Entries Tagged 'stupidity' ↓

It’s 2010. We can agree on that, yes? At least by the Gregorian calender, it’s 2010 CE/AD.

According to the IRS, it’s 2009.

According to Glendale Community College, it’s 2010, but when I start classes in August, which end in December, they take place in 2011. By their calender, 2010 ends in July.

My 2009 taxes are done in 2010, and they taxes which occur in 2009 determine the state of the grants and scholarships which happen in the 2011 school year, which actually happens in 2010.

I’m going to travel 3 years in five months somehow. I do not understand it.

That’s good. That means you’re thinking.

I’ve just realized that people who never feel that way probably ARE wrong.

Among recent people who’ve never felt they could be wrong-

Osama Bin Laden
George W Bush
Sarah Palin
Dick Cheney
Kim Jong Il
Jon Kyl
Joe Arpaio
Glenn Beck
Bill O’Reilly
Marshall Applewhite
Pope Benedict
Fred Phelps
Stephen Colbert (The character, not the actor)
Dale Gribble

And, most damning of all, Christian Weston Chandler.

No, that’s not a typo.

That’s what I just heard on the commercial for the Maricopa County Fair. “Meet Dorai in person!” it says, while showing a giant foam rubber suit Dora. Or maybe it’s not. This is Arizona, dirt poor and stupid.

I can’t tell if someone just didn’t do the research, they were too cheap to rerecord, or they didn’t want to pay for an actual Dora the Explorer appearance, so have gone with a similar but legally distinct version. Either way, my head, it meets the desk.

Facebook ads, this time, which do fail pretty often.

I did, in fact, drive to Movie Gallery! Well, Hollywood Video, but it’s the same company.

Of course, that ended for everyone when the company went into Chapter 11.

Facebook ads-Showing you a picture of your wife and asking if you’re into horny singles since 2004.

“If you’re using the leading toothpaste, you may be missing a key ingredient for a healthy mouth.” 10 seconds later, “Crest is the leading toothpaste, with all the key ingredients for a healthy mouth.”

Wait, what?

“Crest? Man, fuck that guy. He’s number one, woo!”

When did the two become so hard to differentiate?

I thought this was simple enough. I learned in third grade what the difference was, afterall. Hell, got 10/10 on the test! The irony is the teacher got 9/10. I remember distinctly the point of contention.

“Fact or opinion: Spiders are smart.”

Opinion. Pretty simple, right? But the teacher said “Well, the guide says opinion, but if they weren’t smart they couldn’t make the webs they do, so I’ll take either answer.” This was a smart teacher too, this was an AP class! And yet, there it was.

Just a few days ago I watched J.D. Hayworth, noted moron/jackass but also former elected official, claim that he disagreed with someone on a fact.

A fact. Facts are, simply put, things that are real. There is no subjective choice, there’s a reality, and there’s a total lack thereof. J.D. Hayworth says Massachusetts defines marriage as the “establishment of intimacy.” It doesn’t. The words aren’t there, at all. You cannot marry your horse as he said you could by that clause.

Rachel Maddow correctly pointed this out, that those words do not agree in the document he’s referring to. And he says “Well we disagree on that.”

One person may love chartreuse, everyone else can hate it. That’s how opinion works. You may not, however, debate that the creature before you is a cat when it’s a border collie. You cannot disagree that you breathe air and be a sane person. You cannot disagree with a fact and be sane. If it’s a fact, there’s no option. Option, opinion, the words are fairly close even. That’s a hint.

Unless you’re a Fox News regular, anyway. Then the phrase “Well, we disagree, because I think dolphins are fish” is just as good as “I think the clause says ‘establishment of intimacy’ ” by all accounts. Reality doesn’t matter, and people don’t understand the difference between what they think, and WHAT IS REAL.

I mourn for the world. I also mourn for the nation, since this has become the standard tactic of the right, to claim reality is not real, to disagree with facts.

Fuck.

From the Moral Orel characters page:

“He was even still breastfed by his mother until he was finally weaned off.”

Other suggested pieces of information:

My keys were lost until I finally found them.

I was hungry until I finally ate.

