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Archive for May 15th, 2006

plus c’est la meme chose…

Posted by scott on May 15th, 2006

The LA Times sends us an anniversary card from A. Mitchell Palmer:

May 15, 1923: Upton Sinclair, a crusading writer, climbed the steps of a platform that striking dockworkers had built atop what they named Liberty Hill in San Pedro.

As someone held a candle for illumination, Sinclair began reading the Bill of Rights, making no reference to the 600 dockworkers who had recently been arrested for striking.

Sinclair only got as far as the first three lines of the 1st Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, before he was arrested. The incident would lead to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

Generalissimo Arbusto

When presented with the first ten amendments to the Constitution at the end of a recent fundraising dinner, an irate President George W. Bush called the Bill of Rights “outrageous!” and said, “I won’t pay it! Why, I can get half these rights in Uzbekistan for the same price, and they’ll throw in the dissident-boiling for free!”

‘Man, You People Are Stupid: Therefore, You Should Buy My Book,” by John Stossel

Posted by s.z. on May 15th, 2006

Do you believe that clean air, unpolluted water, and pure, untainted food are good for you? Then you are the kind of illiterate, inbred, simple-minded whiner who makes John Stossel want to puke, and you need to read his lastest book, Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel � Why Everything You Know is Wrong, and Why I Hate Your Guts.
An even better solution to your appalling stupidity would be for you to read the ABC News excerpt of the book, because that way you won’t have to pay for it, and you can use the money you save to buy lots of DDT, gasoline, and Agent Orange.

But if you are too lazy to do even that, here’s a (slightly paraphrased) redaction of that excerpt — it will still teach you how ignorant you are, but will save you a few minutes.

So, here we go:

* * * * * * * * * *

Chapter One: Clueless Media

The media sucks. I should know, since I have been working in the media for thirty-six years, most of that time while wearing clothes. So, you should trust me when I tell you that reporters lie to you all the time, and they use all the tricks in their cynical armory to get you to believe such untruths as “The Moon is Made of Green Cheese,” “Tainted Meat is Bad for You,” and “Dow Chemicals Doesn’t Really Have a Wonderful Plan for Your Life. ”

MYTH : The media will check it out and give you the objective truth.

TRUTH: Everybody in the media but me is clueless, amoral, and out to deceive you. You must trust only me.

The media spits in your coffee when you’re not watching. The media is sleeping with your wife while you’re at work. The media laughs at you behind your back. Plus, its members never talk to the right scientific experts.

For instance, there are experts who work for the tobacco industry who will tell you that smoking is actually good for you. Does the media ever report their views?

NOOOO!

These experts never get interviewed because they don’t advance the media’s pet belief that smoking can cause cancer. See, the media just wants to scare you, so it can keep all the sweet, sweet cigarettes for itself. Don’t let it!

MYTH: Pesticide residues in food cause cancer and other diseases.

TRUTH: The residues are largely harmless, depending on how you define “harmless.”

A scientist I met at the Pesticide Trade Association told me that pesticides may actually help to cure cancer, as far as you know.

Besides, vegetables make toxic chemicals to keep off insects, so every vegetable is 5 percent of its weight in toxic chemicals. These are Nature’s pesticides. Celery, alfalfa sprouts, and mushrooms are just chock-full of carcinogens. Yes, vegetables hate you and are trying to kill you, and we must nuke them into submission if we don’t want to be conquered by a race of evil carrots!

MYTH: Radioactivity is deadly; keep it away from food!

TRUTH: Food irradiation saves lives.

See the above info about the threat from the evil carrots.

Also, some expert I met on a street corner told me that the broccoli army plans to invade us via our porous Mexican border, and will then rape our women and enslave our children. Food irradiation may be our only hope.

MYTH: Chemical pollution is the cause of the cancer epidemic!

TRUTH: There is no cancer epidemic.

It’s just something you imagined. Sure, the incidence of prostate and breast cancer is up, but that’s only because there’s more early detection these days. When cancer detected while it’s treatable, it’s not really cancer, for all practical purposes, and so it shouldn’t be included in studies of cancer rates. That’s another thing the media doesn’t want you to know!

See, we think there’s a cancer epidemic because we hear more about cancer. Cancer is a disease of an aging population, and fortunately, more people now live long enough to get cancer. More talk about it too. Many years ago people who got cancer were secretive about it, like God intended. And we liked it that way!

So, if people would must stop getting their cancer detected, and would shut their damned traps about their conditions, then chemical pollution wouldn’t always be unfairly blamed for causing cancer, and it could hold its head high once again.

