doit, doit now!

The federal government sucks. The Bush Administrations’s attempts to rewrite history (lying about WMD’s and then saying they didn’t lie about them, acting as if Iraq had anything at all to do with 9/11, the list goes on…) has reached a ricidulous crescendo this week. This administration loves to eschew facts for talking points and soundbites, and the idiotic people who watch Fox News and listen to Rush and Dr. Laura and all of the rest of the we’re-going-to-hell-so-let’s-just-make-it-hellish-for-everyone-else crew just start agreeing with them after a while because it’s all they hear. These people do no critical thinking, they don’t get multiple viewpoints — they get one side of the story and they hear it so often that it changes them from thinking, rational people into idiotic automatons who simply repeat what they are fed.

Enough with Fox News already. If Fox News is your primary source of knowledge about what’s going on in the world you really deserve the massive shit sandwich you’re fed every day by our government. Fox News lies over and over every day (see Media Matters for America for near-real-time coverage of the lies they spew, complete with factual backup), and when you hear enough of those lies you start to believe them. There’s a reason Rush Limbaugh calls his followers dittoheads, and it’s because they parrot what he says without ever doing any research themselves or really thinking about what they are hearing. The world is bigger than Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter and their ilk. If that’s where you get your news on a daily basis consider yourself part of the problem with the world.

Fox News is really spelled “Faux News.”

Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard was even more blunt.

“Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area,” he said on CBS’ “Early Show.” “Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot. Give me a caring idiot. Give me a sensitive idiot. Just don’t give me the same idiot.”

From WWLTV, a local New Orleans television channel.

It’s been four days since the levee broke and New Orleans was destroyed. That’s four days of 90-degree weather, no food, no water, murder, looting, disease and death, and meanwhile Congress has been talking about ending their recess a few days early (hey, the life of a Congressman is rough, they need vacations, too). Four Senators, two Democrats and two Republicans, managed to pass a bill for $10 billion aid for FEMA and finally, an hour or two ago, some House membbers finally sauntered in to the Capitol and passed their version. Bush will finally get around to signing it tonight.

So much for a “Culture of Life.” It’s convenient to say that to get the support of the Religious Rong, but when it comes time to save the living it’s apparently only for clusters of cells in a womb. If there is one good thing that could come out of this it might be that the pendulum will swing away from lies, fear, deceit, and death, and back towards human rights, progress, truth, and life.

Meanwhile National Guard troops have finally started bringing in supplies to the people of New Orleans. There are estimates that 50,000 people are stranded on rooftops alone, which is to say nothing of those at the Convention Center and elsewhere.

The conditions there are just heartwrenching.

This account of what the conditions are like on the ground in New Orleans is simply staggering. Armed soldiers herding people like cattle, pointing guns at them when they try to approach, others dropping supplies from such a height that they break when they land… What is going on down there? This is unbelievable.

May God have mercy on the people of the South. And may she have mercy on the souls of our “leaders.”

The facts surrounding the horrors in front of us loom far too large to be ignored:

• As of today the illegal, unjust, unwinnable war in Iraq has cost us at least 1,900 American lives and the lives of countless innocent Iraqis.
• The Bush administration lied to the nation and to the world about the reasons for the war:
  • The Bush administration had plans to invade Iraq long before 9/11 and lied about that.
  • The Bush administration falsely tied the Iraqi government to 9/11 and Al Qaeda when there was no connection and thus lied about that.
  • The Bush administration knew there were no weapons of mass destruction and also lied about that.
• The Bush administration cut taxes for the people with the top .1% of the incomes in the US and yet lied to people with incomes of $25,000 or lower (which the U.S. Census says is around 80% of the country) by telling them that they would somehow benefit from these cuts, when in fact many of their tax burdens increased.
• The Bush administration, with the cooperation of the neocons in Congress, has run up a huge deficit (which is being financed almost entirely by China’s buying of government bonds) that they had no way of paying for.
• The cost to us taxpayers is already at several hundred billion dollars and is estimated to eventually run up to $1 trillion or higher if the war ever ends. This is of course to say nothing of the immeasurable cost of human lives.
• The Department of Defense is saying that the US will have to continue its occupation of Iraq for at least 4 more years and will have a large presence there for at least a decade. Since the insurgency shows no signs of abating this means that hundreds, if not thousands, more Americans and who knows how many innocent Iraqis will die in Iraq.

The war was a lie. If you believed it for a moment you were listening to goddamned Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh or Bill Frist or Ann Coulter or any of these other disgusting people. It was built on lies and deceit and people are dying at this very moment because of it, and now they are not only dying in Iraq, but they are dying in America.

With Katrina we are facing an unprecedented national disaster, and there are not enough National Guard to fulfill their actual role of Guarding the Nation since they are all over in Iraq fighting in that horrible war. If this war was not happening the domestically-stationed military would be home, as it should be, and we would have the full resources of that military to bring to bear on this tragedy. Instead there are innocent Americans dying in New Orleans because the soldiers, helicopters, ships, and vehicles that would normally be available to service the people they are actually meant to protect are instead over in Iraq where they have no business being.

