Let’s get some shit straight about conspiracy theory, bro

We need to talk man.

Every time we meet up you tell me if I watch the grainy video of Tower 5 on 9/11, I’ll see little men in black pajamas running up and down with plastic explosives right before the whole thing comes crashing down.

But I don’t see it, bro. Sorry. Never have. Know what I see? A burning fucking building that requires precision architecture to stay standing, which it can’t do when its integrity is shot all to fuck from a total structure fire that it was never designed to handle.

And look dude.

I know you think the International Monetary Fund, the Word Trade Organization, the Federal Reserve and the G-20 are just fronts for the Illuminati, a secret organization that is systematically destabilizing the globe in order to bring about an evil, totalitarian one world order.

But that’s not the way it works, dog.

I promise you for every great event that transpires as a result of some maniacal plot, there are a hundred that just fucking happen.

Yup. It’s that plain and simple. They just fucking happen, usually as a result of pure human stupidity and random chance.

More often than not you need to fear the evil you see right in front of you. The one that’s using lame ass euphemisms to make its despicable ideology more palatable, but in the end is not really working too hard to hide its demented agenda.

The human brain is wired to find patterns in everything, homeslice.

That’s why you might think swine flu is really a designer virus strategically released in Mexico to distract the world from something nefarious, but really, it’s just a pissed off planet trying to kill us as a species in the process of checking our evolutionary mechanisms.

I know, it’s pretty dope thinking there’s just one big guy who controls everything with his massive cock on the boat wheel of the world. That’s comforting. And you think maybe one day after you’ve perfectly triangulated all your conspiracy theories you’ll find the mastermind, and when you discover he’s a vampire you’ll kill him and assume his power before the great council makes you high king of the immortal overlords. Yeah.

I get it.

But that world doesn’t exist, killa.

Never did. Life might feel a lot more boring without all that stuff, I understand. In the trivial and mundane chores of your ordinary existence you might get depressed at the casual banality with which life is extinguished and created or empires rise and fall.

You might need to have a little existential crisis while you get over this shit, bro. It’s cool. I’ll be there for you while you work things out. I got your back like that.

But you do gotta work it out, dude, ’cause if you don’t stop bombarding me with all these dumbass conspiracy theories every time we talk, we gotta quit being homies, yo’. Alright?

-The Internet

I hope swine flu kills you all

There’s a retarded picture going around of a little kid licking the nose of a pig with the caption, “You little bastard, you’ve killed us all.”

First off, fuck this picture.

I’m tired of cats, gerbils, hedgehogs, and hamsters with dumbass captions sabotaging my Reddit front page.

Second, it’s supposed to be funny because none of us really expect the human race to perish from swine flu, so this ugly ass tow headed kid licking the nose of a pig is meant to remind us that life is cute and adorable and pigs are wonderful animals despite the panic.

I am not laughing.

It is my sincere wish that seven out of ten people who read this post experience the excruciating business end of H1N1.

Yes. You, and you, and you.

We need to grab our collective sac and face the facts:

Earth has grown obese with humans. It has a homo sapien spare tire riding its gut, and if there isn’t a rapid depopulation within the next five years — leaving the human species so decimated  that we can’t over fish, pump shit into the air, and dump waste into our rivers at the same self-destructive pace — the world won’t be habitable soon anyway.

Fact.

Please stop the hand wringing, the moaning, the bitching, the useless worry over self-preservation (god is not looking out for you because he does not exist, so you can stop praying too), and start calling whatever pandemic inevitably wipes out a good two-thirds of the world population what it is.

Nature’s version of gastric bypass surgery.

Knock off a subcontinent or two, the entire East Coast of the United States, all the Speedo wearing men in Europe and a whole bunch of chopstick users in Central Asia.

Who fucking cares? Humanity is like a weed. Give us a little water and we spring right back.

I’m not crying if a whole handful of helicopter parents and their pansy ass, allergy prone progeny perish.

Here’s a radical suggestion: Don’t wash your hands. Don’t cover your mouth when you cough. When you feel swine flu symptoms setting in, use drinking fountains and hang out in shopping malls.

Find a way to serve food at the local elementary school cafeteria and sneeze on the mac and cheese.

Invite your friends and neighbors over when you start feeling sick, and spike their food with the flu by dipping your cock in their soup.

Be at peace with this situation. In the long run, depopulation on a massive scale is good for us as a species. Yes, it is. To argue otherwise is to be a deluded douche nozzle who isn’t paying attention to science.

So go forth. Catch swine flu. Vomit blood into your toilet.

Then do us all a favor. Die.

This isn’t Wall Street

A strong and healthy press is one of the most important institutions to a free and open society. In this age of information and rapid expansion in human progress, when millions can come together around to world to create the greatest concentration of knowledge in history, it is shameful that we allow the watchdogs of progress to starve.

Journalists fill the margins of history for the most part.

The vast majority seek no great credit or lasting fame. They live in small towns. They’ve worked the same couple papers for the last fifteen years. They go to school board meetings. They interview the hospice nurse Joanne and they talk to Bob her dying charge with the nasal cannula, and this is one of the last great ways Americans are able to preserve their sense of community.

