A very funny YouTube video to send your dumbest friends. It’s a real classic.

They say in marriage counsellings that you write down and express your demands and expectations to provide clear communications. So here is a short and far from complete list of things that I feel America needs to change in order for us to avoid divorce court.

1 – Drop this “America is the Greatest Country in the World” shit

We are not. Not even close. The only thing we are number one in would be wealth and number of people in prison (see #2). Any major study has found that in a large number of key areas Americans are far behind the rest of the world. From our eduction system to health care we are falling behind the other industrialized nations with many 3^rd world countries quickly catching up. In a recent poll measuring general happiness we came in 16^th.

As just one example, we work more hours for less money and get less vacations. The U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave. France leads the world with 30 days off a year. Employees in Britain, German, Australia, Spain and Sweden have 20 or more days off a year, and Canada and Japan have 10 days off, about the same as some American corporations allow their workers. The Chinese get three weeks off a year, and this is only the legally mandated vacation time. Many employees in other countries take six or more weeks off a year (the French average 39 days and the English 24).

Assuming you are prefect leaves little room for change. Saying you are the best at everything (even if false) tends to make people believe nothing needs to be done to improve the situation. America is a good country and we should be proud of her but not to the point of being disillusioned about her less then flattering truths.

A strangely compelling electronica song (and video) composed of sounds from the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland.

By Bruce Friedrich, AlterNet
Posted on May 19, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/85828/

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux-meats like bacon and sausages and an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants, vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week here, without further ado, are the Top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try, starting now!

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it's about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today's factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won't even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry "should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."

I was a supporter of John Edwards but now he has dropped out I am backing Barack Obama. I was not really against Hillery Clinton when I decided this, but the recent behavior of her and Bill Clinton has soured me a bit on her campaign. When it comes to policy there is really not too much of a distance between the two. My support of Obama would be based primarily on two reasons.

The first being that the people who hate the Clintons do so with little fact-based reasoning. In truth Bill Clinton was far from some liberal boogie-man that Republicans make him out to be, if you honestly look back at his eight years you will see he pushed a very centrist policy. Items such as NAFTA and the deregulation of the media companies were a wet dream of the Republicans, both passed under Clinton. I guess because Bill Clinton brought an end to what Republicans view as the 'Reagan Glory Years' they attacked him far more then he deserved. I do not believe I need to point out the full list of crimes committed by our current President to show the hypocrisy of the Republian party in protecting him when they tried to impeach Clinton over oral sex. When people hate someone for an almost completely irrational reason there is little that can be done to change this. While I believe this force would not prevent Hillary Clinton from winning they would do their best to make her term in office as difficult as possible. This would continue the same divisive politics that have been destroying this country. It might not be Hillary's fault but the negative forces against her will not allow her to unify this nation the way so we desperately need.

The other reason I really want to see Barack Obama win is that we need to restore our standing around the world. Bush has completely destroyed American creditably. Hatred against us is at an all time high. We have committed grievous crimes against people of other nations. We have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people. We have held and cruelly tortured people without even allowing them to challenge this in a court system. We have broken countless international laws and rejected treaties signed by past administrations. We have acted like self-righteous bullies, soiled children attacking without mercy anyone that stands against our selfish goals. We have become the new Roman Empire, corrupt and contemptuous of other nations who we view as either puppets or enemies. I can not think of a better symbol of change from this course then having at the head of our nation a black man named Barack Obama. We need to send a message to the world that the time of over-privileged white people is over. A new understanding of what America truly is needs to be projected from our leadership, that we are a melting-pot of cultures and races. We need to make a statement to the world that the Bush years have ended and hopefully the injustice can someday be forgiven. We need to show the Muslim nations that we are not a racist nation. I can really think of no better symbol of what America can become then the election of a black man with a Muslim name. I just hope it is not too late to restore the perception of America as then land of the free, a promoter of justice and order for all.

I guess it is because this is a rainy Monday but I feel like a good old fashion rant

# 1 – Pagans

“The term pagan is from Latin paganus, an adjective originally meaning "rural", "rustic" or "of the country." As a noun, paganus was used to mean "country dweller, villager." In colloquial use, it could mean much the same as calling someone today a 'Hillbilly'.” – Wikipedia entry for Pagan

I hate Pagans, basically they are pack of misfits who think being pagan makes them somehow special. If this was England in a few hundred years ago they would be Christians just to be different. You do not see too many pagan bumper stickers on a BMW, it is always some long haired jerk-off in a t-shirt, well maybe they can have their mom sew them some puffy pirate shirt. I am not referring to those that follow new-age beliefs or eastern philosophy but specifically to those that call themselves Pagan.

You know why pagan sucks?  Their gods are losers and sore losers at that. I can think of at least four times in the bible where they had a "Test of Gods.” You know who wins? God that's who! The Jewish God kicks ass and does not bother to take names because your people will be slaughtered and your cities burned. Just ask the people of Jericho how much help their crappy little dirt god was to them. Constantine did not have his troops draw a tree on their shield....no...they draw a cross and then kicked some freaking ass.

