The Westboro Baptist Church gets one right

Hey, even a blind squirrel finds a crazy nut every once in a while.  The following picture has popped up a few times recently on my facebook feed:

It’s usually accompanied by some sort of rhetoric like “fuck yeah, come and get your ass kicked, Westboro!” or something similar.  I find this line of conversation interesting.  First, let’s take a quick look at the WBC.  The most curious thing about them is that they have roughly 40 members, according to wikipedia.org.  Yet they’re one of the most widely known Baptist sects around, because of the free publicity they get from their outrageous stances.  40 members.  I could make a fan club for this blog and have 40 members.  OK, maybe 30 or 15 or so.  Point is, 40 members ain’t that many.  Faster Pussycat gets more than 40 people at most places they play.  Maybe they should start protesting funerals, too.  Anyway…the WBC ain’t that big but they have a huge media reach.

Now, let’s briefly examine Slayer.  They’re a heavy metal band with album titles such as Hell Awaits, Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, God Hates Us All, and Seasons in the Abyss.  The song “Hell Awaits,” according to wikipedia, features a backwards recording of a demonic voice saying “join us” and “welcome back”.   Heck, when I listened to one of their songs for this blog my dog heard it and transformed into a goat on the spot.  I’ve never gotten into Slayer but I can make an assumption, based on the song and album titles, that they have at least nodding references to Satanism and I do know that their music sounds kinda like demons fisting each other while wearing spiked, rusty gloves.

You see where I’m going with this?  Yeah.  The WBC swings and misses so much they’re like watching Josh Hamilton since he swindled joined the Angels, but just like Josh every once in a while they get a bloop hit.  Slayer is their weak single up the middle, or at least the other team making an error so that the WBC ends up on first, only to be stranded.  If there is a semi-popular band out there whose members are going to Hell – assuming you believe in that – it’s gotta be Slayer.  As wrong as they’ve been in the past, they might have gotten this one right.

So I say, let those idiots protest the funeral.  Let them celebrate the one time they got one right, kinda like Wile E. Coyote would celebrate if he finally caught the roadrunner (although we’d all know he wouldn’t be able to hold on to him).  Besides, protesting a funeral is a really metal thing to do, and in this case by “metal” I mean “stupid.”  Let the WBC be metal.

Kansas Idiots

“I hired you fellas to get some track laid, not to dance around like a bunch of Kansas City faggots!”

That’s a quote from the movie “Blazing Saddles.”  I don’t exactly know what a Kansas City faggot is or why that city has their own peculiar brand of faggotry, but I laughed at the line in the movie because it was funny.  What I do know about is Kansas Idiots.  You can’t swing a grumpy cat around the internet without hitting a story featuring Kansas Idiots in full idiotic bloom.  Most of the time I can just ignore them and be amazed that they give me a reason to be thankful I live in California, because our idiots are slightly better.  However, this article pisses me off so much I feel like my angry conservative brother and it makes me want to smash things, preferably stupid republican things:

http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/01/2742490/kansas-senate-passes-anti-abortion.html

The gist of this is that Kansas is passing a law, to circumvent legal abortions, that states that life begins at fertilization.  Once that sperm cell hits the egg, it’s life on and it can’t be ended.  “A bill defining human life as beginning at fertilization and outlawing any direct or indirect state support for abortions cruised to Senate approval Monday.”

I get that there are a bunch of people who have strong moral objections to abortion and want to see it repealed at the federal level, and if not there they will do what they can to see it thwarted at the local level.  I sympathize with them because there are many things our government does that I definitely do not approve of and have my own strong moral objections to and I’d like to see those things ended.

However…well, let me get a bit deeper into this article to explain why it has me so pissed off.

“In addition, the bill:

• Prohibits paid agents or volunteers connected to abortion providers – including Planned Parenthood – from providing any information on human sexuality to students in public schools

Supporters say the primary function of the bill is to prevent abortion opponents from having to provide even the most indirect support of abortion through their taxes.”