I was a fetus until I was finally born.

MSNBC runs live all day, based off the eastern feed.

The Ed Show, Hardball, Countdown, Maddow, same time for everybody. This is how most news channels work, really, with repeats later on in the night. And that seems to work fine.

But the Olympics get a tape delay.

On a live network.

The Olympics that are happening right now in Vancouver will not be seen by west coast residents until 3 hours after the events are over on the network that runs everything else live.

What the fuck? Is this a secret plan to keep The Ed Show off of the west coast? Does LA not deserve Dylan Ratigan? The only effect of this delay is that shows which wouldn’t be pre-empted suddenly are, but only for half the country. If they kept to one feed, they’d be able to break in for news and events as needed, and they’d certainly not have to worry about repeating coverage to make up for the separation.

But to hell with that. Tape delay it. Show it live on the east coast, delayed on the west, they decided, for a reason absolutely nobody can figure out.

I’m starting to think NBC just wants to go bankrupt and get it over with, I really am. They’ve got a decent Thursday block, Chuck, Heroes, and Saturday Night Live. The rest of the time is a big festival of “No thanks.” Unless you’re the one person excited for The Marriage Ref or Who Do You Think You Are, then I guess NBC’s doing well.

Maybe NBC is just trying the Bush theory of promotion. You know, Michael Brown fucks up FEMA, gets a Medal of Freedom. Harriet Miers fires US attorneys out of political motivation and calls Bush “the most brilliant man she has ever met”, she gets sent up for a Supreme Court nomination. Jay Leno bombs on primetime but says how great NBC’s programming and sponsors are, gets sent to the Tonight Show.

I don’t get too political here for the most part (though it’s not hard to guess I lean way left, by any means). I can usually just laugh at death panels and the other lies going around.

Today, thanks to a sign I just saw at the “tea party march” down DC way, I have to make a political post. And it’s going to have some seriously offensive content. Fortunately, some of these people are just stupid, like the one holding a sign covered in stars that said

“I am not a Terroist [sic], Socialist or Extreemist [sic]. I am a PATRIOT.”

Really, they did put in a lot of effort. A circle of stars, nice color work, just uh…well, not so much with the spelling. And right now I’m looking at someone walking with a “Fair Tax” flag (now that I could write plenty about later). He’s holding it backwards. And there’s signs saying “Who is John Galt?” from the objectivists who forget someone has to scrub the toilets, to quote Frank Fontaine. The standard implication Obama is a Nazi, via a sign saying “Got Swastika?” Most of the time, we can just be amused by these signs. And an interview with a woman who said “We have some people in talk radio that are tellin’ us the truth!”

This time, one sign really concerned me.

“Obama,

We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country. Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”

Now granted, there were plenty of insane signs as always, but something about this one just really gets my attention, probably the racist undercurrent combined with general Beckian (Comma Glennian) batshittery.

“We have waken[sic] up to your evil plans to destroy our country.”

Now honestly, I’ve never been a fan of say, GW. But I don’t remember people in such large, visible numbers declaring he had evil plans to destroy the country. Was he fucking up? Sure. Were members of his administration war profiteers? You bet. But did he have an “evil plan to destroy the country”? No, he really didn’t. He just was shitty at the job.

Now how in the world have people come to the conclusion Obama’s got active, malevolent intent? What would be the point, even, of actively destroying the US if he even had that ability?

I hear a lot of “take the country back.” From what? Who? I heard a claim of Obama’s secret government, and cries of socialism (and frankly, as someone who’s just fine with some socialism, we’re nowhere close to it anyway, seeing as the government doesn’t control any means of production).

Let’s just visit the next piece of the quote.

“Take your racist, un-American *ACORN* group and arrogent[sic] wife back to your own country and strip their rights away.”

Oh.

I guess that fits with the self-contradictory “Muslim Marxist” claim. Not that Marxism and religion match, or that Obama is Muslim. Or that ACORN is un-American, even. I’d dare say any group which gets more voters to the polls is pretty damn American on either side. But, since ACORN has a tendency to push minorities to the polls, they helped change the balance of power. And as for his arrogant wife and own country…well, if the scary black man really is from Kenya (despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary), we can send him away! It’ll be okay, and take his wife too, she’s another negro. Obviously that means she’s not American, because if she was, she wouldn’t be getting uppity, because let’s face it, that’s the word they’re wanting to use.

