I'm becoming an Elephant because Elephants stomp Donkeys' asses in war, business and big dick contests

I've been a registered Democrat for the six years that I've been old enough to vote, but Mr. Obama's recent budget is the $3 trillion straw that broke the camel's back. I see now that our federal government is bloated and weighed down with unnecessary federal programs that cost too much of my money and yours. I say we start cutting.

Let's start with the Department of Transportation. We probably have a few decades until the interstates crumble into completely useless paths of rubble, certainly not our problem now. Next, let's get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency. I have no problem trusting that major factories will do the right thing and dispose of their waste properly rather than dumping it into municipal water sources, even if it means extra cost to them. We don't need a government agency to enforce those standards, those who run the factories know in their hearts what's right and wrong.

While we're on the subject, let's get rid of every government agency that meddles its pesky little way into free enterprise. The Food and Drug Administration is a major violator here. If Pfizer says their drugs are safe then dammit they're safe. I mean they manufacture drugs, I think they know a thing or two about them. If General Mills claims the plants where they manufacture our cereal and Easy Mac are up to the highest standards of cleanliness, who are we to question that? Creating a government mandated set of standards and spending our money to enforce them is just plain socialism. If Pfizer makes a dangerous drug that kills some folks, people will stop buying their drugs and they'll go out of business. That's the free market bitches. It'll sort itself out.

The list just goes on and on, but the point is that the government is too damn big. If you think about it, all we really need for a federal government is a strong, stoic Republican president and a tough Republican Congress to make sure nobody starts any expensive federal programs and to declare war whenever we need to remind all those faggy Europeans how big our God given American dicks are. Just because the majority of Americans voted for and continue to support that Muslim socialist doesn't mean a damn thing. The majority of Americans are stupid, lazy and just looking for a handout. If they weren't, they'd be rich like us.

So that is why I'm leaving the party of heavy-handed socialist government. America is all about freedom and the Republican party is the party of personal freedom; unless of course you're a gay wanting to get married, a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, an American citizen of Middle Eastern descent wanting to have a private phone conversation, or, God forbid, a poor Mexican wanting to come to the land of opportunity to provide a better life for your family like our ancestors did. But the personal freedoms of those people pale in comparison to the rights of good, God fearing rich folk to not give anymore of the money they worked so hard to earn, steal or inherit to a socialist government that will just use it undermine the free market and give handouts to the lazy and uneducated.

Ahhh, Who Invited Gustav?

I really wish pseudo-prominent Democrats (I couldn't have actually called Don Fowler prominent for over a decade and if I called Michael Moore prominent I'd throw up in my mouth) would stop saying that the impending Hurricane Gustav's arrival during what was scheduled to be the Republican National Convention is proof that God is "on our side." Two reasons:

1. It sounds really, really bad. Seriously, when you say something like that you definitely come off as kind of a dick. According to Dominican Today that storm's already killed "at least 67 people in Haiti and Dominican Republic," (not that we count non-American casualties). And if it does turn out to be the Katrina II that the major media is hyping it up to be, then these genius weavers of words will have been essentially calling a natural disaster which caused untold American deaths and property damage (not to mention the 67 or more dead foreigners) a blessing for their team in the Big Game. So yeah, kind of a dick thing to say.

2. It's absolutely untrue! If anything it's the opposite.

2a.) It keeps Dick and George away. The RNC was going to be a forum in which our overlords addressed the nation in support of Big John. If you haven't been paying attention thus far, one of McCain's big goals in this brawl is to distance himself from the Bush Administration. And lo, God called forth a thunderous storm and it was so.

2b.) Palin gets to show the country some executive badassery. While Obama has slightly more big game political experience than Palin and Biden has a lifetime more, she has more executive experience than the two combined. In other words, they're both senators while she's a governor, an executive position. A ton of National Guard from all across the country have been deployed to provide relief and curb looting in the potential aftermath of this thing. A state's governor is essentially the Commander-in-Chief of their state's National Guardsmen, like the President is of the Army, Marines, etc. She will officially be in charge of the Alaska National Guard. So as long as she doesn't tell them to start shooting civilians or raping chickens and they more or less do their job, then around a trillion TV cameras capture her successfully and single-handedly leading a military unit. The headlines read something like, "Palin Successfully Leads Alaskan National Guard to Save Bayou Woman from Rooftop." In other words, good press for Palin.

