It makes me so angry when I hear Republicans (mostly) talking about how “our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay for this” as an argument against President Obama’s plans for alternative energy, education, and health care.

I think if my children and grandchildren could grow up in a country where they could breathe, afford to go to college, find a job, and get insurance, that they would be glad to pay for that, versus growing up in a country which, as of now, looks as if it will have clouds of coal and oil fumes to blind and choke my children and grandchildren, who won’t be able find jobs, or afford college, health care, or possibly even food or gas.

I’ve been watching C-SPAN, and almost every Republican repeats this “it’s not fair for our children and grandchildren to have to pay for this” mantra, almost every time they speak. I know what they are really saying: it’s not fair for THEIR children and grandchildren to have to pay to fix the world that THEIR greed and selfishness and shortsightedness have created, even if it means a lower standard of living for MY/OUR children and grandchildren.

These guys weren’t arguing when Bush spent hundreds of billions on the Iraq war, or when the bailout for their rich embezzler banker buddies got hundreds of billions, but when it comes to hundreds of billions to make a better life for the core of America, the working class, the middle (and increasingly lower) class, “NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS!”

They didn’t seem to be worried about the National Debt before, BUT…

When they hear that it might be spent on solar, wind, and hydrodynamic energy to compete with the coal and oil guys who bribe them to make policies that benefit them, they stand up against spending. When they hear that the big business lobbyists might have to pay taxes to provide health care for the workers who make them rich and die from lack of insurance and retirement benefits (which were reduced over decades to increase the business owners already tidy profits) they stand up against spending.

When they hear that the taxes of the rich might help my poor son go to college to get a good job to not be poor someday, and to compete with their son who is put through the best schools because they profited from friendships with big business that I and my fellow Americans have worked so hard for for so little compensation, and that OUR children and grandchildren, if educated, might want jobs someday that their big business buddies plan on farming to third world countries to save money, they stand up against spending.

Well, I am glad for one that they are standing up! I wish they were standing in line at the unemployment or welfare office, so they would see the need to spend money on PEOPLE!

(You probably thought I was going to say I wish it was against a wall in front of a firing squad, or in a line at a guillotine, or underneath the nooses hanging from the gallows!)

I say, debt be damned!

If Obama wants to spend a trillion a year for 10 years, and it means we can get away from being the bend-over bitches of the middle eastern oil barons, create jobs for our record numbers of unemployed people, and ensure college and health care for at least some of our children and grandchildren, shouldn’t we do it?

These are the same guys who are probably always saying things like “you gotta spend money to make money”.

Well, guess what? Spending money in Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran is not going to make us any money.

It might make your defense contract buddies or your oil stock buddies or you money, but most of us are not seeing a dime.

OUR children and grandchildren need education, jobs, health care, and a clean environment, not more terrorists avenging their dead family members!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial analyst, consultant, banker, stock trader, economist, or any other type of expert when it comes to money.

I don’t have much money, so I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs of the American economy, but I think I know what one of our biggest problems is: the stock market.

I think we should abolish the stock market.

Speculating on, buying, selling, and trading stocks, commodities, futures, and whatever else is legalized gambling.

I have nothing against gambling, so long as it is done responsibly, meaning that the gambler bets only what they can afford to lose and doesn’t borrow or steal to place or pay their bets.

The problem is, Wall Street is like a Las Vegas that’s legitimized by our political system.

The Federal Reserve Bank is just a bullying casino boss that gets it’s way, pressuring the United States government and therefore it’s people, into doing whatever best profits them.

The average stock holding citizen, that perhaps does a little light trading on the side, is not so much the problem. I’m not blaming our economic crisis on working people who are making a few investments in the stock marker on the side, although I think it’s most prudent if someone is going to do so that they put most of their money into other investments that aren’t so much like a roulette wheel.

The problem is the big players, like financial analyst firms and lending firms and banks that play little games with the money that their investors have in their companies. I suppose this is the way it has always been done, as the return on investments made by the institutions allows them to pay the interest on their customers’ investments in them. What seems to be one of the roots of our present predicament is that, as always seems to happen, people who do know a lot about money and how to move it around, explain away discrepancies, try to get to fancy, and basically play games with money, dribbling it in and out between their legs and behinds their backs like the Harlem Globetrotters do with basketballs, all in an effort to maximize short term gains for those involved, at the expense of the stability of the economy, and it ends up affecting everybody, except maybe for those who are actually playing, since they are usually wise enough to know that the magical bubble they are blowing so big is eventually, inevitably going to pop, and therefore they hide away a few million or billion into foreign bank accounts for the rainy day they are helping to ensure in the future.

