep these kinds of criminals out?!

Meanwhile, cases like this mysteriously keep popping up (emphasis added):

A suspected gang member charged with killing a father and two of his sons after a minor traffic incident has been ordered held without bail.
Twenty-one-year-old Edwin Ramos of El Sobrante is charged with three counts of murder that each carry the enhancement of being committed as part of a street gang.

He faces the possibility of life without parole or the death penalty if convicted.

Ramos is accused of killing 48-year-old Tony Bologna, and his sons Michael and Matthew after the Bologna’s car blocked Ramos’ car from making a turn onto a narrow San Francisco street.

Authorities say Tony Bologna put his car in reverse to let Ramos pass, and [Bologna] and his sons were gunned down.

Police say Ramos is a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, gang.

Immigration authorities say they believe Ramos is in the country illegally and could try to deport him once the case is resolved.

Aren’t sanctuary cities the greatest? Illegal immigrants are free to come to your city and trash it, without any interference from city officials. It won’t matter how many drugs you bring in or crimes you commit, because San Fran Nan & Co. will bend over backwards to accomodate you and to keep you there. They are, however, working tirelessly to make sure the military is completely eradicated from the city.

San Francisco: liberalism in action.

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin

Isn’t this just genius?

First it was a proposed ban on plastic bags.

Now, a member of the influential Madison Plan Commission wants to ban the restaurant drive-through — or at least restrict the ubiquitous symbol of America’s auto-centric lifestyle.

“Given the concern about all the carbon going into the atmosphere, I’m not sure we should be building more places for people to sit idling in their cars,” says Eric Sundquist, who was appointed to the citizen panel by Mayor Dave Cieslewicz this spring.

I think I’m in awe of the sheer brilliance of this plan.

Whoops! Did I say brilliance? I meant stupidity, as that is quite possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my entire life.

This plan came about because of a new Starbucks opening, and there was debate on whether or not to let the coffee shop have a drive-thru. What these idiots think they’re doing by wasting people’s time with pointless restrictions like this is beyond my comprehension.

But, as Van Helsing points out,

With enough restrictions, we’ll be forced to get out of our cars and go inside to get coffee, thus lowering carbon emissions, cutting gasoline usage, and striking a blow against “America’s auto-centric lifestyle.” Where would we be without authoritarian bureaucrats?

Without authoritarian bureaucrats, we’d be in America. With them, it’s generally called “Europe”. Let’s keep the two separate, hmm?

Christ Almighty. It seems like Britain sinks more into moonbattery every day. Stories like this make me think that Rachel is right:

A council has banned the term “brainstorming” and replaced it with “thought showers”.
Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent was accused of taking political correctness to extremes after instructing staff to make the change.

The move came as council chiefs feared the word brainstorming might offend mentally ill people and those with epilepsy.

The buzz term is often used by executives to generate ideas among their staff.

But memos have been sent to staff asking them not to use it and some have been given training which encouraged them to use the alternative of thought showers.

…

A spokesman for Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent said: “We take diversity awareness very seriously.

“The majority of staff have taken part in training and been asked to use the term thought showers.”

There’s not a lot of commentary I can add to this that you aren’t already thinking. I just want to know who the blind-deaf retard is who thought that “brainstorming” would offend someone. And if it does, then so what?! Get the hell over it! I am SO tired of stupid oversensitive people hyperventilating over the most ridiculous, asinine things. If you have an issue, here’s a tissue (a little Austin Powers for ya’). Does anyone seriously believe that this kind of ridiculous bullshit actually achieves anything? I just really have to wonder if the idiots pushing this crap are actually buying their own brand, because I can’t believe that they actually do.

Somerset County in Maine is getting themselves a new jail, and as such, are leasing out the old jail for anyone interested. PETA, being the brilliant strategists they are, thought it would be a perfect location for… a “Lobster Empathy Center”!!

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has sent a proposal to the Somerset County commissioners to lease their jail for the world’s first Lobster Empathy Center.

The central Maine county is constructing a new jail and has put the century-old jail in downtown Skowhegan up for sale. The Realtor handling the sale called the offer “likely a publicity stunt.”

“A prison is the perfect setting to demonstrate how lobsters suffer when they are caught in traps or confined to cramped, filthy supermarket tanks,” PETA wrote in a June 2 letter to the commissioners. “The center will teach visitors to have compassion for these interesting, sensitive animals while also commemorating the millions of lobsters who are ripped from their homes in the ocean off the coast of Maine each year before being boiled alive.”