2c.) McCain gets to "push aside" politics and replay hero role. People eat the hero thing up. I don't know if you've heard, but McCain's a hero. And not just any kind of hero, he's a bona-fide genuine goddamn war hero. I'm not saying that sarcastically, he served our country valiantly and if you happen to encounter the Straight Talk Express along your travels and don't thank him you're an ungrateful C-Word. Seriously, you are. But what my slightly esteemed fellow Democrats Mr. Fowler and Mr. Moore and Mr. any-other-dumb-asshole-who-decides-to-have-a-chuckle-with-the-media-about-the-impending-hurricane don't realize is that if said hyped up hurricane does indeed become a Katrina II it will be the perfect opportunity for him to re-solidify that idea. Come Thursday night, rather than delivering his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination at a boring-ass convention in front of a bunch of boring-ass Republicans, he could instead be delivering his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination live via satellite in front of the hurricane ravished Gulf Coast he's been working three days to help restore.

And lo, God called forth a thunderous storm and it was so.

Wouldn't it be an ironic twist of fate if Katrina II ended up helping the GOP as much as Katrina ended up hurting it? Wouldn't it? Well in eight hours or so the meat of this thing will hit land and we'll see what it really is. But mark my words, if this thing does turn into Katrina II there will be no Kanye West saying John McCain doesn't care about black people and no Mike Myers standing awkwardly and silently next to him. If this is Katrina II Michael Moore will eat his words like Crisco from a spoon. If this is Katrina II it will storm the US coast like a Viking, leave utter devastation in its wake and blow the Republican party into a third straight term in the Oval Office.

Word Verification: The Internet's CAPTCHA Of Your Dignity

We're now well into the world of "Web 2.0." If you don't know what that means don't worry, nobody will call you an idiot, at least not to your face. They'll do it over the internet thanks to "Web 2.0." It actually doesn't really mean anything. It's just a fancy buzzword used to describe the fact that the internet is now (and has been for several years) widely interactive. Unlike the early years of the internet, you no longer have to have your own website to have a voice on the web. You can now post your crappy band's songs, videos of you lighting your brother's sack on fire, and your inane, incoherent opinions on somebody else's website (much like I'm doing right now). Chances are that you've done one of those things, and chances are that along the way you've seen something that looks like this garbled pattern of monkey feces...

That's word verification, otherwise known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart...thanks Wikipedia). According to Blogger Buzz, "word verification is designed to be a simple puzzle that a human can solve easily but a computer cannot." It was created by a couple of guys, whose sperm are probably smarter than your cousin and I combined, at Carnegie Mellon University to protect against spam. It ensures that when you read an article online about McCain farting and Obama smelling it seven states away and condemning it as "the politics of the past," and you're actually brave enough to scroll through the comments section and stomach the babbling lunacy that ensues, that you won't be inundated with computer generated links to guaranteed male enhancement and local sexy girls dying to "meet" a guy like you. The perturbing part of this is that when you see in the comments section of a legitimate piece of journalism, a link guaranteeing to help you lose 40 lbs AND make your junk bigger, that was posted, purposely for that specific article, by an actual human being.

What's even more perturbing however, is when you come across one of these "simple puzzles" and you can't solve the damn thing. When it comes to the actual science of computers I know slightly less than nothing, but are these machines becoming so smart that we have to make these things look like this?

This is a "simple puzzle."

This looks like it was drawn by a five year old who just learned the alphabet and was given finger paint laced with acid. I couldn't write something this illegible if I was missing 1 1/2 eyes and having my face waxed.

By now you may be asking yourself "What's the point?" or "Why am I still reading this crap?" I don't really have a good answer for that. I guess the point is that they should make these things easier to read.

Where Were The Parents In All Of This?

Everybody is always so quick to blame the parents. Every time a news story comes out about some teenager or group of teenagers in Anytown, USA committing some horrendous or abhorrently stupid act of vandalism, random violence, treason or plain old illegal idiocy, the overwhelming response from the self-righteous majority is always, “Where were the parents in all of this?”

Where indeed? Presumably they’re sitting at home sucking on a crack pipe and watching talk shows with the glazed over look of a George A. Romero zombie. Or they’re spending 90+ hours a week at the office putting their own selfish ambitions above the development of the moral fabric and sense of social responsibility of their otherwise perfectly angelic children. Why else would an American teenager do something stupid or violent?

One article I read online a couple of months ago described how a teenager in Florida tried to poison her mother while cooking dinner by deliberately adding a spice she knew the mother was violently allergic to. The overwhelming consensus among the myriad of comments to the article was, in the abstract, that parents are to blame for all of the ills of society’s children, and in the specific context, “Where was the father in all of this?”

