How to run a for-profit college

It isn’t very difficult, really. And there’s a killing to be made. Simply:

An open letter to Scott Brown

Dear Scott Brown,

 

You’re an idiot and an asshole. Please go the fuck away.

 

Sincerely,

New England

 

P.S. – You’d be very marketable in New Jersey.

Romantic racism

Perusing the internets a while back, I came across this picture posted on a prominent pro-liberal web forum:

 

The image certainly reflects the mentality of a very vocal subset of liberals who, right or wrong, see western civilization as having gone off the rails. They are a people who desire a simpler existence uncomplicated by the deleterious effects of mass production, corporate capitalism, and a materialist, consumer-oriented culture. Like the Beat-generation before them, these “modern primitives” have latched onto fringe cultures they feel buck against the dominant culture in their own societies. We’ve all met them; they are the  ones throwing money at Deepak Chopra or pretending to be Native Americans. While it is worth pointing out I generally disagree with their assessment of western cultures, that’s not what bothers me about the picture. Rather, what gets me is the unashamed, flagrant, and patently illiberal racism of the whole thing.

The death of a million is just a statistic

Or so thinks the International Criminal Court, it would seem.

If you kill one person in Texas, your death at the hands of a county executioner is almost a certainty. While I am steadfast in my opposition to the death penalty, this line of thinking — however barbaric and useless it may be — seems, at least superficially, more in keeping with justice than what the ICC just doled out for Congolese war criminal Germain Katanga.

Look before you leap

See a clever picture on Facebook? Think sharing it will make your friends and family think you clever as well? If so, you may want give that photo a good once over before tossing it out to everyone you know.

Case in point:

Coming down hard on the pedos may win you a few likes, but endorsing Britain First — a far right British political party advocating racist and theocratic policies — might land you in hot water.

Pay attention, people.

 

King of Mount Stupid

One year, when I was kid, my Boy Scout troop was selected to host our council’s annual Klondike Derby.

For those not in the know, the Klondike is essentially a race, wherein the scouts are broken down into teams. Each team has a dogsled, and the boys pull their sled across a course dotted with a dozen or so stations. The boys stop at each station, where they are required to perform a task meant to test the skills they have learned as scouts before progressing to the next station. Whoever gets the most points wins. Or something to that effect.

Rant: Good call, Mr. Inslee

For a nation of misanthropes, we certainly put a lot of faith in juries. Most of us wouldn’t trust twelve complete strangers to give us gardening advice, but a majority seems to take no issue with them assigning guilt and doling out punishment. Not me. If I’m ever accused of a crime, there’s a good chance I’ll stand before the judgement of six Republicans, three Evangelicals, two anti-vaccination nuts, and some loony tune who wears a tin foil hat and thinks the judge is a skin-changing reptile from the planet Klaatu. It may be the best system we know of, but I’ll be fucked sideways with a morningstar before I’d willingly let any of these clowns decide my ultimate fate.

But I don’t have much choice in the matter. We, as a country, have a hardon for the death penalty. We love it so much, we’re willing to keep it on the books even when we know for a fact innocent people are going to wind up on the chopping block. Even when we know those innocent people could be us. And in our usual clumsy way, we rationalize this shit in much the same manner we rationalize dropping daisy cutters on residential neighborhoods: “Oh, well. If you want an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.”