Fetchez La Vache

One of the most American foods we have is French Fries. I heard today that the three most eaten vegetables here are 1) fried potatoes (fries), 2) fried potatoes (chips) and 3) iceberg lettuce (water in leaf form). If you could get a family sized bag of burger (beef) chips for two dollars you could wipe out vegetables statistically, but why are fried potatoes called french fries when in France they just call them frites pommes? There was that whole thing about changing the name to freedom fries, but it seems like the American way would be to sell the name to some corporation to get it in every restaurant and grocery store.  "Pick me up some Google Fries!"  But I'd rather change the names of burritos and tacos before we start thinking about French foods. Who's going to eat carne if we just call it roasted meat and I'm not switching from French's mustard to the spicy brown English one either.

I'm not sure why we can't use this as a public relations trick. When we're negotiating with other countries and they talk about us patronizing or offending them, just point out all the imports from their country:

France: Salad dressing, mustard and toast

Germany: Beer, pretzels and shepherds

Mexico: Cheap beer, cheap food and unskilled labor

Canada: Bad comedians, Celine Dion, cheap supposedly skilled labor

Japan: Crappy cartoons, sushi and tiny tree presents for your mom

China: All the stuff we used to make

We're all friends here, right?

Magna Charter School

Proof that just like life, segregation will find a way when you defy the laws of nature; Charter schools are the answer to the failure of the public school system. When are they going to figure out that you just can't teach everybody. Some people are just soylent green and even a good teacher could spend all their attention on a rock if performance evaluation is based on improvement metrics of the weakest Gomer. Throw in some emotional disturbation and a deficit of attention and even a professional cat juggler wouldn't be able to cope.

In the 80's I thought I would have to pay beau-coups to put my kid in a sterile catholic/military petri dish with no authority challenge and thinking for yourself meant finishing your calculus homework. Silly conservatives thought vouchers were the answer, but why steal the cake when you can get the recipe and put the place out of business? Now we can siphon all the money from the public school system, pay our charter school teachers peanuts, leave the problem kids with parents that don't care in the already struggling system making it look even worse, force the good teachers to quit, sneak a little religion into the charter and break the bank to force education into privatization all in one punch.

If everyone can afford a good education, how are my slightly below average kids going to compete in the real world?

Spare the Rod

You hear people talk about corporal punishment as a form of humiliation like that's some revelation. The hum in humble comes from humiliation, right? I'm not sure what the problem is here. We were all spanked as a child unless you grew up in some hippie camp. We all hate our parents and we all turned out ok. Do we want our kids to live with us until they die? Why would they want to leave the house and get married and have their own kids if they don't decide they can show us how much better they can do it?

Anger is a motivating force and if you want to keep competition and the American way going you have to perpetuate that dysfunctional drive or we'll all start doing artsy crap. Why do you think all the music from the 60's and 70's came from the British bands? They weren't spanking their kids and they weren't driven to conspicuous consumption and baby booming economic control of the world. Capital punishment is just extreme corporal punishment and where would we be without that? If people (or kids) start thinking they're just as good as everybody else, then what's to stop them from thinking they're above the law or God's will? It's a slippery slope.

I brought you into this world and I can take you right back out.

The Xmas Wars

I don't like to get pissy, but this backlash against our original beef with Christmas becoming "Santa Claus and gifting" instead of baby Jesus's b-day is a little ridiculous. Wasn't it enough to shorten it to Xmas. Replacing Christ with a tilted cross (X) is rubbing it in a bit (who says the Jews don't control the media?). I guess we should neuter all holidays to secular motifs. We could have zombie bunnies for Easter to keep the undead (back from the grave) theme. Does recognizing a religious holiday constitute a break in the separation of church and state? Who cares?

Have you ever tried to sing O Holiday Tree? Feliz feriados? Blue Hanukkah? White Kwanzaa? It's funny that we celebrate giving gifts to children to avoid the previous tradition of groups of young men going from house to house demanding alcohol and food. Christmas is one of those big bags that we keep stuffing new things in to please everybody until it won't mean anything to anyone. My kids think it's about Santa rewarding their behavior for the year because that sounds like a good idea when they're being bad.

