RibbleRabble

After watching the most recent Penn and Teller: Bullshit! episode about how the legal system is out of control, I created a new test both for lawmakers to gauge the sanity of laws and for the justice system to gauge whether or not they should enforce them. I figured that with the success of the What Would Jesus Do (WWJD) campaign, I could launch a spin-off with aspirations of attaining equal success. Thus, I propose the following: "What If Jesus Did... (WIJD)". It goes a little something like this:

Say you're a lawmaker and you've got a bill. You want to know whether it would be a good idea to try to turn it into a law. Ask yourself What If Jesus Did...the thing you're about to criminalize. Would it then be sufficient grounds to put Jesus in jail for committing the crime. If you wouldn't be okay with putting Jesus in jail for breaking that law, then the law is inappropriate and should thus be either pigeonholed (and thus never made into a law) or repealed (if it somehow already became a law).

The same process goes for a cop faced with whether to arrest someone for a certain crime, or a district attorney faced with the decision of whether to prosecute someone for a given violation of the law. Judges can even apply it when it comes to sentencing.

Some examples of the application of the WIJD principle:

• Rape—Is it okay to send someone to jail for raping someone else? What if Jesus raped someone? Yeah, I think son of God or not, Jesus should go to jail for raping someone. Thus, laws against rape are valid.
  
• Theft—Even though it'd be kind of weird, I'd say it'd be okay to jail Jesus for theft in certain situations. If he's stealing to eat because he's starving, then by all means, let the man have food, but if it's stealing a car to increase his street cred, then jail Jesus. Then again, if Jesus was stealing a car because someone was dying and he needed to get them to a hospital, then it wouldn't be right to jail Jesus. Thus, laws against most types of theft are valid.
  
• Drug possession—Here's one where you really can't justify jailing Jesus. If Jesus and his twelve friends gather together and get high, don't hurt anyone, and watch Family Guy reruns in the privacy of their own home, how, on earth, could you justify throwing on some SWAT gear, breaking down Jesus's door, and sending him off to jail? It's absurd. He's professing peace and happiness, volunteering to help the weak and sickly, and you want to throw him in jail for getting high? Insane. Thus, laws against marijuana possession are not valid.
  
• Speeding—Say Jesus was cruising down the highway (sober) and he happened to be going 15 over the speed limit. Interestingly, this is a case where at least in Texas, both WIJD and the law say that it would be silly to put Jesus in jail for breaking it. So, a law where speeding, alone, lands you in jail would be not valid.
  
• Prosecutorial misconduct—Say Jesus had a job as a prosecutor and conveniently suppressed or ignored evidence that would otherwise prevent an innocent man from going to jail. Would it be okay to jail Jesus? You bet. Jesus would never do such a thing, but if he did, by all means, throw the jerk in jail for life. Thus, a law jailing prosecutors for life in cases of prosecutorial misconduct would be valid.

There. Problem solved. :P

After having received at least a dozen "we need permission to include your work in our advertising stuff" sorts of requests from various marketing firms for massive mobile device manufacturers (e.g., motorola, nec, sony, nokia to name a few), I now can safely say that all of them have one thing in common: they procrastinate. This is obvious, because they'll email me on a Thursday and expect me to fax them some form by the very next day. The best of them give me an extra day or two and provide me with a pre-filled in form, while the worst of them expect me to take time out of my day to call them in the 22 hours I'd rather spend getting high or something.

Now, I mean, it's likely these guys say things like this in order to light a fire under my ass. That's totally understandable, and I guess it's expected in the world of big business. Things happen fast, business moves at the speed of light, time waits for no one, yada yada yada.... Whatever the buzz-phrase, one thing's glaringly obvious: they procrastinate with the skill and alacrity that I always have.