I think the stock market is the most obvious example of how wealthy people gamble not only with their own money, but with the money and jobs of the everyday worker, who is too busy toiling away in obscurity to realize that their life savings or their retirement or their home mortgage or their kids’ college tuitions is about to be lost at the craps table by some guy in a remote tower in a distant city.

Speculating and trading stocks, commodities, futures, and whatever other things they have on Wall Street nowadays is just a bunch of rich guys playing a giant card game trying to trick each other into giving up the good cards and whomever ends up with the best hand walks away the winner while the rest of us leave the table broke.

We don’t need stocks. Companies don’t need to be publicly held or traded. The only people who benefit from such nonsense in a major way is the people who usually end up screwing everything up with their greed and cheating and lies.

If everybody just kept working and making and buying things, we’d be alright without stocks.

Things would be worth as much tomorrow as they are today and as they were yesterday.

Maybe it’s not as glamorous or exciting, but it’d be a hell of a lot more stable.

Follow this link to take my survey, hosted on PollDaddy.com: SURVEY

On My Honor, I Promise To Get Some Poontang

I recently came across a blog entry with scanned pages from the 1965 Boy Scout handbook. Some of those commenting mentioned that the book has a chapter concerning masturbation. One commenter included a quotation of one section of this chapter, which reads as follows:

At times the glands discharge part of their secretions through the sex organ during sleep. This process is called a nocturnal emission or a “wet dream”. It is perfectly natural and healthy and a sign that nature has taken care of the situation in its own manner.

There are boys who do not let nature have its own way with them but cause emissions themselves. This may do no physical harm, but may cause them to worry.

Any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be avoided or overcome. If anything like this worries you, this is not unusual – just about all boys have the same problem. Seek the correct answer to any question which bothers you about your development from boy to man. But be sure to get your information from reliable sources – your parents, your physician, your spiritual adviser.

It’s funny that the writer practically plants a suggestion to the readers that pleasuring themselves will possibly trouble their consciences. I’ve never felt worried about masturbation, nor has any man or woman I’ve ever met who has been willing to discuss the topic with me. Any guilt associated with self-pleasing acts is generally forced onto people by the judgement of others who are less open-minded.

However, what strikes me as strange is that the discussion on the page mentioned above focuses on masturbation, which was important enough to mention in the book, but that there is no mention of homosexuality. I assume that this is because, at the time, gayness was less accepted and less talked about in society, and as such was not a topic deemed necessary for inclusion in the manual. I guess the writers of the book were afraid that mentioning homosexuality might have given sexually frustrated boys ideas about how to work out their issues without resorting to masturbation?  

Wouldn’t the BSA rather have Scouts jerking off in their sleeping bag than playing leap frog in the showers? Perhaps the organization saw masturbation by a boy as gay, because pleasing yourself as a male means that a male is pleasing you, and is therefore somehow a homosexual act?

I was a Scout, and Eagle Scout in fact, and I don’t remember a single Scout leader, event, pep-talk, pledge, or piece of literature that ever mentioned the pursuit of sex or the act of sex, so I therefore assumed that the Scouts was not a group concerned with sexual orientation. It’s not like the Scouts is about getting girls anyway, so why would they care whether you wanted to?

I was in Scouting from 1982 to 1992. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the topic of homosexuals vs Scouting became a hot button issue in the news, nationally.

My immediate response was twofold: why would gay boys, who are generally more effeminate, want to go rough it in the wild with heteros, who would probably make fun of and bully them, and why would Scouts, who enjoy being clean and doing crafts, not want gay members?

I have often thought it funny that an organization that wears such gay outfits as short shorts with slits in the side, long socks with fuzzy balls on them, scarves, and berets would be so anti-gay. Hmm… Maybe that’s why gay boys would want to be Scouts; for the lovely uniforms?

I later caught on that the real issue is that many parents were concerned more about gay leaders, who they felt might molest or corrupt their boys, than actually about gay boys intermingling with straights. Protecting your child from sexual predators is a valid concern, but I think that most statistics would show that hetero men are far more likely to take advantage of girls than gay men are of boys. So, I think that the uproar against gays in Scouting was kind of overkill.