It’s like these people found my rage switch and jammed it full on, and broke it so it can’t be switched off.  Let’s tackle the first part, about Planned Parenthood and not providing any information on human sexuality to kids in school.  Wow.  I think it’s safe to say Republicans have a raging hard-on to eliminate Planned Parenthood.  The main reason is because of abortion, but I think that if you scratch deep enough below that surface you’ll find a much more vindictive reason: because they provide information about sex to poor people and provide free or low-cost treatment.  That’s most of what Planned Parenthood does – they try to keep poor people from getting pregnant and getting and transmitting STDs.  I think that’s a pretty damn good thing to do and I fully support it, and can’t understand why others don’t.  Again, I get the moral objection to abortion.  Despite my liberal leanings I don’t like abortions and it’s an option that would never be on the table for me (obviously, because I’m a man, but I think you understand what I mean) but as much as I disagree with it I won’t impose my morals on others and tell them they shouldn’t get one.  I think it’s a horrible choice that is usually made with at least a certain level of agony.  Yes, I know that for some people abortion is a form of birth control and to me that’s abhorrent.  But let’s bring this back full circle to Planned Parenthood and point out that their overarching purpose is to prevent pregnancies.  If you’re against abortion shouldn’t you support that?

Furthermore, the Kansas government wants to “prohibit paid agents or volunteers connected to abortion providers – including Planned Parenthood – from providing any information on human sexuality to students in public schools.”  What a horrible, horrible idea.  Again, this will go counter to their intentions, unless their intentions are to keep children ignorant.  If you don’t teach children in high school about sex – and let’s be more specific here, about safe sex and the consequences of sex – they’re gonna get their information somewhere else and chances are pretty good that information is going to be wrong.  Be it from peers, TV, the internet – they’re gonna get a lot of messed up information along with the few nuggets of truth.  This means they won’t know about birth control, or won’t know how to properly use it.  Kids will believe some stupid stuff, like that you can’t get pregnant your first time or if the moon is full.  Kids tend to think they’re bulletproof and won’t get an STD or get knocked up.  Education is the counter for that.  It’s not perfect but I’d rather take my chances with treating kids with some respect and giving them information they’ll need to make good choices, instead of not giving them any information at all and letting them figure it out on their own.  Good information is infinitely better than no information or wrong information.

“Supporters say the primary function of the bill is to prevent abortion opponents from having to provide even the most indirect support of abortion through their taxes.”  This pisses me off just as much as the other stuff.  Not more, but just as much.  We pay taxes all the time for things we don’t like.  Sucks, but it’s true and it’s necessary.  If we could select where our taxes would we wouldn’t fund fire departments until our house was burning down and by then it’s too late.  We wouldn’t pay for cops until we needed them and by then it’s too late.  We wouldn’t pay for parks, or NASA, or libraries, or inspections to make sure our meat is sorta edible, or anything we lacked the foresight to realize might be valuable in the long run.  The only way we can decide what our taxes pay for is through elections.  So, if our taxes fund abortions we have to suck it up because abortions are legal.  We should also be glad to fund Planned Parenthood because they’re trying to prevent abortions and only provide them when the other methods they use have failed.  Keeping funding from them, and keeping them from educating people, will only lead to more unplanned pregnancies and abortions, the same things the abortion foes purport to be against.  Why would you fight so strongly against something that coincides with your interests?

I just don’t understand these Kansas Idiots.

The line of believability

Movies (and television, but I’m focusing more on movies here) are great.  I love them, and really, who doesn’t?  A good movie – or even a bad one, if it’s bad enough – is a great way to spend time with somebody you love without actually talking to them, and as a borderline antisocial man, that’s a plus for me.  As Elvis said, a little less conversation…(I should note here that my girlfriend does indeed read my blog and it leads to some interesting conversations; I sense another one coming) plus, you get entertained, get a good story, and if you can wait until the movies hit the cheap theaters – about two months – you can get out with minimal monetary damage, another plus for me.  I know, hard to believe I’m taken. 

However, the best thing about a movie is slipping into another world for a few hours.  Some movies take you to a fantastic place that you never knew existed and they cast a spell over you, drawing you into that world and making you believe in it.  For 90+ minutes you live in that world and you’re a voyeur and loving it.

Until the movie crosses the line of believability.  And that’s what I’m focused on right now: the line of believability and how ridiculously arbitrary it is for each person.