Because the information age has isolated us with the same rapidity that it has allowed our knowledge of the world to expand.

This isn’t about saving a few big players who keep their boys in the White House press room. This isn’t about one glorious act of investigative reporting that makes it to celluloid.

Though there’s a place for that kind of reporting and that kind of journalism in the world, too.

And this isn’t about preserving a few big newspapers chains. We could do with fewer of those and more locally owned operations in this country.

No.

This is about all the small town papers that don’t have the breathing room to let their reporters dig up the petty crimes, the nascent criminals masquerading as pillars of the community who left in the dark become monsters.

It’s about the embezzling of $200,000 by a school board that goes unnoticed, or the shattering silence that meets the cry for help of a marginalized border community as it is exploited by an unregulated dairy industry while the pesticide factory across the street pumps poison into its aquifer.

It’s about the modest reporter who records and exposes ineptitude in the daily act of asking questions, or the quietly intelligent city editor who encourages the hounds to dig around where there is a faint odor of malfeasance.

Keep the little monsters in their little ponds from becoming big monsters in big ponds. This is a good way to ensure we have a healthy society.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about institutions that are, “too big to fail.”

I’ll tell you what a few of those are: Journalism, education, law enforcement, and the military.

Journalists aren’t in it for the money. The few of us that are married don’t have children, because we can’t afford it. Going into PR or becoming the mouthpiece for a well-established non-profit, that pays. But it’s not journalism, and journalism is a craft. Few will want to learn it or pursue it honorably and ethically if it’s impossible to make a living while doing.

No one’s asking for a blank check or a free ride at the papers I’ve seen. This isn’t Wall Street. They’re just looking for a fair shake — from Google.

As someone commented on a recent column by Maureen Dowd, “Google should somehow partner with the content providers not out of charity but because they won’t have anything worthwhile to search for in a few years if they don’t fork over some of their profits.”

The newspaper industry and by proxy print journalism — paper and electronic — is dying an unnecessary death, like a man in an ER who is left to slowly perish because he does not have insurance.

And that’s a shame.

Wise Words

“The United States is committed to the world-wide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. I call on all nations to speak out against torture in all its forms and to make ending torture an essential part of their diplomacy.”

— George W. Bush in 2003

— George W. Bush in 2007, “The United States government does not torture”

See also: Quote For The Day, On Torture, We Elected a Reformer, Not an Avenger…a different take on torture, Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach Donald Rumsfeld. Impeech Condi Rice. Impeach Them Now, Torture timeline: when did we know it?, Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Gonzales Signed off on Torture, Releasing Memos, The only question that matters re Cheney and Lieberman, Pelosi, “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”, and Hypocrisy, Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?, The Unvarnished Truth about Torture, Who Would Jesus Torture?, and Time for Democrats to Forget Past and Lead.

On Slashing $100 Million

Earlier this week, Greg Mankiw jumped on the reports that Obama planned to ask his cabinet members to slash $100 million from their combined budgets:

Just to be clear: $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year–approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

On the surface, this is an easy and obvious judgment — $100 million is a penny in the well and we’ll never get to fiscal solvency if we don’t make dramatic budgetary changes!

But for anyone who has ever in their life worked at the federal government, this will come across as a rather naive assessment of the ease of slashing federal agency budgets. Budgetary cuts are fought tooth and nail with the kind of fervency that would make a Prussian bureaucrat explode.

I’ve had the pleasure of working at two federal agencies and I can personally attest to how difficult it is for department cuts to gain traction or simply reach the right people. I watched two managers turn beet red in a screaming match over a discrepancy of $500 in an over $5 million dollar budget. I’ve seen a $1000 budget ‘adjustment’ (hint: moving money from one project to another) take over a year to pass through the right hands to actually be passed (with the ‘besieged’ departments doing their best to block the cut by any means possible). Budget cuts seem to awaken the inner demon in every government employee, channeling an anger usually left for divorces and little league games.

I know $100 million doesn’t sound like much given the current economic situation and federal budget. But trust me, getting federal agencies to voluntary cut their budgets by $100 million will be a painful and agonizing process.

See Also: $100 million here, $100 million there, Disagreeing With Greg Mankiw, Mankiw: This Has to Be a Joke, Right?, How Big is a Budget Number?, Obama Asks You to Save $6, Obama Gets An “F” For First 100 Days (MSNBC Poll), $100 million is not a serious budget cut, Obama’s spending cuts!, Obama Is on the Right Track When It Comes to Eliminating Government Waste, Comment Of The Day, Perpetuating A Myth, Quote Of The Day — Obama Cost-Cutting, and The Wrong Way to Cut the Deficit.

[tags]greg mankiw, on cutting budgets, barack obama, $100 million, 100 million dollars, bureaucracy, economists, addressing budget cuts, federal budget, federal deficit, fiscal solvency, federal cuts, national government, government agencies[/tags]