Commissioner Chairman Phil Roy, who doesn’t care for lobster, was at a loss for words Monday afternoon.

“I’m shocked and I don’t know what to say. I didn’t realize Skowhegan was the coastal community PETA was looking for,” Roy said, with tongue in cheek.

As the crow flies, the distance from Skowhegan to Rockland, home of the Maine Lobster Festival and a lobster fishing port, is approximately 53 miles.

“The lobster capital of the state of Maine certainly isn’t here,” Roy said. He said it was odd that PETA would object to the jail conditions for lobsters but had never filed a complaint on behalf of the human inmates incarcerated there.

Ah, but PETA doesn’t care about humans. They only care about saving the animals. The humans can rot for all they care, as long as the cockroaches and rats that live there are comfortable.

The center will have interactive displays, where lucky, lucky visitors can have their hands wrapped in rubber bands which are required to stay on for the entire visit. They’ll then be crammed together into a disgusting glass tank for up to an hour. Kiddos will get stuffed lobsters that say “Lobster Are Friends, Not Food.”

Kind of reminds you of Finding Nemo, huh? “Fish are friends, NOT FOOD!”

Interestingly enough, PETA may have a pretty big stumbling block to overcome. The county wants to sell the property, not lease it. And considering they have 22 leads indicating interest, I’d wager that the county will probably go after the potential buyers before the potential leasers.

Slublog at Ace of Spades has the best perspective on this:

Interesting, sensitive animals? They’re sea cockroaches, for crying out loud. The only thing interesting about them is the variety of ways they can be cooked and served on a plate. And sensitive? There’s a reason they put those rubber bands on the lobster’s claws before they drop them in a tank together.

…

What’s really funny is that Skowhegan is about 53 miles from the coast. Anyone who has ever seen a lobsterman will understand why the PETA weenies are staying away. Lobstering towns are basically full of guys who look like cast members from “The Deadliest Catch” and they have minimal patience for people who want to shut down their livelihoods.

You know, maybe PETA could try out a “Hornet Empathy Center”. They could build a human sized replica of a hornet’s nest, complete with real live hornets! Then, the PETA wackjobs could peacefully commune with the gentle, humming insects all they want, since, like this exhibit, they’d be the only ones interested.

Stupid:

In his upcoming biography of Jesus, “Basic Instinct” director Paul Verhoeven will make the shocking claim that Christ probably was the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee.

An Amsterdam publishing house said Wednesday it will publish the Dutch filmmaker’s biography of Jesus, “Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait,” in September.

It will be translated into English in 2009, Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said. Verhoeven hopes it will be a springboard for him to raise interest in making a film along the same lines, she said.

The 69-year-old director, who also directed “Showgirls” — starring Elizabeth Berkley in one of the most panned films of the ’90s — and sci-fi action hits like “Total Recall” and “RoboCop,” as well as the sci-fi bust “Starship Troopers,” claims he and co-biographer Rob van Scheers have written the most realistic portrayal of Jesus ever published.

In addition to suggesting that the Virgin Mary may have been a rape victim, the book will also say that Christ was not betrayed by Judas Iscariot, one of the 12 original apostles of Jesus, as the New Testament states.

This kind of stuff is simply ridiculous. Is it insulting that someone would imply that Jesus was fathered by a rapist? Of course, but people are allowed to believe anything they’d like. What’s annoying about claims like these is that these idiots have absolutely no evidence to back it up. It’s about as credible as the idea that there was a spaceship being dragged behind the Halle-Bopp Comet. He just decides that this is how it maybe happened and call it “the most realistic portrayal” EVER.

Um, sure, buddy. And Starship Troopers and Showgirls were GOOD movies.

Hat Tip: Newsbusters

What happens when you get pulled over for a traffic stop, don’t comply with the officer, tell him to “do what you gotta do”, swing at the officer when he tries to arrest you, and then turn around and try to walk away?

Well, this happens.

Liberals will probably get their panties all in a bunch over this, of course, but this guy had it coming. You cannot swing at a police officer and not get tasered — not to mention walking to a vehicle filled with unidentified people. How does the officer know what his intentions are, especially after this former football player just swung at him?

I don’t care if the police officer is wrong in the situation (and there hasn’t been a video I’ve seen yet where I’ve thought he has been). When he tells you to comply, you comply. If he tells you not to walk away, don’t walk away. When you are about to be arrested is not the time to fight the officer — if he really is in the wrong, there’s a time and place to do so, and most of these idiots we see getting tasered, if not all of them, don’t seem to be able to understand that.

He’s got only himself to blame.

Hat Tip: Hot Air