I’ll give you my example, my line of believability that has been crossed – much to my anger – in two of my favorite movies (Terminator and Face/Off): the noise-cancelling, incredibly cheap Walkman headphones. 

I love the first Terminator movie.  It has a cool, mysterious hero from the bleak future.  It has a kick-ass cyborg killing machine that causes lots of explosions.  It even has a few seconds of gratuitous nudity, which was very important to my 15-year-old self when it first came out.  Boobs!  There are so many ways you have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy this movie, though.  First, you have to accept time travel and cyborgs, and computers taking over the world (thanks, Obama!).  You have to accept the paradox of John Connor existing in the future before he was created, thereby mixing timelines.  You even have to accept that in the future the remarkable technology exists that allows Terminators to be created, but for some reason they have them speak English in a thick Austrian accent.  That’s a lot to swallow, and I gladly do it every time I watch it. 

But then comes the scene where Sarah Connor is getting dolled up for a night out, and has on her Walkman with cheap headphones that don’t even cover her ears.  Stormin’ Arnie the Terminator comes into her house and noisily kills Sarah’s roommate, thinking it’s her, and Sarah doesn’t hear it because she has headphones on.  She’s oblivious.  That’s where I say “aww, come ON!  That’s ridiculous!  She’d have to hear that!”

The line of believability has been crossed and it can’t be uncrossed.  I can never let this go.

Near the end of Face/Off there’s a shootout scene and the mother of a kid (who seems to be there only to piss me off and cross my line of believability) tucks the kid away in the corner to keep him safe.  The corner has magical shrapnel-blocking properties, but I’m fine with that.  To keep the kid from knowing what’s about to happen, she gives him a Walkman and he dons the – you guessed it – cheap headphones that don’t even cover his ears, and he passively listens to Somewhere Over the Rainbow – more like Somewhere Over My Line of Believability! – while guns fire and shit gets blown apart, oblivious to it all thanks to his sweet noise-cancelling headphones.    This is where I say “aww, come ON!  That’s ridiculous!  He’d have to hear that!”

I had no problem accepting the ridiculous premise of the movie, I’m right there with them when they do the face transplant and Nic and John live each other’s lives (I’m assuming they have identical penises because John gives Nic’s wife the Rodgering she’s been hankering for and she doesn’t seem to notice any bodily differences, or at least she doesn’t care), and I’m good to go with the re-transplant of the faces.  I’m even down with most people around them not figuring out something is wrong even though they have obviously different body types (“Hey man, did you have a tapeworm because it looks like you lost 30 pounds since I saw you a few days ago!”  “Wow, I didn’t realize a grown man could suddenly get three inches taller overnight!”).

But this movie crosses the line with those damn headphones.  Knock that shit off, Hollywood!  I know I’ve seen it in other movies but these two are the ones that stick with me. 

For any of the dozen or so people who read this: what movies am I forgetting that have these magical headphones, and what is your line of believability?

Yankees fans/baseball

So I was cheating on my diet this morning and went to the Burger King drive-thru for breakfast.  Life pro tip: breakfast at Burger King is about as good as any other crap at Burger King and should probably be avoided.  I know that now.  Anyway…I had my green Angels cap on, because yesterday was St. Patty’s day and I approve of Irish stereotypes (wearing o’ the green!) only when I’m the one indulging in them.  I placed my order and pulled up to the window.

Dude working the drive-thru window looked like one of the douchebags from one of those Jersey Shore shows.  I don’t watch them so I can’t name names, but he looked like the guy with the slicked-back and spiky hair.  Yeah, that douchebag!  So I was prepared for the worst.  He saw my Angels cap – kinda hard to miss it, a green cap on my huge noggin looks like a mini-golf obstacle – and said “ah, Angels fan, eh?  I’m a Yankees fan.”

Ah shit, here we go.  Jersey Shore lookalike and a Yankees fan.  This dude is gonna be a choad for sure.

He continued: “Gettin’ excited for the season?”

Me: “Eh, a little bit.  I’m cautious after last season, ya know?”

