Real-World News

Looks like some Baptists in South Carolina are pretty homophobic. From the article:

Encouraging churches to work to curb gang violence.

Calling for laws restricting sexually oriented businesses.

Opposing the Catawba Indian Tribe’s proposal to start a high-stakes bingo operation in Marion County.

Encouraging Baptists to help pro-life pregnancy care centers purchase ultrasound machines.

Praying for candidates for political offices and thinking of their vote as a Christian duty.

How wonderful. I don't quite understand why they chose those topics, but let's try to understand their reasoning:

Here's a quickie:

We've now spent $1,600,000,000,000 dollars on the War in Iraq. Yes, that's "16" with 11 zeros after it.

You know what this is starting to remind me of? Gamblers who keep borrowing money from the house thinking their lucky breaks are overdue. It's called the gambler's fallacy, and it's driving us into oblivion. Soon, the United States will be putting the pink slip for its car on the table— and we'll be practically guaranteed to lose it.

We're a country of lazy, unintelligent, mindless, paranoid, hedonistic dumbasses who are easily frightened into tossing money in any direction to prevent some unknown person from doing some unknown thing to us. We build gates and walls to fence ourselves in— even though they keep out nothing.

So here's my question: just when, exactly are we going to cut our losses and walk away from the table? The corporate puppets will say that we want to, "cut and run," and you know what I say to that?

YES! Cut and fucking run the hell out of there, before our legs get blown off and we can't even do that. I'd much rather cut and run instead of hemorrhage everything we've worked for as a country on some fucking sand people over some bullshit archaic energy source. Let them deal with their own shit.

We've got our own problems to deal with here. We can start with the infant mortality rate and try to re-instate the constitution as we work our way up. Maybe once our ravaged rectums heal, we'll be able to formulate another strategy for invading the middle east for economic gain. Until then, let's recoup our losses and focus on brainstorming ways to prevent a great depression.

Cheers.

I was reading a fun little shock page put out by Dallas News the deals with steroid use in high schools. Personally, I think the entire page is a little over-the-top, but I definitely have to compliment the dude in the picture-- nice freakin' body. I guess the implication is that he's using steroids and thus has a tiny penis. Meh. Kudos anyway.

Anyway, I guess I never really understood the whole fascination with steroids. It seems like a relatively simple problem to solve through education, because it's a simple numbers game. The articles hint that the majority of steroid use is for American football, so all we need to do is sit everyone down, pull out a chalk board, get them to take a deep breath, and then perform the following exercise a few times to let it soak in:

Well, it seems that this bullshit same sex marriage issue just keeps popping up. I'm not exactly sure why. I mean, there was a point in time when people could argue against letting gay people marry based on hypothetical grounds; that is, for the last decade, we've been preventing gay marriage because of what-ifs. So, let's put this issue to rest, shall we?

It's been three years since Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, and we need to seriously look at the evidence to see if all hell broke loose, as Republicans and church leaders would have people think:

• Gross state product increased 2.6% from 2004 to 2005.
  
• It is now the state with the lowest divorce rate.
  
• From 2004-2005, the divorce rates of states proactive against gay marriage increased, on average, by 1.75%.
  
• 4 of the 5 states with the highest divorce rate increases are anti-gay-marriage.
  
• The Congressional Budget Office predicted (2004) that if federally same-sex marriage was legalized, there would be a net budget surplus of $1 billion dollars per year over the next 10 years.
  
• The federal Department of Health and Human Services (the people who oversee adoptions, among other things) explicitly state that gay adoption is perfectly healthy and acceptable to the adopted child.
  
• The world population continues to grow.
  
• You can marry if you're a post-op transsexual, but not if you're gay.
  
• Nobody has provided solid, non-speculative evidence against it.

The evidence therefore contradicts claims that same-sex marriage in the United States is a bad thing. Massachusetts, if anything, has gotten better because of it. Are we done now? Can we move on to more important matters, like our shitty education system, Iraq, an idiot president, lack of environmental policy, and, most importantly, global warming?

The Republicans have been wrong-- about everything. There were no viable weapons of mass destruction, Iraq is in civil war, they don't want us there, and oh, how could I forget, gay marriage is beneficial.

Until theres evidence to the contrary, legalize it. If it's still being opposed next year, we must collectively bitchslap the people that oppose it. If you don't like gay marriage, you don't have to like it; but, there is now no reason to keep it illegal.

...period. End of story. Thank you and good night.

From the Tribune's article:

SPRINGFIELD -- The Illinois House overwhelmingly approved a statewide smoking ban in public places Tuesday that would eliminate a confusing patchwork of local laws and leave smokers in every community with one place in common to light up—outside.

I've got mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I can totally understand the recent move toward bans on smoking in public places. After all, smoking cessation aides like Nicorette are able to completely replace the addictive qualities of cigarettes in a relatively non-carcinogenic way by providing a high quantity of nicotine in various forms. Essentially, these yummy drugs have quickly and efficiently replaced the cigarette's primary addictive chemical so that smokers can now transform their addiction to a gum or patch. That alone is pretty evil, but then again, it's not the nicotine that's the problem, now is it? Realistically speaking, nicotine's no more dangerous than caffeine, but if you put caffeine in cigarette form, caffeine would be the bane of humanity-- not nicotine.