Maybe we could help to rectify this issue by blending the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts into just the Scouts, the way it is in most countries around the world. But perhaps the USA is still too sexually repressed to let our little boys and little girls play and work and camp together?

I guess as a para-military organization, you want to prepare the men to die in trenches some day defending the flag? I think unless they include some merit badges about boobs and getting nookie, they should just not worry about it.

Parents: teach your kids to tell you if adults take advantage of them sexually or otherwise, in Scouts, or elsewhere, and get over it and stop giving the Boy Scouts of America a hard time.

Scouts: stick to teaching citizenship and survival skills and personal & social responsibility, and let boys decide whether they wanna get with girls or boys or animals or whatever…

WARNING:

This blog is written by an infidel, and may offend Allah, anyone named Mohammed, suicide bombers, self-proclaimed “martyrs”, religious nut-cases, and third world child molesters and rapists who like pre-pubescent wives…

Since first hearing about the claim of 72 virgins awaiting Martyrs of Islamic Jihad, some time back in 2001, after the December 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, I have often questioned the math behind this outrageous claim. I am not the only one, I admit. All you have to do is Google “72 Virgins” and you will see many, many sites joking about the fraudulent logic involved in such a concept.

For the few of you who may not be familiar with this idea, supposedly, according to many Islamic extremists, every “martyr” is supposed to be rewarded with 72 virgins in paradise after blowing up themselves up to kill innocent civilians in their Jihad to please Allah.

I will not go into the very misguided morality of attacking random, innocent, uninvolved men, women and children to avenge some wrong that certain governments and/or militaries have done to those who consider themselves Jihadists. Needless to say, they are usually too cowardly and poorly funded and trained to actually strike at the people directly responsible for their oppression, namely their own governments and the governments that their nations are at war with. It’s kind of like the little boy whose daddy beats him so he beats up the smaller boys at school, or the dog who gets kicked over and over by the mean old owner and then turns on the little girl walking by the fence; it’s safer to hurt someone weaker than you by surprise than to take on the power that is hurting you in a direct confrontation.

Anyway, I will now put aside ethical judgements and get back to the matter at hand, which is refuting the illogical lack of math behind the claim of “72 Virgins”…

Most of the sites that my search results returned on Google ended up being either Islamic blogs claiming that Israel is responsible for spreading this notion to western civilization, which I am sure is in at least some small way true, or people simply commenting “has anybody ever done the math” or something to that effect.

Well, I have decided to do the math, or at least to pull together various resources from around the web offering estimates and statistics where other people have done the math of how many people have ever lived and died on the Earth, and out of people that die, how many are female, and out of those how many are virgins. I am not going to bother calculating how many are virgins of legal age or who have entered or completed puberty, as this does not seem to matter in most of the Muslim world, especially in the middle east and other parts of Africa, where girls of 12-14 routinely are sold to men as wives and often, even girls of 8 or 9 years of age as well.

According to reports by Population Today magazine, the journal of the US Population Bureau, as of 2002, about 106 billion people had ever lived on Earth.

If we estimate that 50% of them were women, that means that by 2002, there had been about 53 billion women who had ever lived on the Earth.

I don’t know of any statistics that measure how many women that die are virgins or not, so, for the sake of argument, I will again take 50%, which is probably way off since usually 50% or more of even unattractive women are molested by the time  they are teenagers.

So, by a liberal estimate, there may have been as 26.5 billion female virgins who had ever lived on the earth by 2002.

If we divide that number by 72, which is the number of virgins that each martyr is apparently promised by Mohammed, or Allah, or Osama, or whomever is in charge of their gang, we get the number 368,055,555.55555555555555555555556 . I will round off the decimal point, since 55% virgin does not a virgin make.

That means that, using some very liberal estimates, there were enough virgin women who had died on Earth as of 2002 for 368 million suicide bombers, assuming that people of all races, cultures, countries, and religions all go to the same heaven, and that all the virgins went to heaven, and not hell or purgatory or limbo or were reincarnated or whatever.

According to most of the global population data that I can find on the web that takes religion into account there are about 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.

For expediency’s sake, I will guess that about half of these are men. This is important because only male “martyrs” are rewarded with virgins.

