wtf?!? seriously?!?

the following are copy/paste lines taken directly from an email (the third) i have just received from these jokers:

The national, cross-country tour titled, Tea Party Express II: Countdown to Judgment Day (www.TeaPartyExpress.org) is rolling into Washington State to host Tea Parties. ...will hold rallies that seek to educate, entertain, and encourage patriotic Americans who are concerned about the quasi-socialistic policies being pushed by the Obama/Pelosi/Reid administration.

The Tea Party Express II caravan features two 44-foot coaches along with a group of several support vehicles,...part of a national tour that will span 19 days, 38 cities, and cover more than 7,000 miles.

The Tea Party Express is advocating for less government spending, an end to the bailouts, lower taxes, opposition to government-run healthcare and opposition to the growth in the size and intrusiveness of government in general.

they also wouldn't mind it much if you n i cared to make a charitable donation to such a worthy cause. i wonder how much it costs to drive two specially-painted coaches all over hell and gone? and i wonder what exactly these tea party lunatics are actually proposing by way of lessening government intrusiveness? are they coming up with any alternative ideas to the government health plan? do they understand that the bailouts started with dubya, not obama? why wasn't anyone driving tour buses around when dubya's administration was proposing the "patriot act" that would basically invade anyone's privacy and arrest individuals based on books they checked out of the library, or searches they did on google? did they not figure that the government was being intrusive in that case? they don't seem to realize that staging a moving "patriotic" carnival that will eat up countless dollars in gas and maintenance, not to mention the initial cost of two 44-foot coaches and the support vehicles, conservative speakers and singers, etc etc etc. and blowing all this dough on an extravagant tour is easily the best way to tell us that government spending is out of control, taxes are way too high, and the government is growing and taking over our lives. i might also recommend we watch these motherfuckers cause this has all the makings of a well-scheduled recruitment for a bloody revolution.

i wonder if hitler and lenin had 44-foot coaches?

darth sardonic

get bent

in the time between the scratch of the flint against the steel and the crackle of the first drag of acrid smoke, the weatherman announces there is a 70 percent chance it will rain punches.

like salmon, fighting the current to fuck then die, we clog highways and byways.

a team of experts has spent months working in a lab to create chaos. destruction is for sale, and if you can't afford it, your doctor can prescribe you pills so you no longer care.

which costs more, books or bombs?

we once needed clothing, a roof over our head, and the crops to grow. we now need cars and phones and laptops; a pill to keep us awake, another pill to put us to sleep, and a third pill to deaden the hard edges in between.

do our fits of melancholy coincide with the death of someone that touched our lives but with whom we have lost contact?

a man picks a fight at a bar so the other patron will hit him, and he can again feel human contact.

god is watching us, but only when "american idol" is a repeat.

darth sardonic

the plight of humanity...

for lady macleod specifically, and the world in general. and because i feel this particular post deserves a certain amount of class to lend it weight, i will refrain from swearing.

i first became aware of the plight of the tibetans through rudehead. he not only had a "free tibet" sticker on his bumper, but his dashboard as well. and later, when i bought the beaster and proceeded to cover it in offensive and sarcastic stickers, a "free tibet" sticker was prominently displayed.

but to discuss tibet, i need to travel back in time to the moment when i first became aware of the world at large, and the not-so-pretty things that happen in it.

so we head back to junior high, when i lived in constant fear of world war iii, the bomb, and bullies who would tease me incessantly. what, i often asked myself, was the point?

it began then, with pre-perestroika russia, who, i was convinced, wanted to nuke us into oblivion and enslave whatever remained of the human race living in what was once the united states.

but as i got older, i became aware of a much larger, more sinister, and, even worse, very real underlying current among us homo sapiens on this, the third rock from the sun: we feel an almost urgent need to overtake, enslave, and conquer. and the overtaken, enslaved, and conquered feel a primal need to fight back with whatever weapons they can find.

the irish were bombing the english. the people of the persian gulf were throwing rocks (i remember being awash in the sheer futility of these poor people as they threw broken bricks at advancing tanks, almost as if a fly had picked up a grain of sand and tossed it at me to prevent the descent of the swatter). africans were starving while the overlords let the food donated by other countries spoil on the docks.

i learned about ghandi. i learned about nelson mandela. i learned the underlying details of the vietnam war. i learned about colonization, mistreatment, raping and pillaging. i learned about gengis khan. i learned about alexander the great. i learned about hitler. i did a report on hiroshima. i learned about annihilation, holocaust, and genocide.

and it didn't stop, o fair and wonderful beloved non-existant readers. russia embraced peace talks with the us, and let go of communism, and still small countries were being taken over by bigger ones. the wall came down in berlin, and still people were being slaughtered the world over.

and the other big countries, the "heroic" countries that should swoop in like a big brother into the fray to pull out the underdog, to quell the bully, more often than not, stepped aside, gave the cold shoulder, turned a blind eye.

