Taking Careful Aim

I recently had a discouraging conversation with a kid, a 40-year-old kid, but still a child. He's unemployed, living off of his wife's wage, and pretending to be a stay-at-home dad but who refuses to cook, clean house, or even take care of the kid for more than 20 hours a week. He is, as you might guess, a "conservative." Even sillier, he's a "libertarian." I could probably end this rant right now, since it's obvious that this boy is one of the many clueless marching morons who overpopulate this rapidly declining empire's voting registers. At least a dozen years of education failed to make a mark on this kid and millions of self-indulgent idiots just like him. Why would I imagine that a few hours of debate would have an effect? Arrogance, blind hope, an unreasonable belief that inside the skull of every idiot pseudo-conservative lies one or two functioning brain cells, or some other pointless, irrational fantasy that I need to work on purging.

The things I "learned" while listening to this babbling brook of a Faux New's indoctrinated sheeple were along the lines of "the liberal media doesn't give real conservatives a chance." Translated: Smart people don't listen to stupid people rant nearly long enough to want to kill themselves in relief." How about the traditional "investment in business is a greater risk than just taking a job." Translated: If I get lucky with my wife's money and stumble on to employees who will work harder, smarter, and longer than me, I deserve credit for being a courageous Ayn Randian job creator.

Like a lot of fools who label themselves "libertarian," this 5'6" 180 pound couch potato practically drools at the thought of a complete national economic collapse. He imagines himself as some sort of John Galt while being someone a lot closer to a character on Seinfield. The impotent, usually unemployed, still-in-the-closet short fat guy comes to mind. He imagines himself buying a gun to "defend his family" as the hoards pound on his door to steal his wife's hard-earned money. At the best, he'd blow his dick off if he ever handled a gun. At worst, he'd freak out and murder his family and blow himself away in a panic if any threat presented itself. He is a one-man example of why guns should not be available to the average American fool. He is also evidence that we desperately need to reinstate the draft to keep idiots like this quiet and below ground.

He did, however, remind me of how much luck is required to become a successful "entrepreneur." Fools like Romney would starve without their family connections. The overwhelming majority of small business owners would spend their lives with heads barely above water if they didn't luck into a few employees who worked harder and smarter than their bosses to make the business successful. (Been there, done that. Never again.) As Elizabeth Warren and Obama have explained, the core services and infrastructure that business can not even comprehend, let alone support and design, come from taxpayers. The wars that the Cock Brothers and Bush family have made their fortunes from were paid for with the money that should have been set aside for Social Security that those same assholes now claim is an unfunded "entitlement." The real "entitlements" that are crushing the nation are the military-industrial complex, the bought-and-paid-for corporate handouts K Street is so proud of, and the preference the idle rich receive over working Americans.

His pseudo-conservative "faith" that the media is overwhelmingly liberal confused me, for a while. After a few moments, I realized that he is, sort of, right. While the majority of like-Americans are spoon fed their news-pablum by corporate shills, it's impossible to escape the fact that smart people still write more than do idiots. As much as Jimmy-boy would like to keep his head down, well under the sewer of spew and vitriol issuing forth from Newt and Glenn and Rush's assholes, every once in a while the boy has to pull his head out of his own ass just for a quick look at where the stream of effluent is taking him. When he does, some damn liberal intellectual will find a way to get through the river of shit and into our boy's tiny brain. As always, the scarce grip these characters have on sub-reality can only be maintained if no one breaks into their delusion with scraps of reality. Like religious crazies, they can not tolerate contradicting opinions because even a moment's exposure to reality blows apart the fantasy they've constructed.

Finally, he tried to put himself into a better light by reaffirming his dislike for religion, claiming to be an atheist.  I have always argued that atheism is a much harder road to travel than "faith." It requires intellectual involvement, rather than simply falling for whatever bullshit the moment's priests are spewing. Libertarians often try to claw up to atheism, hoping that no one will examine their slightly-held freedom from this one pseudo-conservative dogma. Here's a tip, boys and girls, you can't be atheist and worry about ghosts, too. Fuckin' moron.

I do agree with douchebag-boy in one area. The country is coming apart and it will be ugly. There appears to be no way that Americans are going to wise up and move away from self-destruction. It's only a matter of time before the real class war begins and the 1% have all of the weapons, the military, the police, and the ruthlessness to overthrow the shambles that are left of our democracy. It will be a short battle.

Subway Sticks a Footlong up Its Ass

An open letter to the geniuses at Subway Restaurants:

Sometimes I wonder if competitors plant lawyers and marketing idiots in the employment of their competition. For example, whatever idiot decided it was in McDonald's best interest to sue a pair of British protesters, Helen Steel and David Morris, for libel in 1989 almost had to be working for Burger King. After seeing a documentary made about that legal action, McLibel, I took my already skimpy fast food business to anyone but McDonald's ever since. In the long run, McDonald's didn't win any money from the suit, engendered a shit-load of bad will from anyone interested in corporate fairness, safe and healthy food, or good government. The idiot judge who settled the case in McDonald's favor ended up costing the British government a load of money ( £57,000) in the European Court of Human Rights where the case was overturned and England found itself owing that court money for violating Article 6 (right to a fair trial).



In all, the moron who advised McDonald's to sue these people produced a lot of customers for everybody but McDonald's. I'm not kidding. I haven't eaten a crumb produced by that miserable company since sometime in 1990 and I never will. In my opinion, the best thing that could happen to McDonald's is bankruptcy. I do my best to direct people to McLibel and every bad word I can think of to say about McDonald's gets said as often as possible.

One of the companies that benefited from my deflected business was Subway. That all ended in late May, 2010. Subway sent a letter to Coney Island Drive Inn stating, ""You must immediately remove all references to FOOTLONG (tm) in association with sandwiches."In the crazy mind of Subway's doofus legal and marketing departments, they imagine they invented the word "footlong" in regards to sandwiches. Good for them. Going crazy is a symptom of getting too big for yourself and this is obviously nuts. I would imagine that many businesses, like Coney Island Drive Inn have been making sandwiches called "footlongs" for longer than the morons at Subway have been alive.

So, this is my notice that I'm done with Subway; one of my wife's favorite food franchises. We're done. No matter how hungry we get, how poor the rest of the choices might be, we don't do business with corporate bullies. So, fuck you McDonald's and Subway. We're gone.