I'm only saying this because I remember a time when some misguided teacher tried to lecture me about how one must plan ahead and tackle herculean projects by "simply" working on a little bit at a time, all the while forgetting that other teachers had said the exact same thing about their own assigning of massive projects. I also remember carefully explaining the direct relationship between happiness and free time, as well as the inverse relationship between the summation of the two and time available to crank out a 10 page paper detailing the intricacies of post-Shakespearean, pre-Modern belly button exhibitionists (and their critics). Sadly, my protests would usually fall on deaf ears. It must be some sort of teacher amnesia brought on by fumes emanating from their red pens of doom.

Long story short, though, I was right. Sadly, I would guess that any teacher that reads this will probably shrug it off and continue robbing kids of their childhoods in order to prepare them for successful careers in procrastination later in life.

Tradition: it's just another word for "cyclically tenured nonsense."

It's been a while since the last blog, but I genuinely felt this needs to be said quite clearly: if 30% of Americans will at some point travel by air this year, 30% of Americans (~75,000,000 people) will be being strip-searched at the airport--without probable cause--if we allow backscatter machines to become permanent fixtures in the security line.

I have no idea what makes people somehow think that the magic of technology somehow mitigates such a brazen violation of several constitutional rights by treating the 30% of the entire American population that travels by air each year like criminals.

By the way, in case some of you out there somehow think that this will make things safer, know this: a terrorist doesn't expect to survive the flight, so he'll have no problem filling his large intestine with explosives or downing a few sealed baggies of his explosive of choice. Drug smugglers already do it with every drug imaginable, so I don't think it's beyond wide-eyed fundamentalists to do the same thing with explosives.

Keeping that in mind, my fellow 30% of America, when this e-strip-searching fails to prevent the next once-in-a-decade attack that apparently only kills a few thousand people (0.002% of Americans), be sure to think of me and how right I was when 30% of us are getting...what? I dunno? What's next? Maybe...e-fingers-in-the-asses by some robot. After all, it's not strip searching en masse when it's done electronically, so surely it's not a cavity search when it's also done electronically.

Go ahead. Laugh at the idea of an airport anal probe. I know I did. I mean, it's absurd to even think it'll happen. The thought of a robot with a finger in my ass at the airport is hilarious, and since this is the internet, someone out there probably finds the idea not only hilarious but exciting. :P

I suppose, though, that if a few decades ago you'd told me 30% of everyone in the country and 100% of all air travel passengers would be getting strip-searched annually, without probable cause, well, I would have probably laughed just as hard.

By the way, if any historians in the future happen to read my tiny, insignificant blog on the outskirts of the internet, know this: this is how the most successful empires fall. It's neither lead-lined aquifers nor disease nor invasion nor over-expansion; instead, it's paranoia. Dopamine-fueled paranoia that something, somewhere, somehow... will get us or our children--that evil and danger lurks in our own shadows and must therefore be eradicated before the boogeymen get us. It doesn't matter if the threat is insignificant, justified, or non-existent. If it's insignificant, we think it can be eliminated; if it's justified, then we'll claim ourselves infallible to it; if it's if it's non-existent, then we'll invent it.

When our last real enemy gave up, we panicked when there were no more. We turned on ourselves and decided that if the evil isn't just out there any more, it must be right here instead. It's because of this paranoia that we end up stripping away everything that has allowed the empire...republic...once-democratic nation to flourish in the first place. All of our principles, including freedom itself, are sequentially being seen as weaknesses that are being exploited in a seemingly perfectible curtain of allegedly impervious iron--and those weaknesses must be patched for our curtain to remain strong.

Of course, as history has shown us, it's a detrimental, ineffective curtain that's fated to fall. No matter how high it's built or how wide it extends, it can never be anything other than a huge, expensive hunk of metal we use to keep ourselves thinking we're locking bad guys out when we're really just locking ourselves in, becoming a nation of idle shut-ins content in our baseless, self-determined notion of perfection.

