Jaded Times

Dammit, California, America has spoken!  We don’t want gays getting married.  There is a perfectly logical reason, and that is that God, or Allah, or L Ron Hubbard will destroy the earth if people who love each other are recognized as such by the state.  Didn’t you read the Bible?  Or the Koran?  Or Dianetics?  Wait, maybe that was from Battlefield Earth, or the Book of Mormon, or any of the lesser known (or B-list) works…

As an American and a human, I will go on record for a THIRD time to say I am embarrassed that this is something any of us would care enough about to vote against.  Honestly, what fucking business is it of yours who other people marry?  It’s as if, somehow, allowing gay people to be married will unite their gayness into a gay coalition of some sort, that could then rise up out of the gayetto and possibly overtake our children, forcing the men to crave cock and the women to buy flannel shirts.  We must protect our adoption agency workers jobs!  And our flannel industry!  Keep adoption legal!  Keep flannel, um, Canadian?

I honestly just feel sorry for people who feel like they somehow have the right to decide what is morally right for anyone other than themselves. How about this, America: I don’t think fat people should be allowed to get married.  After all, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and some chick wearing a mu-mu. And before you start quoting scripture at me, gluttony is ALSO a sin, so drop the twinkie and hit the treadmill you hypocrite.

A couple of stellar pull quotes:

“In America, we should uphold and respect the right of people to make policy changes through the democratic process, especially changes that do nothing more than uphold the definition of marriage that has existed since the founding of this country and beyond,” said Jim Campbell, a lawyer on the defense team.

Campbell makes an excellent point here; at the time of the founding of this country, African-Americans were predominantly slaves and women were treated as property.  So by the transitive property, we can thusly assume that Jim Campbell wishes to re-enslave black people and put women back in the kitchen where they belong.  A bold stance, Mr. Campbell, but we have to admire your honesty. If, you know, nothing else about you.

Former U.S. Justice Department lawyer Charles Cooper, who represented the religious and conservative groups that sponsored the ban, said cultures around the world, previous courts and Congress all accepted the “common sense belief that children do best when they are raised by their own mother and father.”

Holy shit, I couldn’t agree with this more!  I don’t think anyone in the world is pro-homosexuals-stealing-babies.  Beyond that, I fail to see Mr. Cooper’s point, as I think that even the biggest homophobe on the planet must concede that it is far better to be raised in a loving environment than in a boarding house by the state (which would be some of that socialism that the right seems to only hate when convenient for them).  Or maybe this is more of the right’s war on adoption.  Keep adoption legal.  KEEP IT LEGAL.

Either way, tragic loss to the DoJ’s legal team, that Cooper.

(seriously, though, congrats California for joining the very short list of states who are seeing reason, even if the only person to finally do something about it is one of only three openly gay federal judges in the country)

Hi DC!

My opinion of gay marriage mirrors Bill Hicks’s opinion on gays in the military:  anyone DUMB ENOUGH to want to be married should be allowed to be married.  I’m still working on somehow adopting the “trained killers” portion of that bit into my philosophy as well, but it’s not quite there yet…

Entertainment Weekly has published the first video advertisement inside a print magazine this week, proving once again that useless excess is, indeed, fashionable.  The ad, a four page thick cardboard spread with a digital viewing area consisting of tiny speakers and a cell phone sized LCD, can apparently hold up to 40 minutes of video, which is 40 more minutes than the pages that surround it.

“This is an extraordinary way to refresh how we interact with consumers,” said Pepsi-Cola’s chief marketing officer, Frank Cooper.

Extraordinary.  Indeed.

Thus far the responses seem to range from “who cares” to “really? That’s retarded”.  I personally wonder where CBS and Pepsi get off thinking it’s wise to spend that kind of money and waste the resources involved at such a critical economic and environmental time.

$1.92 Million?  That’s a lot for some Rihanna and a coupl’a Britneys, but that’s the judgment that has been handed down to Jammie Thomas-Rasset, the first guilty verdict in a case against a user of file-sharing services to go to court.  Excessive?  Yeah, maybe a little.  But whatever, filesharing is filesharing, loving it and claiming how it “should” be doesn’t make it any more or less legal.

