How to Deal with Superstition

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can’t disarm their enemy.

--HL Mencken

The Sensible Liberal's Guide to Sensible Liberalism in the Age of Obama

God, I fucking hate people.

Okay, so I'm at the Blue Line station on my way home from work. I need to add money to my stored value card or else I won't have enough to get to work tomorrow. But the machine doesn't take credit cards, so I have to get $20 out of the nearby ripoff ATM, which is located inside a tiny convenience store inside the station. If I hurry, I can make it to my bus before it pulls away from the station. Unfortunately, this stupid, fat she-beast who just bought a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos is standing right in front of the ATM, and she won't move until the clerk gives her a bag. The clerk is already helping the next customer, so the stupid fat she-beast has to wait for the bag that she doesn't even fucking need but that she thinks the clerk owes her because she just bought a 99-cent bag of Doritos. Of course, she won't move her fat motherfucking ass so I can gain access to the ATM; I have my card out & she looks right fucking at me, so I know she knows what I'm trying to do, but she still won't move until the clerk gives her the plastic fucking bag that she so richly deserves. Finally, the clerk finishes helping the other customer and asks the stupid fat she-beast what she wants even though he already knows what she wants.

"You didn't give me no bag," she explains, her words dripping with injury.

The clerk glances at me, recognizing my building rage, chuckles, and laboriously pulls a plastic bag from the hanger and carefully spreads it open for her to deposit her precious motherfucking Nacho Cheese Doritos. Finally, the obese food tube waddles off allowing me, at long last, to access the ATM, which, despite the fact that it's charging me two dollars and fifty cents to access my own money, takes for fucking ever. After chirping and grinding and wheezing for an eternity, it finally spits out my measely twenty. I snatch it and dash to the stored value card vending machine. But by this time, there is a line of people waiting to put money on THEIR stored value cards. The line is long, in part because the other vending machine is out of order (naturally), and in part because two motherfucking thirds of my fellow countrymen have not yet figured out how to operate these things. They are hell on wheels when it comes to texting their post-literate friends, but when it comes to reading pictograms on a vending machine rivaling a PlaySkool infant's toy in simplicity, they turn into stone cold imbeciles.

Anyway, by some miracle, I am able to add the twenty dollars to my stored value card and make it to my bus moments before it leaves the station. And guess who I see on the bus. Come on, guess. That's right! The very same fat, cretinous whore who wouldn't get the motherfuck out of my way until she got the plastic motherfucking bag for her stupid goddamn fucking Doritos, which she doesn't fucking need anyway. And guess what I see on the floor of the bus beneath her idiotic hooves. Go ahead, guess. That's right! The plastic fucking bag that she wouldn't move until she got because it was owed to her.

This meat puppet, this disgusting, worthless food tube is exactly why people go postal. She will go through her entire pointless life consuming and consuming and consuming while producing nothing of value until she dies and begins decomposing, which can't happen soon enough. Every bite of food that has sustained her, every stitch of clothing that has kept her warm, every brick, piece of lumber, slab of concrete, tile, shingle, rug that has sheltered her, every tidbit of knowledge her teachers tried in vain to ram through her thick skull, every gallon of gas that has moved her carcass around, every satellite that has been launched and every megabyte of bandwidth that has been used so she can text her backward, half-witted motherfucking friends has gone one hundred percent to waste. She is a monumental drag on civilization, and, unfortunately, there are millions just like her. They waddle around prattling on and on about god knows what, consuming every idea and resource like matter down a black hole and leaving nothing in their wake but a trail of discarded wrappers and stains and crumbs. God it's great to be American. Thanks for listening (and by listening, I mean reading.) I'll be here all week.

Happy Memorial Day

Kurt Wise's science career was destroyed by religion

Imagine

Imagine if the Tea Party was Black

by Tim Wise

Let’s play a game, shall we? The name of the game is called “Imagine.” The way it’s played is simple: we’ll envision recent happenings in the news, but then change them up a bit. Instead of envisioning white people as the main actors in the scenes we’ll conjure - the ones who are driving the action - we’ll envision black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to imagine the public reaction to the events or incidents, if the main actors were of color, rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America, at the end of the game, wins.

So let’s begin. Read on.

Legalize It - Peter Tosh (Remastered)

Juana Molina Performs on Soundcheck

Liberals Piss Me Off

Yeah, you read that right.

Liberals.

Piss me off.

I've written before about how moderates piss me off, but these days, liberals are becoming almost indistinguishable from moderates. Just by standing still, I've moved to the radical Left. It is gratifying, therefore, to see that at least one other person feels the way I do.

After too many mornings waking up feeling guilty about mean things I've said, sometimes drunkenly, to dipshits who deserved it, and despite the fact that I'm probably the least religious person on the planet, I've made an effort to take this bit of Buddhist wisdom to heart:

The origin of suffering is attachment to transient things.

If ever something was transient, it's this infestation of early 21st century politics by spineless, cheerleading, pseudo liberal shitheads who have made it their life's work to achieve Wall Street's objectives by adopting formerly right-wing policies.

Of course, if I were truly taking that bit of Buddhist wisdom to heart, I wouldn't even be posting this, but it helps me to (sometimes) remember to say my piece and move on, rather than stewing over something.

Call it a catharsis.