They are just a pack of fruitcakes that want to be spiritual while they are thinking they are too cool for good old fashion Christianity. "The Bible is silly and full of lies.....now quiet while I pray to this leaf." They are basically banging the ugly fat chick because they want to get laid without having to take someone out to dinner.

"Oh you are so silly to think this pentagram necklace is evil, it is a pagan symbol"....."OK then this is not a picture of your mom's vagina, it is the symbol of the life-giver."

# 2 – Religion

“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions” - Blaise Pascal

I have often described myself as a Pro-Religion Atheist. I lost my belief in the supernatural one day in 8th grade science class while day dreaming about aliens. I did not come to this as a rejection of my upbringing or due to some priest molesting me. In fact my experiences with religion up to that point had been profoundly positive. Over the past few years I have found that my view of religion has become more and more negative as belief systems are used to justify outrageous behavior. From Muslims flying planes into buildings to Christians holding “God Hates Fags” signs outside the funerals for soldiers killed in Iraq.  Today I read two news items that really got under my skin.

The first would be the raid on a compound in Texas filled with the followers of Warren Jeffs, the guy that just got jailed for polygamy. These inhuman pieces of trash justify having sex with a 15 year old girl because they claim it is part of their faith. While some steps are now being taken they are still being treated with undeserved respect. If someone reported me for having sex with an underage girl I would be hauled into jail before I could blink. But because these scum claim that it is part of their religion they have been forcing young girls to marry and then be basically raped by 50 year old men. The cloak of religion has been used by too many to justify crimes against humanity and if the moderates of faith will not stand up to knock these people down then all religion needs to be judged. Freedom of religion protects me as an Atheist but it can no longer be used to protect rapist dirt-bags. Let’s just hope this does not end like Jonestown, another bucket of crazy that was allowed to continue for far too long since it started in a church.

The other item that really made me want to take a baseball bat to someone was the story today about an elementary school being blasted for having a day where kids dressed as the opposite gender as part of what they called Wacky Week. Some group calling itself the Voice of Christian Youth America interrupted their radio broadcast as if kids getting dressed up really mattered. I am sure they did not bother to do the same when the death toll in Iraq reached 4,000 or when Matthew Sheppard was beaten to death. What makes it worse is that this was not some plan by a transgender group or anything, the kids voted on what they wanted to dress up as during Wacky Week. I dressed up as a chick for Halloween once and in juror high the boys wore skirts one day to protest that we could not wear shorts to school, those two events did not turn me gay or make me believe that I should be a woman. It was fun, kids tend to like to do things for the simple reason that they are fun and if these religious jerk-offs would embrace that simple idea they might not be losing them at a record rate.

Things like this really just make religion look stupid and out-dated. Kids getting dressed up as another gender is not going to cause some transsexual virus to be spread. I hope every member of the Voice of Christian Youth America have their kids grow up to be pagan so I have a reason to hate them too, trying to force this kind of religious bullshit on them is a good start toward that goal.

# 3 – Ain’t It Cool News

“Tonight was the my first work out. I pedaled for 20 minutes – followed by about an hour and ten minutes on the various weightlifting equipment doing reps.” – from movie review for The Ruins

I am so sick of the web site Ain’t It Cool News. Founded in the late 90’s it was one of the first web sites about movies and television shows from the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror fan point of view. Being one of the only sources of information the site was allowed to indulge in senseless ramblings about things that have nothing to do with the subject. Now that other much better sites provide this information in a concise and clear format it is time for the plug to be pulled on Ain’t It Cool News.

Maybe it is because of my near famous lack of patience but I am so sick of trying to read a simple movie review on the site because more then half of the post is about the minutia of that person’s day. I do not care what you got in the mail or that you just got back from lunch at some piss-hole restaurant in your town, I am clicking on that item to learn about the movie. But after making you scroll past that crap they have to give you their complete history of movies by the same director and actors as if to provide you some kind of unnecessary insight into their review. Often I can not even tolerate this outpouring of useless information long enough to make it to the actual movie review. As much as I believe the mainstream media is horrid, sites like Ain’t It Cool News just shows why we need professional writers and editors.

Those that CAN - make movies.  Those that CAN’T - spend all day writing a post to Ain’t It Cool news about how they got the Batman TV show DVD in the mail and hanging out with their equally jerk-off friends at the Bowl-A-Roma.

# 4 – Tom

“From Hell's heart, I stab at thee; For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee” - Herman Melville – as spoken by Khan

Just because he deserves all the contempt the world can muster.

Terry Reid

Faith to Arise

Without Expression

Eldar

Blackbird

Martin Sexton

Diner

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

100 Days, 100 Nights

How Do You Let a Good Man Down

My resolutions this year were to be more active and try to be nicer to customers at work. Even with this vegetarian thing I am still way too heavy so I need to start doing something more to get my weight under control. Over the years I have really built up the reputation of being a total jerk to angery customers, I just do not react well to negative people. As my manager once told me, "The only good thing about you taking a Supervisor call is that customer will never ask for a Supervisor again."

I am starting 2008 feeling as mentally and physically healthy as I have in a long time. Things in my life have for the most part been going well and I have a very positive outlook for the year to come.