The part that concerns me:

The Obama administration told a federal judge Friday the $1.92 million jury verdict against a Minnesota woman for sharing 24 music tracks on Kazaa was constitutionally sound, despite defense claims it was unconstitutionally excessive.

Now I’m no constitutional lawyer or anything, but I’m pretty sure the process of law works in the exact opposite direction.

The below video may appeal to me more because of my (oh so useful!) degree in folklore, but it’s still Jon Stewart, still funny, and still a great representation of what Congressmen do to earn their six figure salaries and lifetime pensions…

Chuck Grassley’s Sir Taxalot

Unfortunately, Senor W. T. Fayta saw his shadow, so we have eight more weeks of ridiculous partisan bitchery to deal with.

Earlier today California’s supreme court upheld the results of the vote on Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriages. As I haven’t really broached this subject directly before, let me try to sum this one up as best as possible:

1) Based on what I’ve seen of marriage, you’re an idiot to want to be married.

2) BUT, either all of us or none of us should have that right. Basic “equal rights” logic. So you’re a much, much bigger idiot for preventing anyone from getting married.

3) In a state that has been in severe financial crisis for several years, it’s a bit gross that so much money was spent trying to make same sex marriage illegal.

4) You don’t need a piece of paper to tell you that you love someone. But if that paper is offered to some, it should be offered to all. Again, basic “equal rights” logic.

5) For all of you out there who feel this even fucking matters, feel free to write in to explain why you voted for Prop 8 and why you feel it’s any of your business what other people do in their private lives. I’d seriously like to know.

6) And for all of you bashing the right wing over this, the best resolution I have heard to the issue came from an ultra-conservative relative of mine (though I have read similar ideas elsewhere since), who suggested:

SOLUTION–change the legal definition of marriage: make the legal end of marriage a “civil union”, and let religious groups ONLY perform marriages. What this means is that anyone can be together with anyone and have their union be recognized/receive all the same rights as current “marriages”, and let churches and synagogues and temples and mosques decide who should be married in the eyes of their god.

For the gay among us about to complain, keep in mind many churches were already performing gay marriages and it really should be up to them, not the state, as to what is acceptable in the eyes of their god. For the bigoted among us about to cheer, keep in mind that if you were not married by a priest or rabbi or the like, you have a civil union, not a marriage.

There. Done. Now can we move on to this whole “collapsed economy/people starving in the streets” thing, California?

You’d think someone at the BBC would have caught on to the problem with this headline.  The article is interesting too, until you find out that the experiment was conducted at a college, which leads me to believe that it was nothing more than an elaborarte scheme to get undergrad twins in bed.  Which, of course, is genius.

A man in Norway was arrested for driving while under the influence of, um, er, hmm.  Can we say multi-tasking?  Maybe coming and going?  Or how about fucking his girlfriend while driving 20mph over the speed limit?

After filming the exploit for evidence, they [police] pulled them over at a rest area.

Yeah.  For evidence.  Right.

See, Ice Cube, there are snakes out there this big.

So far President Obama seems to have done more in a few days than former president Bush (man, those words in that order just feel right, huh?) accomplished in his first year.  In a rarely seen political move, Obama has actually kept true to his word and signed the directive to close Gitmo and limit the army and CIA’s ability to torture prisoners, a promise many felt he wouldn’t fulfill.  His administration is already hard at work attacking the current economic apocalypse, moves that harsher critics might point out the Bush Administration could have been making for the past three months.  He has also reversed several unpopular Bush administration policies, including striking down the pre-suffragette throwback abortion funds policy (though the policy did warn that if he were to strike it down, it would become more powerful than he could possibly imagine) late Friday afternoon.

So while one could conceivably point out that the man is being scrutinized far beyond any reasonable measure, most Americans do have to admit that, after 8 years of Bush, it’s just nice to have a President who is actually fucking doing something.

It is rumored that his next move could very well be to overturn the Bush Administration’s highly controversial “Babyback Ribs Act”, in which orphans who have not found homes by age 9 are harvested for their delicious, delicious meat.