Not effective: "God sees what you're doing and you'll regret it when you die."

Effective (first couple of times): "Santa is going to bring you a big pile of dog poop if you keep doing that."

Believing in Santa Claus is just one step away from believing in Jesus. He's watching you all the time. He's magic and can bring you good stuff or bad stuff and he lives some place far far away and you can't go there to check it out. Don't look on Google Earth.

This (Xmas) war would be a lot better if we could use our guns.

Abortion Is Murder

One of the most prominent fences bisecting political philosophies; this is a good litmus test to separate left and right. With the death penalty and war justification, you might think exceptions for advocating the destruction of life would fall into the conservative camp, but it's not difficult to find the right answer to this question when you follow these rules: 1) Life is a wonderful gift that can't be taken away... unless you do something wrong, 2) Since brains aren't required for life, a heartbeat is enough.

Everyone loves (other people's) puppies and children, so why is it hard to understand that once a child has a beating heart you would be an Indian giver to take it away. If you think the child might be evil or deformed, you have the option of making it someone else's problem. If no one wants to care for it, then god's will can be decided by sending it to war or death row.

If there was a puppy growing in your tummy, you wouldn't destroy it.

Fear Addict

We are all afraid of something and it's our nature to embrace these fears. Ironically, most of us do this by avoiding them or building elaborate defenses. It's like putting up fences to keep out the brown people or acquiring vast wealth to avoid death; we all know it doesn't really solve the problem so yelling that from the sidelines is not helpful. We're not stupid. We know that plastic surgery looks worse than the wrinkles, but you can tell we can afford the procedure. It's a class thing which is something Democrats have to repress. (proven by how touchy they are when you call them elitist).

So when you tell us we're driven by fear and greed, it's like telling a monkey he's driven by a compulsive banana addiction. So what you're saying is I'm human. Interesting concept. What are you driven by? I have a fear of sleeping on the floor so I got a bed. My irrational fears keep me from thinking about the rational ones. If you're worried about the rats eating your toes, you don't think so much about the fact that you're homeless. We turned irrational fear into a whole industry with the cold war and then Reagan had to be a hero and win it. I think that was during his senile years.

A shiny city on a hill is a formidable redoubt.

Activist Judges

So many times I get the insulted virgin response from Democrats when I talk about activist judges promoting their policies, but I'm not specifically opposed to legislation from the bench. Look at the recent ruling about Obamacare being unconstitutional requiring people to pay for health care insurance. Now with a legal precedent I can stop paying for car insurance too. There are many good examples of judicial activism like Bush v. Gore, Plessy v. Ferguson, campaign finance restrictions removed for corporations, striking down the law allowing same-sex marriages. It's a tool in your belt like a gun or a lobbyist. The funny thing is that Democrats are so holier-than-thou that they won't admit to using dirty tricks as a means. Compromise my ethic? - No!

The reason it doesn't work to shout "activist judge" at a Republican is we're just going to say, "Duh, why else would we have selected that judge." It's only cheating if you can get an indictment. We point it out when you do it because you feel guilty for being weak. Look at Roe v Wade; you had to use "right to privacy" to make it legal to kill babies? That's not a stretch? I believe the constitution was meant to be interpreted and some people call any decision they don't agree with activist, but there's no such thing as objectivism (I'm looking at you Ayn Rand) so there's no universal interpretation of the law. The only universal law is in the bible.

The constitution is more like a set of guidelines than actual rules.

Fiscal Conservative

I get tired of the muckrakers saying, "I thought you were supposed to be a fiscal conservative". Maybe the old Republican party was worried about saving money or making sure government is small and efficient, but the important thing now is 1) Anything to make me pay less taxes, 2) Shrink the government to where the programs I don't like are not effective. These two goals are not at odds with each other. Fiscal conservative is a nice way to say stingy and I'll own that. I'm cheap with the government, but generous with my friends. Why do I want to pay for your public school when I already pay for my kid's private school. I don't care if your kid can make proper change for me at McDonald's. I don't expect him to because he's trying to cheat me anyway so I'll keep him honest.