Him: “Yeah, I know.  I’m not to sure about us this season.  Hey, I bet you were so glad when Lackey signed with the Red Sox!”

And there it was, our moment of bonding and the exact second when this guy went from a choad to a genuine Good Guy.  We could share in our loathing of the Red Sox, just about the only thing that draws Yankees and Angels fans together.  

Me: “Oh man, when Lackey signed with them at first I was pissed.  ’He signed with the Red Sox?  Man, what a jerk!’  After that, though…so glad he’s with them.”

Him: “I know, I was laughing when they signed him, for so long and so much!”

At this point I’m ready to ask this guy out for a beer, no homo.  We have something in common and we could spend a few hours making fun of the Sox.

Me: “Yeah, and he was terrible at Fenway.  They shoulda seen it coming!”

Him: “No kidding.  Man, I’m not sure about the Yankees this year, we got a lotta problems.”

Me: “Yeah, you guys have a lot of injuries and your team is getting old.  This might be the year you really fall off.”

Him: “Tell me about it, man.  So you have to feel pretty good about your team, right?”

Me: “Eh, I’m not sure.  Our pitching is pretty shaky.  We’re gonna need to win a lot of 8-7 games.”

Him: “Yeah, that’s true.  All right, here’s your stuff, have a good day!”

Me: “Thanks, man!”

Hell, I coulda stayed there and talked to him for a few minutes.  As I often say to my girlfriend, “this kid is going places.”  Good customer service skills, turned me from a skeptical customer into a satisfied customer, even though the food was crap.  Hell, I might even go back to see him again (and again, no homo).

Baseball fans – and sports fans in general – understand where I’m coming from.  It’s that moment of connection with a complete stranger that leads to talking about teams in the possessive because we’re a part of them, somehow, just because we watch on TV.  We could probably not do it but deep inside we don’t want to; we want to feel a part of something we invest so much (time, money, effort) into.  

As a side note, yesterday morning my girlfriend and I caught a bit of Fever Pitch before we left to do other things.  Even though it’s about a Red Sox fan, he’s the most inoffensive and cutesy Red Sox fan ever so it’s tolerable.  I kinda like the movie because it has some funny moments and it serves as a personal barometer that lets me check how obsessed I am with the Angels, and pull back the reins before I become the guy (to paraphrase Drew Barrymore in the movie) whose apartment “looks like he lives in the gift shop.”  I’m not that guy yet, although my downstairs bathroom does have a more-than-healthy amount of Angels crap in it.

Ah, baseball.  Welcome back.  

Sequester, and some common sense

“Sequester” is the word of March, and I see it all over my facebook feed and hear about it at my work almost every day.  With good reason; I’m civil service working on the F-22, and like most civil service workers I’m facing a 20% cut in hours starting in about a month.  It sucks, but I’ll find a way to deal with it (if it even goes through, which I still have my doubts about – there’s still time for a retroactive deal).  I wanted to address a few issues about the sequester. First, the cuts to military tuition assistance.  I’ve seen this pic quite a few times in the last week or so:

Yes, tuition assistance has been suspended, and the best way to garner some righteous outrage is to invoke the military.  Now also consider that almost as soon as the sequester was signed Obama said that White House tours would have to stop due to the mandatory cuts.  He’s now backing off on that and trying to blame it on the Secret Service; as usual our president lacks any courage for his convictions (other than the courage to keep Guantanamo open, renew the Patriot Act, ignore financial malfeasance, and so on, but I digress).  What do these two news items have in common?  Discretion and selective outrage.

It’s outrageous that the military has to cut tuition assistance for our hardworking heroes and it’s outrageous that the public can no longer tour the White House, the place they pay to maintain with their taxes!

It’s all bullshit PR.  The cuts to tuition assistance aren’t mandated.  The military – a bloated beast that could well absorb cuts in other areas with little to no effect – is choosing to cut tuition assistance as part of the cuts instead of focusing on other areas, because they know that will create the greatest public outcry.  They know that will have the greatest effect on the rank-and-file and get them riled up.

