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| Yellow Jackets are just assholes |
Sep 12, 2015
Sep 11, 2015
Soothe The Savage Breast
It's been said by wiser men than me that the opposite of anything is whatever keeps you from it.
That means the opposite of love is fear, and the opposite of hate is forgiveness.
One / Let It Be (mashup cover) --Boyce Avenue
Out Of The Blue by Simon Armitage --(as read by) Rufus Sewell
(the embedded commercials at dailymotion are jarring and spoil the effect, so if you wanna try it a little differently, go to YouTube):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Give Peace A Chance --John & Yoko
Sep 10, 2015
Today's Lesson
...in household budgeting and money management - just a reminder about the money we're spending on gasoline.
We'll start with the basics, and say you drive a good medium size car getting about 25 mpg, and your daily commute is a short one at 20 miles per day; plus you go to the gym, and there's daycare/school, and you make groceries, and you go to the dry cleaners, and you run all the other errands in a very well-planned kinda way etc etc etc, which brings your total monthly drive to about 1100 miles.
@ 25 mpg, you're burning 44 gallons of gas, which is gonna cost you about $90 right now because gas is down around $2.05 for a gallon of regular 87 octane.
But hang on a dang minute. You also get to pay your share of the tax breaks, and the sweetheart loan terms, and all the other subsidies that American oil companies get in various forms in order to help them provide us with all that "cheap" fuel.
Then you get to add in your share of what it costs for the US Military to protect our (ie: Halliburton's) vital interests, the VA bennies for the vets, the increased healthcare and insurance costs, and the cost of lost productivity for the millions of us who get sick and die every year because of the toxic shit left over from drilling, pumping, storing, shipping, retailing and burning that crap and and and.
This "help" suddenly gets pretty expensive, even tho' it's next to impossible to get anybody who actually knows what the real amount is to say straight up what the real amount is. Ya gotta figure it's pretty bad when it seems like so many people are going so far outa their way to keep us from getting at the answers.
Estimates on all this help run as low as about $40 Billion (which everybody knows is the PR Consultant Bullshit Number), and as high as $500 Billion to $1 Trillion per year, (which some think is the bullshit radical hippie pinko number).
But even if the low estimate is ridiculously low and the high end is ridiculously high, the ugly truth is that the gallon of gas you bought for $2.05? That gallon of gas cost you more like 8 bucks.
8 fucking dollars for a gallon of gasoline
But hey - all that other stuff - that renewable stuff - c'mon, man - that's really expensive, and it's new, so it's scary. And ya know what happens when we get scared? That 8-dollar gas might have to go up to about 10. Don't fuck with your betters.
We'll start with the basics, and say you drive a good medium size car getting about 25 mpg, and your daily commute is a short one at 20 miles per day; plus you go to the gym, and there's daycare/school, and you make groceries, and you go to the dry cleaners, and you run all the other errands in a very well-planned kinda way etc etc etc, which brings your total monthly drive to about 1100 miles.
@ 25 mpg, you're burning 44 gallons of gas, which is gonna cost you about $90 right now because gas is down around $2.05 for a gallon of regular 87 octane.
But hang on a dang minute. You also get to pay your share of the tax breaks, and the sweetheart loan terms, and all the other subsidies that American oil companies get in various forms in order to help them provide us with all that "cheap" fuel.
Then you get to add in your share of what it costs for the US Military to protect our (ie: Halliburton's) vital interests, the VA bennies for the vets, the increased healthcare and insurance costs, and the cost of lost productivity for the millions of us who get sick and die every year because of the toxic shit left over from drilling, pumping, storing, shipping, retailing and burning that crap and and and.
This "help" suddenly gets pretty expensive, even tho' it's next to impossible to get anybody who actually knows what the real amount is to say straight up what the real amount is. Ya gotta figure it's pretty bad when it seems like so many people are going so far outa their way to keep us from getting at the answers.
Estimates on all this help run as low as about $40 Billion (which everybody knows is the PR Consultant Bullshit Number), and as high as $500 Billion to $1 Trillion per year, (which some think is the bullshit radical hippie pinko number).
But even if the low estimate is ridiculously low and the high end is ridiculously high, the ugly truth is that the gallon of gas you bought for $2.05? That gallon of gas cost you more like 8 bucks.
8 fucking dollars for a gallon of gasoline
But hey - all that other stuff - that renewable stuff - c'mon, man - that's really expensive, and it's new, so it's scary. And ya know what happens when we get scared? That 8-dollar gas might have to go up to about 10. Don't fuck with your betters.
Sep 9, 2015
But Then This
Just wondering if there would be a circumstance under which I'd support religion getting in the way of government employees doing their jobs.
And the answer is actually pretty simple. Yes, but as with all Civil Disobedience, I can be on your side only as long as you're going to accept full responsibility and you're ready to pay the price in terms of arrest, jail and fines.
Then we'll work on changing the law - and we'll be doing it right. We won't flat out disobey, rationalizing it with god-knobbery, and expecting total impunity because we have friends with large weapons and small vocabularies.
Today's Tweet
Protestors are now calling for the firing of deputies issuing marriage licenses. pic.twitter.com/ZBrNGNvLZG
— Victor Puente (@thevictorpuente) September 9, 2015
So that's kinda where we are? The point where the rubes are convinced that Kim Davis isn't the one going against the law - it's the cops and the judges, and everybody else who's not willing to accept their Brand-X Knock-off Sharia?
Now, you can go ahead and try to make the Both Sides argument by saying 'the libruls' think the cops and the judges in Ferguson (eg) are the bad guys, and so yeah, it all evens out. Sadly, that sounds plausible because we've internalized that kind of paralysis. We've allowed the Opinion Pimps and their Press Poodles and their Coin-Operated Politicians to use our sense of fairness against us for political gain.
The very thing that's at the core of our strength as the Exceptional Nation is now turned against us and becomes our greatest weakness. Oh dear, what're we to do? How will we ever figure this out and get a handle on what's real and what isn't?
Chill, Sparky.
Here's the thing that we just can't quite get each other to remember about the shit we were supposed to learn in 9th grade Civics class. You know - way back when school was a place where ya learned a coupla things about how to know what the fuck is goin' on? Yeah that. Anyway, the question is: who's following the guiding principles of the US Constitution?
- everybody's supposed to be treated the same
- we're gonna be a nation of laws, not men
- nobody gets to take their religion and turn it into law
The cops in Ferguson failed to fulfill their obligations under their oath by engaging in selective enforcement of the law, and then they allowed it to degenerate into an extortion racket, which is crazy stoopid understandable because if you're not willing to see that the first part is pretty fucked up, then how ya gonna not go full-on-rat-bastard-straight-outa-The-Godfather-crooked-cop? Seems like a logical progression.
As an agent of government, Davis failed to live up to her oath as well. She refused to hold up her end of the deal. That's against the law. Denying US citizens their rights under the constitution is illegal, and it doesn't matter that your imaginary friend told you to do it, because that's fucking illegal too.
So, if ya wanna try to make that Both Sides argument here, then what you're doing is called False Equivalence/False Dichotomy, and I'm callin' bullshit on that.
Colbert Arrives
Stephen premiered last night, and I had to watch the open, and it was pretty awful. First night jitters, or maybe it was supposed to manage the expectations down or whatever. It got a lot better - at least for this bit, which was classic awesomely awesome Colbert.
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