If we strap the government for cash, the essential programs are still going to get funded because they're essential. They may have tight budgets too, but since when do I want government workers to have comfortable lives? You work for the government if you can't do anything else. Who else would go into the military? If you have to kill a program you're going to kill the ones that aren't required first. Why do we need to pay for schools? Look at the little house on the prairie. Your parents are going to teach you the important stuff. You pay for everything else.

Fiscal conservation means I keep my money.

Family Values

When I say family values, I mean that my family is more important than other people and they deserve more from me, but mostly I'm going to do what I can to rig the game in their favor. It's like the hierarchy of needs. You help those close to you first and when that's satisfied you can move further outside your circle. You would have to be a Democrat to want to help someone before you help your family or spread the help out to everyone where it's useful to no one. Everyone cheats and that's the first thing you need to teach your family is to be wary of other people taking your stuff. It goes back to the nature of people: bad.

I love my family so much that I built (not literally) a fortress to protect them. It's my sanctuary to keep all the bad elements out there. They will be safe in here. I won't expose them to any of the bad people in the world, which might be a problem when they grow up and have to fend for themselves with an unnatural fear of diversity. But when they turn 18 they're someone else's problem.

My family is my most important treasure.

Perpetual Deficit

We borrow money when we buy a car or a house and we all imagine a time when we can pay off all our bills and live off the interest of what we've saved, but it's pie in the sky. We have to think of the country like a citizen of the world where we have to borrow from the world bank to compete in the big market. Where would we live if we didn't borrow? We need to think of borrowing as a hedge against inflation and devaluation of the currency. As long as we owe trillions of dollars to other people, there's no incentive to make that money worthless.

It's sort of like in a bad economy if you think you might have to file bankruptcy, you'd rather be deep in debt than just a little in debt if it's all going away. Why would we want to pay off all the bills? It doesn't make it any easier to survive. If everyone else owes us money, they aren't going to repay any more than we're going to repay them. The house of cards will keep going until someone knocks it down. Just start building it again when that happens. You've still got all the cards.

If I pay off my house, my wife will just start buying more crap.

No Squeaky Wheels

People talk about minority repression like it's a bad thing. When you live in a little "D" democratic society, the rules and the goals are set by the big "M" majority. I know this sucks a lot of times like in school when you want to play kickball and everyone wants to play dodgeball, or you get picked last in team selection, but the benefits are better than the inconveniences. It homogenizes us where we all know what to expect in normal interaction. We are comfortable living next to people who look and act like we do. What if your neighbor played different music really loud and slept at different times than you did? What if they didn't have the same religious or educational beliefs that you do? How hard would it be living next to those people?

Democracy filters all the bad stuff out of society in the form of minorities. Unfortunately, some things that fall into minorities aren't necessarily bad in and of themselves, but that's the price you pay to keep chaos outside. Imagine if your church had to modify its beliefs to allow everyone to worship there. You would no longer have any of the core mythological constructs that make us who we are. Any concept that was difficult to believe or subjected anyone to negative feelings would be discarded. I don't want to live in that generic society.

The wheel squeaks to tell you it needs to be fixed.

NASCAR Go

I don't watch NASCAR, but I understand the penchant. It's raw power and pure structure without a bunch of twists and noodles. People say baseball is the American sport, but it's more like Americanized cricket than a pure sport. American football is much more American. This is a game that is as close to our government and society as can be. It's kind of like the Constitution; every rule is well-defined but open to interpretation. The real rule is the meaning of the rule, not the words on paper. That's why a touchdown is when the ball crosses the plane and why a fumble recovery is only known after you unpile the bodies. Some rules you can enforce with photo finish replays and some can't be "ruled" until after the whistle blows. Football is litigious with red flag challenges, unsportsmanlike conduct and personal fouls.