Every day at the start of work I have a roll call, and it’s a mixed bag with military and civilians.  The military are the bosses (sorta – it’s complicated but my first-line boss is military) and yesterday started with mention of a newspaper article talking about how the military makes more than their civilian counterparts, all things considered, and my boss saying that was total bullshit.  Thing is, it’s not.  I know from personal experience.  When you factor in the benefits with the military – housing, 30 days paid vacation a year, and most importantly free medical for the serviceman/woman and their family, if you stay in long enough (say, after seven years) you’re doing better than your civilian counterpart with equal time.  I tried to explain that and was met with some stares and raised eyebrows. The outrage will continue.

Same thing with bumbling Obama and the White House tours, to get back on topic.  Of course he’s gonna back down on that and say it wasn’t his idea, and the tours will keep going.  Nowhere in the sequester is it mandated that the White House tours be cut; Obama is saying it to generate righteous outrage, and as with the tuition assistance, it worked.  Just like with the military, there are other areas where the budget cuts could be enacted with little outrage or even harm or notice, but that wouldn’t garner any press, or get posted on facebook feeds.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t get outraged.  We should; getting outraged occasionally is fun and we need to vent (and find solutions, something politicians loathe to do unless it affects other people [read: people who don't vote for them]).  I am saying we need to better focus our outrage.

The old man in line at Wal Mart today…

…it was me.  I was the old fart, and I realized that I’m comfortable with that and even beginning to embrace it (Fox News marathons can’t be too far in the future for me).  First, a disclaimer: I hate going to Wal Mart but I lack the power of my hate-filled convictions, so sometimes I get lazy and go to that dreadful store.  Today was one of those times.

I was in the checkout line with my girlfriend and her sister, and there was one customer in front of us.  That was a miracle of good timing for us, only having to wait behind one person at Wal Mart.  Of course the checker was an old (older than me) lady with weird hair and I immediately felt some sympathy for her; nobody works a checkout at Wal Mart because they enjoy it or want to; it’s the equivalent of a job that forces you to clean shitters every day.

My sympathy soon eroded when I saw how slow she was working, and then my curmudgeon kicked into full gear.  I even had the pleasure of relating my personal experience working a checkout to her miserable performance.  I worked at K-Mart in comparatively prehistoric (in terms of checkout technology) times; we didn’t have your fancy barcode scanners or wands attached to the registers, or even pretty card-reading machines to take your money.  We (old people tend to speak in collective when talking about the past, because everybody back then went through what they did) had a keyboard attached to the register and we had to read every price tag and input the price.  We K-Martians also had to tear off tags on clothing items and place them in the appropriate slots for their type: men’s wear, women’s wear, children’s wear, and a few others I forget.

Even with all of that going on – as well as bagging in uncooperative paper bags, not plastic bags on a useful lazy Susan spinner – I still check out customers at least three times faster than this lady was doing.  Yes, I was a teenager but I was still fucking awesome at it, even though I was only a backup checker, called up front from my stocking job when the lines got too long.  That of course meant that the people who rushed into my line as soon as I opened were usually somewhat surly – “why didn’t you open sooner, I’ve been waiting forever!”  I still got them out of the store post-haste, so I could get back to the floor and finding ways to slack.  Sometimes, being lazy takes extra effort.

This all flashed back to me as I was waiting in line and I realized my advanced age.  Like with all old people, I remembered how different and superior things were when I was a kid.  Checkers talked to the people in their lines to be friendly and calm them down, and to be polite.  Checkers worked faster and smiled more.  Every damn thing was more idyllic when I worked at K-Mart and before I became an adult, dammit.

So, we finished checking out and I continued my mental screed against people today.  I was in full mental bluster (If I ever rename this blog “Full Mental Bluster” will be considered.) and thinking, only half-serious, about how old I was getting and how it was kinda fun.  And then…I couldn’t find my car in the parking lot.  My girlfriend had to point out it was in the next row over from where I thought it was.

Fucking old people in the parking lot, looking for their cars and not finding them. Wal Mart is a magnet for them.

Time for me to play snopes…

So, I’ve seen the following on my facebook page about half a dozen times today:

Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law , St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some INTERESTING FACTS CONCERNING THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION:
Num…ber of States won by:
Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29
Square miles of land won by:
Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000Population of counties won by:
Democrats: 127 Million Republicans: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Republicans won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.
Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare….”
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler ‘ s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation ‘ s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.IF YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF THIS, BY ALL MEANS, DON’T SHARE.