That’s a good question, so let’s take a look. Sure, maybe dad is a deadbeat asshole who abandoned his family years ago and is off drinking and whoring himself to death in some wayward Midwest town that caters to the drinking and whoring type. Or, just as likely given the evidence (none whatsoever), he was a goddamn hero fireman who died saving newborns from a burning maternity ward. This is all speculation anyway, so why not go all out?

And that’s the point, it’s all speculation. In the vast majority of these instances where the newscasters and the general population alike cry out in enraged unison “Where were the parents in all of this?” in that accusatory tone we all like to don so much, we actually have no idea what the parents are like because it’s not an important enough story to delve that deep into the home life. There are a few exceptions, such as the Columbine tragedy. Because it was massively investigated and reported on multiple times daily for months, we eventually learned that one of the teenagers involved was able to horde an entire arsenal in his bedroom without detection from mom and pops. Ok, so certainly in that instance some of the blame should be shifted to the parents. But in most of these stories, very little insight into the domestic situation is given, yet we somehow always arrive at the conclusion that the parents are to blame and then we sit back and rest easy knowing there’s really no such thing as bad kids, only bad parents. And we know we’re not bad parents so by God our kids are going to be just fine.

Today I read another one of these teen-gone-wrong stories online and watched as the comments section immediately turned to parent bashing. Apparently a massive brawl broke out at a gas station in (here we go again) Florida, over a pack of cigarettes of all things. The exact details are uncertain, but police know that a stolen pack of cigarettes was involved. Of the six instigators, two of them were teenagers, 15 and 16.

Immediately the questions and accusations began. “The parents SUCK and should be held accountable…” wrote ‘JumpShot.’ “WHAT were these teens doing out at 1 AM?!?! Where are their parents?” mused ‘jeezluise.’

It hardly seems worth reiterating that four of the six instigators were legal adults, no longer under the shackles of parental supervision and free to be out as late as they please. So let’s just concentrate on the two teenagers. Without venturing once again into absurd narratives about the parents’ whereabouts, let’s instead look at some of the very realistic possibilities here. It’s definitely a possibility, so let’s get it out of the way first; maybe the parents simply don’t give a flying fuck what their kids do and let them run around as late as they damn well want. But then again, maybe the parents are relatively decent upstanding citizens who actually don’t want to see their children end up as the filthy suckfish on the belly of society.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume this is the case. Ok, so they give a hoot about their kids. What now? If you’re a single mother and you firmly tell your sixteen year old son that he’s not allowed to go out after 10 PM, but he’s determined he’s going to anyway, what are you really going to do about it? Hit him? Oh no, not today. That would be child abuse. And even if you could, you’re a tired mom and he’s practically a fully grown man full of vivacious, violent, hormonal energy. So it wouldn’t do much good anyway. Face it, if he decides he’s leaving that house, he’s leaving that house. You can threaten him with consequences (take away his car, ground him, shut off the cable, etc), but assuming he’s not the rational, level-headed human being one would clearly expect a sixteen year old to be, he may decide that the immediate benefits of going out and having mischievous fun late at night outweigh the repercussions of that vague, fuzzy specter that most teenagers have a hard time grasping called the future.

Even if you are capable of overpowering your teenage child and even if you had carte blanche to beat them like Super Mario Bros., what exactly are you going to do when they go out after school and simply don’t come home when they’re supposed to? Nothing. Sure you’ll blow up their phone, leave a hundred angry messages, threaten with all the above consequences, but if they decide they’re staying out, there’s literally nothing you can really do about it.

But we’re not talking about good old-fashioned teenagers who just stay out all night quietly binge drinking and fucking like rabbits. We’re talking about the bad ones. We’re talking about the ones who poison their mothers, the ones who start riots over cigarettes, the ones who randomly kick the shit out of the homeless, the ones who shoot their classmates and start structure fires and blow people for crack. Surely someone somewhere must have fucked up royally to create these monsters. Maybe it was the schools, maybe it was the media, but I think we’re safe to assume that it was undoubtedly the parents. Right?

Maybe. Maybe it was the parents. Maybe there was sexual abuse. Maybe there are abandonment issues. Maybe there was a complete lack of moral structure. Then again, maybe not. But either way, at some point in life people have to become accountable for their own actions. The law seems to believe that, except in very major circumstances, that point is 18. Legally speaking, I say fair enough. You have to have some legal age when children become adults and 18 seems to work pretty well. But what about morally, mentally and emotionally? Are people under 18 simply free of the social duty to know the difference between right and wrong and act accordingly? Are their parents necessarily the designated bearers of that burden?