NASCAR is similar with all the cars going in the same circle with the same car and the same limits. Only the driver is tested and while money may buy better equipment for training, repair and fame, if you have enough money to play, there is an artificial equalization within the class that promotes competition and levels the playing field. This is just like regulated society in general. Once you have enough money to play, you can compete and one day if I'm not taxed to death I can do that instead of watching NASCAR (I mean football). Sports seasons give us a sense of safety in familiarity.

My team is going all the way this year.

Deregulation de rigueur

Ironic that I'm quoting Darwin (well paraphrasing), but if you believe a theory of evolution might work in a closed environment, then you wouldn't want to keep imposing rule after rule with an arbitrary structure of control mutating your experiment into a narrow definition of life. If you were god, you would remove as many rules as you could allowing expansion into all manner of sentience with no bound. The free market follows this Darwinian analogy. Do you want a business to survive that can't regulate itself or survive the parasitic nature of the rest of the economy?

The problem with regulation is similar to the problem we're having now with allergies and our immune system. If you Purell everything, when a business needs to survive a real adversary, it has no defenses. Also, if you look at the way our economy has evolved over the past 200 years, there are certain mechanisms that are in place to help businesses help themselves. If you regulate them from the outside, then these mechanisms start working against the corporations like when our immune systems work against us when they don't have anything else to do. That's why kids that grow up with dogs and cats in the house at a young age have stronger immune systems.

A little dirt in your system is good for the soul.

Guns Will Save Us

There's a healthy fear to knowing a snake will bite you. When you look at that snake, you may think it would make an easy snack or it would be perfect boot material, but you're not going to just walk up and take it, unless you have a gun. If everyone had a gun, we would all be snakes except the people in this analogy wouldn't have guns so you're strike would actually be a deterrent, or maybe the snakes would all have guns.

I've heard people talk about letting teachers carry guns to school which sounds like a good idea on the surface, but most teachers are small framed women (in my district), and in high school they could possibly be overcome and have their guns be used against them which would definitely be a problem in some of the bad school districts. Teachers in those areas tend to be a bit larger, so maybe it wouldn't be quite as bad, but still, it seems like a better solution would be to have patrols with guns and dogs by licensed carriers with registered skills and room lockdown alarms that would lock all doors in the school in case of emergency. I need to think that one through a little bit because there are some problems with the plan, but guns make people respect you even if you don't deserve that respect.

Forced respect is the definition of society.

North American Scum

People look at Americans with disdain because we're not afraid to spend our money and feel good about it. Overindulgence is our middle name and we'll wave it in your face and laugh. Am I supposed to apologize for having fun? If God didn't want me to spend this money, why did he give it to me? Or maybe that's the way he's taking it away by letting me spend it on superficial crap that won't really make me happy. Lesson learned!

The difference between Republicans and Democrats is not our spending habits or even our attitudes about it. Democrats go on holiday to Europe and act like they also hate America but have no control, or they tell everyone they're Canadian. We don't care. We'll wear a jumper and a baseball cap made of a big American flag and tell everyone how we saved (or kicked) their ass in WW II. We're like big Charles Barkley stars that everyone loves to hate over there. Who wants to go see old buildings and mimes for a vacation? I'd rather sit on a Maui beach and drink my 18 year old single malt.

You wouldn't touch us with a ten foot pole.

Evil Exists

Some people say that evil is just a concept and there is no pure evil at the core of all bad things, but it is all black and white to me. Relative morality is like reverse discrimination; it's just a loaded term to push people's buttons. The absolute morality is right there for us all to see. Our book may just be one interpretation of it, but we have to fight it our whole lives. Part of that evil is in us and that drives us to sin if we let it control us. The inner fight is the easy one if we follow the right path. That's just staying between the ropes on our journey through life.

The difficult fight is all the evil that is swirling around in the universe without any control. We have help, but our egos may tempt us into thinking that our personal bodies are more important than the big fight for our souls and the souls of our religious families. We're not all meant to make it to the final fight and that evil may knock some of us down even though we're following the proper path. It's the evil in the world that drives us to good. Without it, we would already be good and there would be no struggle or suffering and no meaning to this temporal existence before the eternal peace.