The curtain always falls, and it doesn't fall lightly. It crashes down with a rippling thud, crushing the poor souls desperate enough to erect it in the first place--all to protect the putrid corpse of the past. We'd do anything to get back to the irrationally-idealized "good" ol' days, obsessing in our quest with some bastardized notion that for us, the ends can somehow morally justify the means.

Somehow the anal-probing robot fits into the metaphor, but I'm not sure how. I have to admit, though, I like the mental image of it "inspecting" the very minions constructing the wall. That'd be hilarious...

... Hilarious, but shockingly accurate to the metaphor.

To wrap it all up, I've got this to say: what...the...fuck are you people thinking? Did it never occur to you, somewhere along the way of Nixon, Bush, and the Patriot Act that maybe we should quit fag-bashing and stand up for something noble...something peaceful...something...actually good? Is it even worth trying to fix it any more? I'm starting to think that everyone's just content with letting it all fall to the ground because the charismatic men on TV with fire in their souls, aesthetic crosses on their necks, and cookie-cutter stickers on their cars sit and tell you some missing white girl or some jerk burning a flag or some dude getting married to a dude is somehow more important than 30% of Americans being e-strip-searched without probable cause.

That said, I make a fuss, but in all honesty I really don't give a flying fuck. Nowadays I'm so far outside the freak show that I can only look on and watch in awe. A part of me still wants to join in--to fit in--but thank god I've so far been able to bitch slap that part of me down. :P

It's lonely out here, though. There are few lights, and what lights there are lie far off in the distance, polluted by the fluorescent decadence of a once candle-lit hope for tomorrow. I must admit, though, that I quite like the darkness that everyone's afraid of, because there's nothing to be afraid of once you step outside the light of our noisy cave. I mean, you expect some monster to come get you, and you kind of want one to gobble you whole when you find out the monsters never existed in the first place, or if they did, they're back the way you just came.

I also like the fact that the dark's one of the last places where you can still find balance, and, most of all, freedom.

That said, darkness is a bit depressing at times, and it's a bit of a bitch trying to find the rare kindred spirits wandering around in a night that's almost as black as pitch.... :\ On the upside, though, pot grows like a weed out here, and stress is nonexistent. No wonder they tell everyone there are monsters out here--the whole system would collapse if people knew they actually had a shot at happiness if they stepped out of their caves.

Imagine if we all stopped listening to the cacophonous din of a rock star nation that's been convinced by its businessmen to dump its instruments and ignore its band mates; a pop star nation that now wonders why it struggles to find a harmony or even carry a tune after having carved out its own heart; a bright star nation so desperate to satisfy its addiction to an inflated bottom line that it will steal the very shoes from under the feet of others if it yields more fuel to burn.

That's all it is--a sadistic symphony where everyone screams pointless nothings, dances out of rhythm, and flails aimless delusions in perfect self-confidence that unlike the mechanical music monkeys they so frequently resemble, they remain differentiated from both primitive simians and robotic mechanizations by a far greater, decidedly unique purpose: to repetitively clap for a bass-less cymbal of happiness.

A bunch of parents with sand in their vages banned a Steve Martin play about the nature of creativity, intelligence, commercialism, and art from being performed at the high school (with a 4-3 vote by the school board), because the play contained allusions to alcohol and sex. So, a local college stepped in and said the students could perform it there. Kickass.

From the article:

The La Grande School District Superintendent got a complaint from a parent and a petition signed by 137 people and banned the play, which has references to sex and drinking, features the characters of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso meeting in a Paris bar in 1904, as both were on the verge of breakthrough work. It deals with themes of artistry, genius and the nature of the 20th century.

Since when is an allusion to either sex or drinking a problem in performace? Seriously.

It's not because they're "children." They're highschoolers. Teenagers. They're a couple of years away from 100% unfiltered reality and being free'n'able to blow someone's head off in war, but sex and alcohol is too much for them to handle? Up until the 80s they were able to buy and drink alcohol, and it was outlawed only due to the now-proven-incorrect belief it would end teenage drunk driving, so their knowledge of it or alleged glorifying of it is immaterial, since they're clearly not going to be possessing it, drinking it, or driving during the course of the play.