when does it end, o my beloveds, my droogs and only friends? who knows, i sure don't. but in the early days of man, i imagine the fighting was at a much smaller scale, over food, shelter, and mates. did the early man wake up one morning with the desire to take over every tribe he could reach in a day's ride? did he enlist like-minded friends, convincing them with paintings of grandeur and avarice?

and the list of countries that have, at one time or another, behaved to a smaller, undeveloped country (or worse, the "lessers" in their own country) in much the same manner as china does to tibet are endless: england, spain, portugal, korea, egypt, italy, russia, south africa, turkey, germany, greece, mongolia, and i dare not forget the u.s. of a., who enslaved africans for many decades, pushed the native people from their land and traditions and forced them at gunpoint into places wherein no man should dwell, followed by shoving our way of living down any throat unlucky enough to have opened to shout its desire to live as it wishes unharmed, unhindered, and free.

we, as a race, worldwide, have become arrogant. we have grown too big for our britches. we have burned our land, tainted our waters, and killed our brother with extreme prejudice, all the while smiling maniacally and declaring it is our "god-given" right.

and so, my beloved non-existant readers, the stalwart and strong, the faithful and kind, i am barely joking when i say that i believe we are due a plague, a cleansing, or even the third world war i dreaded so much, because we need to be knocked down. we need to be thinned. we need to be bombed back to the stone age, when our only desire was to remain warm, eat, and reproduce. our respective gods to whom we pray and by whom we curse are residing in their heavens, alternately shouting with anger and weeping with anguish for the atrocities we heap on one another in their names, or in our own.

and with that, i will leave you for today. i am in desperate need of some quiet time to release the emotions that burn inside my eye sockets (i really don't feel like trying to explain to my mom that i am bawling for the plight of humanity), and to remind myself that, despite all this, i still believe there is hope, and that i am the jaded, cynical optimist.

darth sardonic

p.s. a note to let anyone who should happenchance upon this post, i am not amassing the makings of large car bombs. i am not mailing manifestoes to newspapers. i am not building a bomb shelter and saving cans of food. i do not think of myself as a "weapon" to execute god's wrath. i am merely a mortal who tries to raise his family to be open-minded, but not blind; and who occasionally looks at the bigger picture around him and shakes his head in shame with tears in his eyes.

artificial intelligence?

no doubt you, the beloved non-existant reader, have seen it. or something like it. or gotten emails including clips used to make the overall video i just watched.

i am talking about the bad day at the office video clip. it is truly funny. look it up if you have no idea what i am talking about.

my favorites are the guy who gets sprayed by the toner and proceeds to attempt to violently copy his monitor, and, without a doubt, the fella what goes out to grab a sledge to take to his desktop.

but as i was watching this video, i kinda watched the people in the peripheral. here are these almost beetle-like individuals, hunched over their keyboard, eyes squinting at tiny numbers being inputted on their screens, when, without any warning (in most cases), a cubicle near them is erupting into violence.

they all do the same thing: they leap up, look around them with eyes that have widened as if they expect to see the armageddon (or is that armaggeddon? neither one looks right) and then sort of stand there, agape, at a loss. if the tirade goes on long enough, they sort of sidle back to their desks and attempt to work whilst keeping a wary eye on the disturber. one guy has the aplomb to toss the laptop that has just bounced off the brick wall by his head back onto the offender's desk.

but what, o my beloved non-existant readers, my droogs and only friends, are the factors that lead to violence against office equipment? well, i'm not completely sure, but judging by the average size of the offenders in this clip, obesity would be one thing. and apparently you have to be male.

i do know i have been this aggravated. probably not enough to leave to get a hammer, but definitely enough to use whatever is handy. if we could all refer, briefly, to my post about the last fourth of july, while my wife (and most of my internal organs, definitely, at least, my brain and heart) was far away in points east. if you, like me, are too lazy, here's is a quick recap of the contributing factors: whiney, exhausted kids who won't shut up. a broken dvd player (broken by same whiney kids). an inability to fix said dvd player. no wife (and no sex) for two months (at the time of the "mishap", heh heh). and an ambient heat level of upwards of 90 degrees farenheit (that word doesn't look right either. oh well). all resulting in feet being stuffed rather roughly into the already-open guts of said dvd player.

but here's the rub, malchicks and ptitsas. here is the item that gives me pause: i know my mom was extremely stressed out when i was younger, being a single mom, recently divorced, trying to keep a roof over three kids' heads, basically on her own, while working full time and trying desperately to have a personal life as well. she was stretched so thin we could almost see through her at times. but the worst i ever saw (or heard) was some screaming and one broken plate.

does technology exacerbate (i actually had to look that one up, o my beloveds) our pre-existing aggravation? have we come to rely so much on computers and such that when they don't work properly, we are prone to violence? would anyone even have thought of finding a sledge to take to their computer if someone hadn't made that really funny cartoon some time ago with the duck wielding a hammer over a desktop and saying, "compute this!"? are we on some kinda handbasket/bus/slippery slope ride on skids greased by technology that is advancing and increasing so fast that our minds can't even keep up? how soon before we reach terminal velocity?

and will anyone be laughing when we do?

darth sardonic