IF YOU ARE NOT then SHARE IT to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.

Let’s break this down, shall we?  First, about the picture itself.  Yes, incredibly large areas of the US are indeed red.  Many of those red areas also have sparse population, especially compared to the blue areas.  That’s why the picture alone is deceptive.  The only numbers you need to prove this are 51.1% to 47.2%.  That’s the amount of popular vote recieved by Obama and Romney, respectively.  That’s really all that matters.  But, for fun and because I’m bored let’s keep going with the statements.

First, keep in mind that “Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University” was used back in 2008 in a chain conservative email, debunked by snopes: http://www.snopes.com/politics/ballot/athenian.asp  This is a pattern I’ve seen a lot over the last few years: repeats of the same crap I saw in 2008 about Obama and democrats in general.

Number of States won by: Democrats: 19 Republicans: 29  This doesn’t matter at all.  Obama won the electoral college and the popular vote.  The republicans did indeed win more states, but many of those states – Alaska, Montana, Missouri, the Carolinas, etc – are sparsely populated, again comparatively speaking.  This is irrelevant.

Square miles of land won by: Democrats: 580,000 Republicans: 2,427,000  Again, irrelevant.  This is just restating the state count with greater numbers.  Should land get to vote?

Population of counties won by: Democrats: 127 Million Republicans: 143 million  Again, irrelevant and sneaky this time.  Counties don’t give electoral votes, nor do they give popular votes.  It’s just another way to restate numbers to make it look like some miscarriage of justice.

Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Democrats: 13.2 Republicans: 2.1  Again, irrelevant to the election and horribly leading.  What does this matter?  It doesn’t but the purpose is to get you to think that murderers vote democratic.  It has nothing to do with the pretty map.

Professor Olson adds: “In aggregate, the map of the territory Republicans won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.  Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government welfare….”  Again with Professor Olson.  This will probably be disproven upon further research, and again it’s irrelevant to the picture that was posted.  How can this even be proven?  It’s vague and oddly specific at the same time:  ”Democrat territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements.”  That’s a setup for a rigged and deliberately inflammatory statement.

Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the “complacency and apathy” phase of Professor Tyler ‘ s definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation ‘ s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.  Again with Olson and the appeal to authority.  An (uncredited and unchecked source) professor said this so it must be true!  I’d like to hear from the good Professor himself, especially in light of the snopes link above.  I have a hunch this “quote” will also be disproven.  Consider that it isn’t even a complete quote; just a few words are actually in quotation marks.  I’m smelling some good old fashioned out of context cooking.

If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.   Another inflammatory statement.  The number of illegals in the US is estimated to be anywhere from 12-20 million (google search and averaged the numbers from various sources).   And again, this is irrelevant to the picture but let’s keep going and have some fun with math.  In the 2012 presidential election approximately 125 million votes were cast.  In the 2012 presidential election approxiamtely 55% of registered voters actually voted.  So, if we assume that 60% of those criminal invaders vote (I’m giving an extra 5% to be reasonable even though the percentage hasn’t been that high since 1948 http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm) and we split the numbers down the middle (16 million) that’s 9.6 million extra votes.  If we give 70% of those to democrats and 25% to republicans that’s 6.7 million votes for democrats and 2.4 million for republicans, or an increase of 5% of the total vote blue and 2% for red, or a net increase of 3% democratic.  3% can be a significant number but it’s certainly not enough to make us “say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years” (an oddly specific number there).  More scare tactics.

Finally, my favorite part and an essential bon mot for any scare email/post: IF YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF THIS, BY ALL MEANS, DON’T SHARE.  IF YOU ARE NOT then SHARE IT to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.  Because remember, if you disagree with this dumb, inflammatory, and leading post, then you are the enemy and obviously don’t care about our country like real hardworking Americans do.  It’s your responsibility to pass this on!

I’m in favor of thinking things out.  If you agree with me, share this post.  If you don’t, well, you must suck and hate America.