Renegade Blogger

In a state that has become known for polygamy a Salt Lake City movie theater has decided to ban Brokeback Mountain. After pulling this move the theater then declined to comment. I don’t get it, why are they banning a movie about gay people? AHHHH! Gay people! Gay men especially! Uh-oh, this movie wont even draw horny men looking to see female lesbian action! And, and, well, GAY PEOPLE! I don’t get it! Someone please explain to me why this movie was banned? I have not seen the movie, but I can tell you now that I’ll still be partial to John Stewart’s critically acclaimed Brokeback Senate. I have to tell you, seeing him do his whole “Coot Off” bit was hysterical. If you want to see senators making fools of themselves head over to comedy central and check out the clip, its really funny…

In other news the new pope has decided people who have sex outside of marriage are still bad. Ok, so it was really

“In our times we need to say ‘no’ to the largely dominant culture of death,”

but still its really the same thing right. But here’s the bigger question, is anyone really listening? Does anyone care? I don’t, and according to him I’m committing a big sin. Oh well, the act is… Or maybe he was criticizing president bush, after all, who isn’t these days? It is Bush’s fault that high schools today are encouraged to instead of teach safe sex that abstinence is the only message. I guess you could directly relate that to abortions if you wanted to stretch it. Hey, sorry if I piss off some really religious person, but I really am not going to lead my life according to some Hitler youth old man wearing a bunch of white robes and shit a long way from where I live. Can you guess I’m not very religious?

On a sad note I have to goto bed at a decent time tonight and get up early, school starts again. Sad, I know.

I was going to write a post commenting on one of comedian George Carlin’s works, unfortunately I cant find a the words to it, nor do I remember what its called and I’m too impatient to wait for it to come back up on my launchcast player. I think its called “Reagan’s Gang, Church People & American Values”. He talks about how America is a very war loving nation and how we always have a war on something. I like his work, mostly because its so damn true, even stuff that was recorded years ago is still relevant. The War in Iraq, on Terrorism, Drugs, Poverty, recently on Christmas and Gays…oh, wait. Anyway, why cant we come up with a different name, something that evokes images of, well, helping others instead of dropping bombs. For example, the War on Terrorism could be renamed the Forceful Removal of Those That Don’t Like Us, but perhaps it doesn’t have that same ring to it. The War on Iraq just begs to have alternate names, undoubtedly many of them have been said by liberal blogs and don’t need to be repeated here.
And the War on Christmas, my three words to add the the fray: “What the fuck”.
What about the War on Poverty? Here’s something, why don’t we actually take a proactive approach. Huh, that’s be something.
Oh, and Happy New Year.

Before I begin let me first tell you that I don’t like the idea of people starving, it’s a horrible death, not pretty to look at and undoubtedly not nice to feel. Your body practically breaks itself down to support life, not fun.

That being said awhile ago I read an idea that well, made me see hunger as perhaps not the biggest worldwide problem (for me it would be AIDS but I think that’s more personal than anything else). The idea said that basically hunger was a way for mother nature to control our outrageous population explosion. Because we’re reproducing faster than we can plant and cultivate crops hunger is a way to prevent to population on earth from reaching the level where we cant sustain that much and then promptly kill everyone for food (or oil, whichever comes first). But the way this was presented was one of the most logical explanations to “the other side of the coin” so to speak that it truly stuck in my head. Now let me clarify my ideas on this. I don’t think our world should have widespread, mass poverty as it does in many parts right now. Plain and simple, but perhaps we should look at it a different way, instead of pumping millions of dollars into feeding people maybe we should realize that the earth is an expendable resource’s, and eventually we’ll use it up. Perhaps we should be exploring other alternatives as to what to do with an expanding population.
More later, oh, and mad props if you can name the source that I heard that idea from, s’ a book.

I’d like to do a brief post on pork, the bad kind. Pork, or pork barrel projects are usually riders on bills that earmark government funds for things such as a $70,000 Paper Industry Hall of fame, say, $1.7 million for the International Fertilizer Development Association (source). So the idea behind this is that in turn for getting money for a specific cause or creating projects that will create jobs that people will vote for the incumbent come election time. “Look” they’ll be able to say “look what I bought our community”. And for the most part most of the public will be happy, they brought jobs to the area, who the heck’s gonna complain about that. We’ll, many people, more so when the projects are as bull as the ones listed above, and especially when its government funded.
So what the problem you’re thinking, well, take my state for example. The amount of pork coming to us could be dispersed equally over the states 11 and a half million people by giving each of them 33 bucks. But that’s not that bad you say, and your right here, but its states such as ooo say, Alaska that really cause problems. In Alaska your congressional reps have secured 984 dollars for every person. Now that, I think qualifies as excessive spending. Our government is expected to spend a whopping 9,698,986,720 billion dollars on pork in ’05. For that amount of money we could pay for roughly 484,000 4-year scholarships for college students to go to a public school. Or for that same amount we could have built 869,800 homes for the homeless or needy.* Instead we build a paper industry hall of fame.
Brilliant
Perhaps its time that the average citizen start paying just a bit more attention to congress, that or start calling em and come up a with a project that needs funding…
Oink Oink