Oh, and the whole of ACORN. We don’t need those darkies in the US either. I used to wonder why the hatred for an organization that encourages voting. I don’t now.

Just what rights have been stripped away, anyway? Over the last eight years old white conservative men have given us DHS, the PATRIOT act, warrant-less wire tapping, torture, and a suspension of habeus corpus. That was all under the watch of George W. Bush. Some of those programs have ended already, thus restoring our rights since President Obama’s election.

The nasty underbelly has shown itself, and it’s racism, plain and simple. From claims the president isn’t born in the US (A claim that people had the decency to leave alone when it came to John McCain, despite having been born to US parents in Panama because they understood a US parent makes him a natural born citizen), to that he’s a Muslim (fine if he is, we don’t have a religious test to hold office, but he’s not), to overtly racist propaganda.

This one came from Doctor David McKalip. A Tea Party activist, Beckian extraordinaire, and member of American Medical Association’s house of delegates. I’m sticking this one under a thumbnail because holy shit, it’s vitriolic, racist, and pretty damn shocking.

This is where we are as a nation. A group that’s had power for 30 years, effectively, has finally been totally put out of power and has shown its true colors. Ad hominem attack, overt racism, panic and lies.

When Barack got elected, I thought “wow, we really HAVE made it somewhere. Racism is still there, but I think it really might not be the problem it used to be.”

I was wrong.

Am I saying everyone against health care reform is racist? Absolutely not. Am I saying everyone who was against the stimulus package, or other policies from the administration is racist? Certainly not.

But it’s become very, very clear a large amount of the people fighting are, even in congress, where you can’t get most of the Republicans to say “Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president” even. At best, they’re playing to an extremist base. At worst, they are that base, and this shit has to end. Now.

I know I find a commercial series to hate daily, usually locals, but what is this crap Dentyne is pulling with the “friend request?”

It’s such an obvious grab at “the youth culture” as seen by a sixty year old “youth expert.”

I can’t help but even feel a bit patronized by the commercial. It features your standard awkward commercial male, a little geeky, fairly shy, who just goes around asking everyone “Friend request?” and passing them a piece of gum. Then narrating “accepted!” Because that’s how reality works. You see a random person, give them gum, and hey, friends! And at the end they’re all at a party together, even the people who didn’t take the gum! And like a smurf, every phrase the man speaks is replaced with “Friend request.” Bad breath? “Friend request please!” A date? “Friend request tonight?” Caught in bed with someone’s wife? “Friend request?” Sure, two are made up, but let’s see how long before they make it 100%.

Okay, maybe that IS how it works with some people, but we’ll get into my dislike of the concept of MySpace friends (random people you add to your list who you never have and never will meet or even email) later. For now, I’m sticking it to Dentyne’s terrible ad series. Because it doesn’t just end on TV, now there’s prevalent banner ads with hipster-approved drawings. With, of course, the “friend request?” caption.

For some reason ad companies seem to think co-opting some piece of popular culture, particularly when they don’t understand it, will get customers. The masses will say “they understand us!” and flock to the product. Because…you know, I can’t follow the logic here, even having worked in advertising.  If there’s one thing the kids hate, it’s their culture being abused by the squares, the old people, the grups!

I’d like to blame focus groups, because I know they’re hand-picked these days as the most easily malleable and receptive subjects, but did nobody see this ad, place their forehead and cheek firmly to the palm, and declare “uuuuugggghhhh”? Followed by someone near him saying “I know, right? Yeeeecchhh.” But instead, Dentyne continues to put money into an awful campaign. And they can go friend request themselves with this banality. It’s like…

Aw smurf. I get it, this appeals to Grey’s Anatomy fans doesn’t it? Anyone who still says “McDreamy” and “McSteamy” (by still I mean EVER said it without cringing) probably thinks this is just amazingly clever.

Is that show a hit still? I think it might be time to kill myself.