The U.S. Government: Now able to detain U.S. Citizens Indefinitely Without Trial. Cool.

WARNING:  Due to the political nature of this blog, i'm probably not as funny as i usually am.  Sorry (i'm not), but if you don't like it then you can go stuff a foot long corn dog down your gullet and choke on it. . . . . . . . Jacob Nelson.

I could say that I’ve left politics out of my blog for years but I’d be lying.  Truthfully, I sneak my beliefs in here and there.  I mostly don’t talk about politics for good reason, though.  People get really upset if you don’t believe what they believe.  I’m guilty of it, you’re guilty of it, everyone is guilty of it, except Chad.  For some reason, my friend Chad doesn’t get upset about that stuff, and I respect that.  Seriously.

Ok, here it goes.

Yes, I think everyone should have basic healthcare available to him or her, free of charge.  Yes, I think that our defense budget is off the charts ridiculous.  It’s presumptuous to think that the entire world wants to kill us.  The truth is, the majority of the world doesn’t really care about us.  We aren’t necessary for the rest of the world to function.  If the U.S. were to fade into the history books, the world would plod along on a slightly different path.  A path void of apple products and freedom fries.

That being said, I’m seriously disturbed by what the current administration has done to our personal freedoms.  Don’t get me wrong; I don’t think that Obama is a “socialist”, or that his birth certificate is a fake.  He’s done an ok job of dealing with a mess that was given to him, just like Bush did an ok job with the mess that was given to him.

Each president has faults that about half the population will take issue with, and that’s ok.  Everyone is entitled to his or her beliefs.

What’s not ok, are laws passed that take away from my ability to sleep comfortably at night knowing that I’m not going to be taken away by my government and held without trial indefinitely.

Enter the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)

An act that seems strangely familiar (think “patriot act”) .  The difference is the Patriot Act used our fear of the terrorists to pass a law that takes away more freedoms than any law a “socialist democrat” ever passed, while the NDAA uses our inability to care about anything other than the presidential race.

Anyway, The NDAA essentially gives the U.S. Government the ability to lock up U.S. citizens and hold them without trial, indefinitely, which i for one am not ok with.  That’s the basic shock and awe definition.  For more info on it, click on this reputable news link.

REPUTABLE NEWS LINK

And don’t be afraid to click the sources and follow the trail of information.  I didn’t do that,  but I’m lazy and it’s a lot easier to just believe everything you read, without doing any research at all.

ps, if you actually clicked on the link, you'll notice two things, it's a foreign newspaper, and it's an opinion column.  One of those is a red flag.  If you think that the red flag is a foreign newspaper, then you're an idiot.  Opinion columns can be a great source of information.  There are really smart people writing these sometimes.  Just make sure to check the sources.

Online Vandalism: Almost As Good As The Real Thing.

We can all attest that doing something on the interweb isn’t as fun as doing something in real life.  Take Farmville for example.  This is a real thing.  People go online and build these fake farms and trade these fake things and I’m pretty sure that some of them actually spend real hard earned welfare money doing it.  It’s crazy.  I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather have to wake up every day at 4 in the morning and go out and milk cows and kill chickens, and mow the lawn.  Unfortunately I have a different calling in life.  If any of you know what that is, let me know.  I’d be interested to find out what it is.

Anyway, people have this crazy notion that the things they accomplish online actually matter in real life.  What’s that? But you have 7,000 facebook friends?  Oh, it must be so rewarding for you to have that many facebook friends.  I bet you go to a lot social activities and are validated as a human bean.  What’s that?  You have over 6 million twitter followers?  Oh, that’s actually kind of impressive.  Nice job.

Which brings me to my next “point”.

Vandalism.

In real life, it’d be a lot of fun.  Running around drawing penises on everything (or whatever else vandals draw), but we aren’t poor people.  We can’t do that.  Society would shake their frowning faces at us and send us to prison.  Which is unfortunate because sometimes I feel like the world could use more phallic images drawn on buildings.

But for whatever reason, I’m unable to vandalize things.  Call it morals or lack of time, but I just can’t drag myself to climb up on a billboard that is on I-15 as you’re driving in to Ogden from the north, pull out a can of spray paint and draw the word “murdered” over the word “persistence”, but I wish I could because it’d be really really funny.  It would be physical evidence of funny.

Instead, what I’m going to do is go online, find a picture of what’s on the billboard bring it in to photoshop, draw the word “murdered” over the word “persistence” and push it out online in hopes that I get a lot of validation from my online peers.

Because that’s what life is about:  Validation on the Internet (did you know that the word Internet is supposed to be capitalized?). 

. . . I guess It was more of a time thing than a moral thing.

Chic-Fil-A: More Than Just a Chicken Sandwich

I’ve been hearing in the news that Chic-fil-A (a chicken sandwich shop) supports “traditional” marriages like Kim Kardashian’s 72 day sham marriage to Kris Humphries , and not homosexual marriages, because obviously homosexuals don’t take marriage seriously.  You can tell because all they do is joke about it.  Anyway, this blog post isn’t about gay marriages, despite the fact that I think two consenting adults should be able to do pretty much whatever they want.  No, this blog post is about the personification of a restaurant chain.

Ok, so first off, I’d like to state that The CEO of that one chicken sandwich shop can believe whatever he wants.  If he wants to tell people that they can’t have the same rights as him, that’s fine, he can say that.  It’s called the freedom of speech.  I get it.  It’s what allows me to write this extremely negative blog without fear of getting sued or put in jail.  I get individual liberties.  Both ways.  I understand them, but I am also a recipient.  Did you see what I did there?

Anyway, what bothers me is that people have been “supporting” a restaurant chain because supposedly the restaurant chain “supports” “traditional” marriage.  I mean, maybe I just don’t get it, but I feel like a restaurant chain supporting anything is similar to a chicken sandwich supporting something.  They’re both inanimate objects.  The only thing a chicken sandwich supports is the pickle and slice of bread on top of it.  And maybe the mustard. 

Oh, what people meant to say was that they support the CEO because he supports “traditional” marriage?  And they’re showing their support by purchasing chicken sandwiches?  I mean that’s pretty ridiculous, but ok, I get that. But if you’re buying chicken sandwiches from Chic-fil-whatever to show your support for non-homo marriages, what about the other people that you’re also supporting?  What about the nearfact that 50% of the employees of Chic-fil-a are known child rapists and meth users?  I guess they probably support child rape and meth use as well.  Because by purchasing a chicken sandwich, you’re not only lining the pockets of the CEO, you’re also handing over children and meth to child rapists and meth heads.  Just saying.

I guess the bottom line is that Chic-fil-a shouldn’t have an opinion about anything other than chicken sandwiches, and even that is debatable.  Personifying a restaurant chain is dumb, because at the end of the day, they’re just a bunch of homophobic buildings filled with chicken, not opinions.