The country supported outlawing it solely to prevent them from harming others-- not due to the alcohol, the consumption of alcohol, the idea of alcohol, or the glorification thereof. We tried that nearly a century ago with extremely poor results; organized crime and violence significantly increased until prohibition was repealed, at which point violence and crime levels returned to pre-prohibition rates. We don't want to re-live the first part of that, right?

The second half of this is sex. Again, they're not kids. Their metaphorical (and in half of them, literal) balls have dropped, and sex is totally natural. Everyone living is the result of it.

For the parents to assume their children don't already know about sex is truly frightening, because it means they've completely failed as parents, and even worse, they don't give a crap enough about their kid to inform them (or are too ball-less to do so), while at the same time disallowing a play to do the job for them. More shocking is that the parents are assuming that their kids aren't already having sex and don't already talk about it between friends— that's mind-bogglingly ignorant.

So, I guess the only reason for forbidding the play is due to the artistic tastes of parents. That, too, is also immaterial. If a parent doesn't like the art his kid enjoys, then the parent needs to shut the hell up and remember how rock'n'roll, jazz, nudism, and pretty much every new art form on the face of the planet spurred significant negative criticism by "parents" during their respective periods. Then again, I guess they would have been reminded of that once they had seen the play that their kids would have performed (that's part of the content of the play) but instead the parents essentially ban themselves from seeing it, plugging their ears and drowning out reason with their baseless screams.

In the end, if the goal is to shield your kid from the world until the second they've been thrust head-first into it, or if your goal is to stagnate art, halt progress, hasten the collapse of creativity, and force the country to fall behind as the rest of the world develops on, then by all means, ban the play and everything else you don't like. Good luck. All I ask is that you simply come up front and say that instead of masking it as a problem of an artistic work referencing drugs, alcohol, sex, harsh language, or some other vague, arbitrary and unfounded crap about "the children."

Really, I should be thanking the parents. As a result of their actions, I'm willing to bet that countless high schools across the country will be performing the play in the near future. People are like that. Censor something, and it's seen by everyone. I guess it means that the world isn't completely mindless...

...yet.

Since it looks like the market's spiraling out of control, I figure I'll offer up some advice on how to fix it, since I can't actually fix it myself. It's not like the right people are going to be reading this anyway, but I figure I might as well write it out so that I can get it out of my system.

First, how to fix the economy: in short, elect Obama. It sounds goofy, partisan, and overly simplistic, but let me explain in business and historical terms. First, please read up on the quick history of the first Great Depression in the United States. You'll notice by the graph that things literally did not begin to turn around until the labor-appeasing, labeled-a-socialist Democrat was elected to office.

Why did the turnaround happen? Simple: he increased government spending to benefit the working class significantly. He increased regulations on business and the free market, founded the SEC, and did a bunch of other things that made him the ire of the upper class. Why did he do this? He realized that the only reason the depression happened in the first place was due to the overpowering business-oriented government from the prior several decades.

... is this starting to sound familiar? And remember, the GDP began to climb pretty much the second the liberal took office and started screwing over big business. Because of that, the GDP continued to rise substantially over the remainder of his 3 terms in office. McCain is claiming that he'd do the exact opposite and freeze government spending, give more tax breaks, and basically take the path of Hoover. Moreover, McCain has been very clear in pointing out that Obama favors significantly increased government spending-- something that Roosevelt not only endorsed but clearly engaged in. And, look at where it got us: out of the depression.

So the choice this November is simple. If you want 4 more years of things getting worse, vote McCain. If you want 4 years of things getting better, vote Obama.

...and I assure you that I'm right. It just sucks that, like always, I've gotta sit in the backseat and let people decide their own path. Either way, it should make for an interesting show. :P

Cheers.