While I’ve been a reporter, I’ve been asked to do alarmist reports about hair dye, dry cleaning, coffee, chewing gum, saccharin, cyclamates, arsenic face powder, radioactive fallout, and Dr. Sommerby’s home X-ray booths. I refused to do most of those stories, and now I have to ask, if the scares were valid, where are the bodies? Unless I personally see corpses stacked like cordwood in somebody’s basement, I refuse to believe that any product produced by our benign corporate masters could be bad for us. And I’ll kill you if you say differently!

MYTH: DDT causes all kinds of cancers, and nearly wiped out every bird in the world.

TRUTH: DDT saves lives, and is also a tasty alternative to ice cream.

Malaria will kill more than one thousand children before you finish reading this book. So, when you get near the end, start over, so that you never finish. Think of the children!

You are probably saying, “Is Stossel hitting the crack pipe again? DDT is awful!” But it isn’t. DDT is the kindest, fairest, most caring friend you could ever have. You just don’t know that, because some people, including reporters, are jealous of DDT, and spread lies about it.

Here’s how it happened: Fifty years ago, Americans sprayed DDT everywhere. Nobody worried much about chemicals then. People at picnics just sat and kept eating while trucks sprayed thick white clouds of DDT on top of them. In fact, when the trucks came to spray, some people ran toward them-as if an ice cream truck had come–they were just that stupid back then. And now they’re all dead. But it’s not DDT’s fault!

It turns out DDT itself wasn’t the problem–the problem was that much too much was sprayed. When will people learn to enjoy their deadly insecticides in moderation?

And when will the U.S. State Department start buying DDT for poor kids in Africa? Does it WANT these kids to die? Are the USAID officials all racists who hate little kids? Dow Chemicals wants to know.

MYTH: Gas prices are going through the roof.

TRUTH: Gasoline is a bargain.

The media periodically get upset about “record” gas prices.
Then drivers assume what they see at the pump confirms what they’ve heard on TV, and they come to believe that $4 a gallon for gas is a lot.

The public is just so gullible that it makes me sick!

Actually, we should marvel at how cheap gasoline is–what a bargain we get from oil companies. We should contemplate how unworthy we are of the miracle of gasoline, and we should realize that it would be cheap at a hundred times the price. We should all bow down to the oil companies, and worship them at the church of our choice.

After all, think about what it takes to produce and deliver gasoline. Oil has to be sucked out of the ground, sometimes from deep beneath an ocean. To get to the oil, the drills often have to bend and dig sideways through as much as five miles of earth. What they find then has to be delivered through long pipelines or shipped in monstrously expensive ships, then converted into three or more different formulas of gasoline and transported in trucks that cost more than $100,000 each. Then your local gas station must spend a fortune on safety devices to make sure you don’t blow yourself up, because you’re such a moron. At $2.26 a gallon (about forty-six cents of which goes to taxes), gas is miraculously cheap! But what we heard from the clueless media was, “Gas prices are at record highs!” What a load of crap!

So, I order you to drive your SUV over the bodies of the clueless media to teach them a lesson about defaming gasoline. Do it now!

* * * * * * * *

Well, that’s probably enough Stossel for today. But until next time, consider these falsehoods that you undoubtedly believe, and try to wrap your puny mind around the concept that you are WRONG about everything:

MYTH: Satanists regularly kidnap and eat Christian babies

TRUTH: They only do this for special holidays

MYTH: Women are all saints, and men are all the scum of the earth.

TRUTH: I once interviewed a man who seemed nice, so you are WRONG about all men being jerkwads. And I suspect that some women lie about some stuff, thus proving that you are also WRONG about women! But the media doesn’t want you to know any of this, since they want to keep all the sweet, sweet men for themselves.

MYTH: Quiet loners who keep to themselves are currently the biggest threat to your safety. You stand a 95% chance of being murdered by one in the coming year.

TRUTH: Once again, this is just something that the media want you to believe, since it helps them sell papers. In truth, you face just as much danger from bushy-haired hippies who belong to murderous cults, teens who are all hopped up on hard rock music played backwards, and Scott Petersons.

Etc.

Why Am I a Hairless Humunculus? Page 213

Posted by scott on May 15th, 2006

I’ve never been able to work up much interest in the whole question of Tom Cruise’s sexuality, since he’s probably too busy choking his own Body Thetan to deal with anyone else’s alien ghost ridden corpus (although I have to agree with Kathy Griffen’s observation, “Have you noticed that the gays don’t want Tom Cruise anymore, now that he’s crazy?”)

But earlier today I took my 90-year old grandfather to see Mission Impossible: III for Mother’s Day (don’t ask) and it had the unforseen side effect of pretty much settling the issue.

Tom Cruise shaves his armpits.

‘Nuff said.