This administration is disgusting, and if you chose to support it you should be ashamed of yourself.

Stop watching Fox fucking News and start thinking for yourselves.

This is sort of what our house looked like shortly after I joined Amazon Prime. Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Kevin is around to smack me out of my hyper-OCD hoarding syndrome.

President Bush has recently endorsed so-called “Intelligent Design” theory and has stated that he thinks it should be taught alongside evolution in our schools. No matter that Intelligent Design is not science. Science, as most people besides Intelligent Design proponents know, starts with a hypothesis, continues with an experiment, and ends with a conclusion. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then goes and looks for ways to prove the conclusion.

This means it is not science. End. Of. Debate.

But science isn’t my main concern. My main concern, like President Bush’s, is that alternative theories be taught to the children of the United States (SAVE THE CHILDREN!!!!). My own particular religion, the First Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, represents yet another way to describe the creation of the universe, and the scientific establishment has just been shutting us out! The Flying Spaghetti Monster of course created the Universe by using His Noodly Appendage. I’m asking you all to support Him by forwarding this Open Letter to the Kansas School Board to make sure that all competing theories of the creation of the Universe are taught alongside evolution in our schools. And buy a t-shirt while you’re at it.

A company has developed a machine that vaporizes basically any form of alcohol so you can simply breathe it in. There is a “built-in safety device” that makes the machine take 20 minutes to process about 1/2 oz. of liquor (which is 1/2 a shot for those of you less-versed in mixology). Someone like me, with a penchant for taking things apart and screwing with them, could probably override it to make it absorb a bit more alcohol the “safety device” allows, but at $299 a pop for the single-user version I am not about to try. $299 is at least a case of Pine Ridge 2001 Rutherford Cabernet!

Anyway, since alcohol passes directly through mucus membranes (which is why you can dissolve other drugs in some alcohol, put a drop or two in your mouth, and get fairly instantaneous effects from the dissolved inebriant) the process dosn’t dump many calories into the body, nor does it dehydrate like actually drinking alcohol. The company says that it even prevents hangovers.

Basically it allows you to get drunk without drinking, and thus without any of the messy physical effects that drinking alcohol imposes, though I am sure all of the messy behavorial effects are untouched.

In an April ‘05 Miami Herald interview, Peter Cressy, president of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, was quoted as saying “This would strongly suggest that the purpose of this device is to get a buzz. We don’t think getting a buzz is a good idea. . . .” (emphasis mine).

I’m sorry. “We don’t think getting a buzz is a good idea” coming from the president of the DSCotUS? That’s like “We don’t think shooting missles at enemies is a good idea” coming from the CEO of Northrop Grumman.

Petey, I realize that your cracker-jack PR and legal team told you that you can never, ever, publically say that the purpose of drinking alcohol is in fact to get a buzz, but literally everyone on the planet knows you’re full of it.

So in the meantime, folks, get yourself an AWOL machine before our government makes it illegal (as they inevitably will, of course, probably “to protect the children”). If anyone has any experiences with this contraption to share, please do so.

Section 2257 of Title 18, U.S.C., which is more often referred to as just “2257,” probably means very little to you unless you work in the porn business. Which I do, at least tangentally. Think and/or say what you want, my porn clients are businesses just like any other, with the notable exception that they are some of the most honest, easy-to-deal with clients I have—they pay on time (well, mostly… hint hint, COLT), they treat their employees, contractors, and customers extremely well, and they don’t bitch about how much it really costs to get good, non-Craigslist “I-will-design-your-lame-website-for-$300″ web application development. A lot of people think it must be heaven (or hell) to work in porn, but as far as I am concerned I can take it or leave it—I think naked people are much more exciting when they are real. And if you have a problem with naked people you can take it and shove it where the Puritanical sun don’t shine. But I digress.

Section 2257 basically says that producers of adult content must keep verifiable records of the age of their models. Fair enough. However, the Bush Administration, apparently under pressure from the Religious Rong, has changed the code to read in such a way that essentially anyone who has anything sexually explicit on any web site needs to have several (note that this is not “one of several” but in fact “several”) forms of verifiable proof of the age of the people in the content.

If you have ever put a picture of yourself on a chat room profile, or on your own web site, even, this applies to you. It also applies to most personals sites, including Yahoo!, Gay.com, Big Muscle, ManHunt, etc. They are going to have to prove the age of the people in the shots, even if they are gray-haired shag-carpeted 50-year-old bears. Of course this will be impossible to do, so they will have to shut down until a legal challenge is fully mounted. Do you ever look at message boards where people post porn? There’s a good chance those will get shut down, too.

The Free Speech Coalition has thankfully mounted a legal defense against the new rules. We shall see how it turns out.

The new regulations go into effect tomorrow, June 23rd, 2005.

Please don’t confuse 2257 with 227, the sitcom from the 80’s. 2257 is obnoxious and probably unconstitutional, whereas anything that involves Jackee Harry is by definition fabulous (well, probably by definition obnoxious, as well, but the point remains).