That would mean that there are about 750 million Muslim males in the world right about now.

Assuming that only about 10 % of these guys are Jihadists, which I think is fair, since it seems to me that while most religious people in the world are illogical, only a few of them are suicidal and/or homicidal, that would mean that there are about 75 million male followers of Islam on Earth that would be willing to blow themselves and other random people up so that they could be served by 72 virgins.

If we now multiply the 75 million possible suicide bombers by the 72 virgins that they will each supposedly receive, that adds up to only 54 billion virgins, and as we calculated before, there are probably no more than 26.2 billion female virgins who have ever died on Earth, so if all of these guys blew themselves up for Allah, they would end up getting only about 34.56 virgins, and as we also decided before, a partial virgin doesn’t count, so if all the possible suicide bombers blew themselves up, they could only have 34 virgins each.

So, my message to Muslim guys is this:

34 virgins is hardly worth blowing yourself up for. Wouldn’t it be easier just to cruise high schools and colleges in kick-ass cars and say that you just got out of prison? Plenty of young hotties, innocent or not, love bad boys in muscle cars. You could rack up 34 before you know it, and live to tell your sons and grandsons about it. Think about it!

According to an article on a site called “Moonbattery”, which is either a blog dedicated to lunar energy, lunar abuse, or liberals (called moonbats by conservatives), under President Obama, whom they are calling “Chairman Zero” (which I must admit is a little clever, given his socialist speeches and his big O logo), some people who make more money are being taxed more than poor people who can barely afford to survive. These social Darwinists would rather the poor people just die out, with their children starving to death or freezing on the streets.

I quote the site, and link to the graph that they reference:

<BEGIN QUOTE>:

“Nation of Vampires … According to this graph, the terminal cancer that is liberalism has passed the tipping point:”

wealthy people pay more taxes than poor, boo-hoo!

…< END QUOTE >

I think that people who argue that wealthier people shouldn’t have to subsidize poorer people seem to forget that a great many of the wealthier people get wealthier by charging the poor ever more for goods and services, while paying them ever less for their labor.

If wealthy people get that way at the expense of the poor, why be so surprised when poor people elect officials who help to bring some of the money back their way?

Also, since it is the cheap labor and the expensive purchases and bills paid by the poor that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, I should think that it is in poor taste for the rich to complain about

giving a little back so that the poor can survive and have some quality of life. 

I guess when you get comfortable, financially, you lose human compassion and understanding for anybody who isn’t; I wouldn’t know…

I’ve never made over $25,000 a year for any of the hard work that I have done for my various wealthy employers, but I would gladly give up a third of my money in taxes if someone would pay me $100,000 or more, instead of making $15,000 and getting back a $5000 tax refund.

If any of you six figure making, higher tax bracket types out there want to switch incomes and tax brackets with me, so you don’t have to pay anything and get a refund, I’d be more than willing to consider moving into your fancy house and driving your fancy car to your easy job, and you can live in my small apartment and work crappy jobs as you can find them, driving around in an aging crappy car.

I think you would quickly realize that paying some of your wealth in taxes beats not having any, and learn not to complain about being taxed for enjoying the luxuries that so many live without.

I am constantly amazed at the way that Conservatives, especially Republicans, either can’t see how hypocritical their thoughts and words and actions are, or just don’t care!

The best example of this is their support of “bailing out” the corrupt and inefficient titans of industry, so that banking and auto CEOs can give themselves bonuses for losing and embezzling money, which is not free market capitalism, which they supposedly promote, but rather SOCIALISM and WELFARE for the rich. But when it comes to the working poor and middle classes from whom they stole the money and exploited the cheap labor and overcharged for goods and services, suddenly SOCIALISM and WELFARE are evil things that are supposed to make people think of totalitarian dictatorships.

Also, as long as we are describing different forms of government, it’s amazing to me that Conservative Republicans can call Obama and other liberal Democrats Socialists, but can’t face reality and admit that Bush and his administration were Fascists. If we are going to call a Socialist a Socialist, lets also call a Fascist a Fascist, despite any negative connotations the word may have, like invoking thoughts of Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Euphemistic language never did anyone any good. If there is to be an honest and productive dialog between the political extremes, each needs to accept it’s own true nature if it expects the other to.

“The people who say that money can’t buy you happiness are just the rich people trying to keep the poor from striving to get their money.” - Me