*Statistics adapted from National Priorities Project data. http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

So Buy Nothing Day has come to an end, it didn’t really work out like I had planned, we didn’t have the guts to stop shoppers and ask them…complex questions. So instead we traveled to a nearby mall and distributed flyers about BND. We left some presents tucked into the bra’s of scantily clad mannequins, in storefront windows and in other devious places. We have to edit the video footage we took but I’ll get that up here as soon as possible, as well as submit it to adbusters BND site. They’ve yet to post anything and are hopefully still getting pictures and whatnot in from the front. Now there are two things I’d like to comment on directly about yesterday.

Number 1. Can someone please explain to me why fights broke out? I mean honestly, your fighting over something that’s likely to get broken, well, in the fight. An think about this, is there something that’s honestly worth fighting for? I heard people were throwing laptops into the air and people would converge in some mass where it was to land to duke it out. If this is what Americas come down to, well, that’s plain out sad. I for one cannot fathom fighting over a product. There’s so much more to life than having the latest 400 dollar gamming system or the best laptop. For me the holidays have always centered around family and friends. It’s time off from school to relax and enjoy the company of relatives and the peacefulness of the time of year (well, mostly peaceful…). Perhaps its time we Americans took a step back and enjoyed the finer things in life.

Number 2. I have over 30 free (hopefully) samples that Chrysler/Jeep was giving away at the mall yesterday. I uhh… took them all. But before you get on me about stealing I’d like to paint the picture of what was going on. Jeep has this thing going on called Operation Gratitude in which we, the public are supposed to fill these jeeps with items to send to troops overseas. Fine, except for the excessive name dropping and product placement. I’m fine with supporting the troops, but this Jeep lady was obviously there to sell me these cars, having the vehicle stats close at hand. See, that I have a problem with, choose one, supporting the troops, or supporting building cars that get 13/18mpg. We called her out on the SUV’s low gas milage, she couldn’t really answer us. So anyway, after noticing two decent stacks of CD’s on a nearby table I decided to investigate. They were CD’s that presumably contain “Your Personal Woman’s Day Cookbook”. I haven’t loaded one in my computer yet. But see, this has nothing to do with getting the troops toiletries and whatnot and in my mind, there just another lovely example of advertising. And so as we were leaving I walked over to the table, set my clipboard down for a moment, looked at something, and then left…with a large stack of CD’s…

Enjoy the holidays folks.

So I gone done done some thinking about this whole buy nothing day. I decided it’d be a good thing, considering I’m planning on going out with a couple friends on the 25th and asking if people wouldn’t mind answering a few questions about American consumerism on camera for a “school project”. I came to the conclusion that I agree with BND’s overall message that America is an overly consumerist nation, but I don’t think I’m as diehard about BND as others, or even I think I am. I think that in order for America to truly change its ways the nation as a whole needs to realize what its doing. With roughly 5% of the population the United States consumer approximately 25% of the worlds resources. We instill in our youth that in order to show our love and affection we have to give them an overly expensive plastic item made in some far off factory which pays its workers .18¢ and hour. But is this really the case? If you cant fathom not giving your child a toy for the holidays, and I’ll speak for a lot of people here who probably cant (hell, I might be one of em [wait, I don’t have any kids]) why cant we give them something that doesn’t support an evil enterprise, or give something that we know has truly been made in America.

We’ll take for example wal mart. What’s wrong with them? you ask. They have given money to my son’s public school and brought business to the community. Fine, they may have done that, but after what point and at what cost did they bring business to your community? How many local stories were forces to closed, how many women were assaulted in their parking lots (source) and how many non-union jobs did that bring in?

I got off topic, excuse me.

I’ll be heading out on BND to ask people some question about American consumerism, but I’ve been thinking about the hypocrite I am on this subject, I’ve received and bought gifts for people in the past and probably will this year, perhaps its time to instill the change I wish to see in others in myself. Oh, by the way, got any questions you want me to ask?