Evil makes the world go round.

Work Ethic from Jesus

Democrats talk about this protestant work ethic being an industrialization of the Christian mind, but it's more about survival than it is about role models. Imagine what would happen if we all gave up our jobs and walked the earth espousing our philosophies and helping others. Even if we could all magically cure people and help bad people become good people, we'd quickly run out of sick and bad people and then we'd all be walking around asking for handouts from other bums. "I don't have any food or shelter to give you. I'm walking the earth."

So in the interest of concretizing this myth, I'm going suggest that each person should walk the earth for two years (maybe between high school and college?) and go around helping people. Since you probably can't heal the sick and your philosophy won't be honed enough to convert the evil, you should just do odd jobs around the house like mow the lawn, do the laundry or clean the garage, but by spreading the word and showing your compassion during this time, you can justify the rest of your life working too many hours and all the compromises that you have to put up with to have a good life. It will also make you feel better about your indulgences (like massages).

I gave during my walking time.

Here Comes The Rapture

Some people say the end of the world is coming in October of 2011. I don't know if I believe that, but if we believe it might come or that we might be an instrument in achieving the end of the world, why would we break our backs and our banks trying to fix the planet? Maybe this is just how the story is supposed to go. It could be that we're supposed to die a slow death of poison air, undrinkable water, population overgrowth, civilized wars and religious lunacy and that's what the revelation turmoil was all about. It sounds like hell on earth, but unless the sun explodes or a meteor cracks the planet in half, the end of times is probably going to be more of a whimper than a bang.

Do we really think we can fix this problem? To get everyone on board, we would have to have a really good dictatorship that could keep people in line even when they were poor and oppressed, or maybe a genocide that left only people willing to work towards a brighter future. Right now, we have too many countries pointing fingers at each other. "China is using more resources than they should and oppressing their people." -- "America is burning more fossil fuels than the rest of the world combined three times." -- "Saudi Arabia isn't even civilized enough to have schools for women." If all but one country did a good job fixing their environment, the one that's left could still ruin it for everyone and spend and waste everything the others saved so they would be riding into the rapture living the good life while the rest of us suffer.

I think I'll just keep spending and let the world take care of itself.

Charity Control

Democrats want to spend my money on their charities. I can't afford to give as much money as I want to my church to help people who really need it when I get taxed by the government charity services. They say we can't have civilization without helping society along, but it's like a giant black hole sucking all our money and not helping anyone that I know. Some of them aren't even Christians or Americans.

Why should everyone get the same health care that I'm working to afford? That's charity. Why should I have compassion for someone I don't even know when I'm not helping the people I do know as much as I'd like? When you're really sick, the hospitals don't usually kick you out if you don't have insurance and people with chronic problems are going to explode our group rates anyway. Why should I pay if I'm not sick? The government is punishing me for not being sick.

I don't want to help people I don't know or agree with. What if they're my enemies?

I Like Money

Democrats will tell you that money is not important and we should share everything and help people and have compassion and walk the earth with only our robe and sandals. That doesn't sound very American to me. I'm sure Gandhi was a good man and we need saints and saviors and such, but they're just role models. If we all tried to be exactly like our models, then who would stand out as a role model?

I work hard for my money and I treat my family well and I like to spend my money. Why should I let liberals make me feel guilty about something I enjoy? They enjoy their meditation and I enjoy my Jet Ski. What's the difference? Money is not evil. If more poor people had massages, maybe they would work harder to actually be able to pay for their own masseuse. I can't be lazy because I don't like to be poor.

Why don't more people like money?

Mission Statement

Having been both a Democrat and a Republican at different points in my life, I thought it was important to list the reasons why I picked one "party" over the other. For most people that are even remotely interested in politics, a party is more like a religion or a personal philosophy, so I want to try to express these reasons in a personal and subjective form instead of a simple set of rules or a "platform".

"Here we go." - Mario