Even in the Columbine case where the parents did undoubtedly deserve their fair share of the blame, a massive witch hunt ensued to attempt to blame video games and Marilyn Manson as well. They blamed the parents, they blamed the media, they blamed the gun laws, and maybe all of those things deserved blame. But where the hell was the blame for the kids? We’re not talking about a five year old who pulls his dad’s gun out of a drawer and accidentally shoots his friend here. We’re talking about people with the knowledge of how to obtain firearms, the advanced motor skills necessary to properly operate them and the presence of mind to actually plan out a strategy. If a couple of twenty year olds had similarly orchestrated such an atrocious act, nobody but those two twenty year olds, and maybe their lack of mental stability, would have been blamed. But when it’s a couple of seventeen year olds then clearly it’s our duty as a society to spread the blame around as much as possible. Because unless there’s someone else to blame, there’s just no way a kid could do a thing like that.

Well I don’t buy it. The sad truth is that there are some kids out there, just like there are some adults out there, who are just rotten, evil bastards. All those rotten, evil bastard adults out there were kids once. You think that rotten, evil bastard mentality just popped up on their eighteenth birthday? Some people just have a screw loose and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it except sit around and wait for them to crack and then lock them up.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the parents are never to blame. In many circumstances I’m sure that to a certain extent they are. In some instances they probably are in a very big way. People much smarter than me have studied and debated Nature vs. Nurture in every aspect of the human personality (including the rotten, evil bastard one) ad nauseum and there are still countless theories and opinions on the subject. It’s a worthwhile thing to study and all, how childhood experiences and early family life work to shape a person’s personality and the way they behave in society, but if we’re talking about people who are less than a few years from legal adulthood, people who are old enough to drive, people who are old enough to work and pay taxes, than we’re talking about people who are old enough to ultimately be held accountable for their own actions.

I don’t yet have children, but I probably will some day. When I do, I fully plan on doing my absolute best to instill them with the values of civility, rationality and social decency that I’ve grown accustomed to. However if, despite my best efforts, my kid ends up being a sadistic sociopath who does something heinous enough to make the national news anyway, do me a solid and don’t come beating down my door to drown me in an ocean of blame and just let me mourn in peace.

Hey Ya

Remember 'Hey Ya'? Of course you do, four and a half years ago you couldn't go two hours without hearing it. Well it's happened, it's been covered. I suppose it was ultimately inevitable considering its former popularity. The group in question is the aptly named Supersuckers and according to their website they are "the world's greatest Rock N' Roll band." I've never heard anything else by them, but according to what I heard tonight they're another poppy neo-punk band that will mass produce a bunch of radio friendly rad tunes for high school students to skateboard and fuck to.

So anyway, they covered 'Hey Ya.' Check it out if you like packing buffalo shit in your ears. Essentially they've added nothing new or original to the song. They've put no interesting new twist on it. The guitar is more distorted, the vocals are flatter and that's it. The whole rock covering rap thing is tricky, but it has worked before. Probably the ultimate example would be Dynamite Hack's cover of 'Boyz In Da Hood' by Eazy E, which is absolutely genius in my opinion. But first of all, 'Boyz In Da Hood' was never the most popular song in the world. Second of all, the lyrics and original beat were so hardcore that there was absolutely no way a bunch of white guys singing it with guitars could ever be taken seriously. And that's the point, it was never meant to be taken seriously. They even corrected the grammar in the title for christ sake, renaming it 'Boys In The Hood.' It was white boys with an acoustic guitar singing an Eazy E song. It was fresh, it was original and it was funny as hell.

There's nothing funny about this Supersuckers travesty though. They play the song as closely to the original as humanly possible, so much so that during the opening riffs, before the vocals kicked in, I thought it was the original. So essentially what you're hearing is 'Hey Ya' with all of its soul ripped out by a legion of pop-punk succubi. But what originally caught my attention was the fact that at first I did think it was the original...on rock radio. "I've never heard this on a rock station before," I thought to myself. And then it hit me, all it takes for a couple of rappers who write one of the biggest songs to ever hit the charts and one of the most original of their genre to get said song heard on rock radio is for four or five talentless bastards who know a couple power chords to butcher it less than five years later. And who the fuck covers a song that's less than five years old anyway?