The kid in seattle who got to be a superhero for a day and the phoenix suns becoming los suns for a game in honor of their latin@ fans and reruns od the gilmore girls i have a wee bit more faith in humanity today. Will resume regular bitching and cynicism tomorrow.

I’ve heard a mountain of disdain for people who shop at Walmart, and buckets of contempt for poor people who breed in this world of over-consumption. All the pressure to change the way we live so as to tread more gently on the earth seems to comes down squarely on the backs of the poor, the brown, and the female. But the truth is, the real things we need to change the system have little to do with the average family’s commitment to “reduce, reuse, recycle”.

You can’t look at a tiny slice of the system, the slice of the system with the least ability to change the system, and pin all the responsibility on that slice. You have to look at the system as a whole.

For example, rage all you want about the Walmartification of the world, but are you screaming just as loud about the depressed wages that make Walmart’s cheap goods the only way to feed and clothe a family with less than the median income? You gan grouse all you want about obesity and poor eating habits, are you also looking at the way those same low wages that make Walmart attractive also make a virtuous diet of locally sourced organic meats and produce a possibility? When whinging about overpopulation do you stop and think that those brown women in poor countries who “just need to be taught about family planning” are leaving a miniscule carbon footprint compared to your comfortable first world life?

I prefer my environmentalism without the stank of classism, racism, sexism and outright ignorance that I see coming from most faugressive whingebots. I think the world would be a much better place if manufacturers were required to to build end-of-life usage into their products and if companies like Halliburton and BP had to shell out the extra 500K in order to avoid damaging the entire gulf coast in a massive oil spill. I think a better way to combat overconsumption is to require living wages for workers both here and abroad. If things are more expensive, people will buy less of them. And if people make more money, they can afford to buy better goods.

You can keep recycling and composting and doing whatever it is you do to make the world a greener place, but you should probably recognize that your willingness to do the work of sorting and rinsing and hauling (or putting that work off onto your female sig. other) makes it easier for companies to avoid taking responsibility. You’ve just performed free labor for whoever you buy your shit from. I’d prefer to see people paid living wages or better to sort our recycling. It’s a valuable job, and much like child rearing, we should pay well for it.

I know that it makes you feel a wee bit better to do something, anything. And I know that we all love to be a wee bit condescending whenever we can (cause you all know I’ve been doing my best snob dance about Obama’s decision to allow offshore drilling in the wake of the oil slick tragedy) but your condescension is perhaps a wee bit misplaced when you level it at those who already occupy the bottom of society. And it’s certainly not going to actually fix the problems.

There are never tragic news stories of people killed while working in solar or wind power like you do with coal or natural gas. There are never horrible pictures of the ocean turning to black sludge and fisherman losing their livelyhoods because of geothermal power. Perhaps you don’t need to be an environmentalist to see that the human price we pay for dirty energy is too much.

Me: if you got a half an hour to change anything in the world, what would you do?
kid: i would invent some kind of shrink ray
me: why?
kid: then i would shrink all the people and we wouldn’t need as much space or food
me: but you’d have to shrink the cows and chickens too, or what would we eat?
kid: nope, chickens stay the same size but then one chicken would feed a whole bunch of people
me: but how do you kill a giant chicken?

I was watching the movie Conspiracy the other day and was struck by a horrible thought. The movie is about the terrible meeting where the Nazis decide to exterminate all the Jews in Europe. There was a bit of a debate about whether they should kill them all now, or just sterilize them all so that there would not be any more Jews born in Europe. Both options are awful.

But I found myself not exactly siding with the sterilization camp, if only because it didn’t mean certain death for 10 million plus people. The movie made sure to point out to us viewers that both choices were rooted in deep seated hatred of Jews. The actors did a pretty good job of being thoroughly despicable. Yet still, because the only two choices given were awful, I found myself gravitating to the less awful.

Now, I am not a Teabagger claiming Obama is the second coming of Hitler (that distinction currently belongs to the great state of Arizona and their racist new law). But we are consistently being given only two choices, two awful choices, when it comes to the governing of our country. Do we keep the crappy health care system we have that kills 40,000 people a year, or make a slightly less crappy system that still won’t cover everyone? Do we leave the banksters that held our entire economic system hostage alone, or do we put in place a regulatory system designed by the people who brought us the meltdown to begin with?

We are missing the good options, the right options. We are missing the person who stands up at the table and says “that’s fucking murder”. There are more than two options for fixing this country. The best options are not being suggested by the people we have given the power to, but because we only see the two main options, we can’t even see how horrid they are anymore. We keep choosing sterilization over outright murder, but neither choice is moral or good.

Last year when i got linked on a horrid forced pregnancy blog we had a little competion to see who was more charitable- godless whores or good christians. As you can imagine, the godless whores carried the day by about a hundred to one.
so douchey steve baldwin overspent by 2.5 million bucks. I’ve gotten about 200 bucks this month (which is more than double last month) and should have had enough to pay our bills and keep the internet on, but silly me bought some groceries.
So if you think that i’m a better entertainment value than steve fuckin baldwin, throw some change in ye old donation jar. Sure, i’ve never made a movie as douchetastic as biodome, but i have brought you such hits letters to the president that include the line ‘douchebags in tacky blue suits’.

I am now sending the dozen or so emails i get from you everyday requesting campaign donations to my spam folder. I think i get about as much usefullness out of you as i get from the ViaGRa without a rx people.

Sincerely,
RQ

Apparently, some Christian big wigs have set up a website where people can donate directly to the blonde Baldwin brother because he had to declare bankruptcy last year. $2.3 million or so in mortgages, tax bills, credit cards, etc. They SAY it’s because Hollywood stopped offering him roles because he’s a Christian.

Well, bully for Stephen. Why does he qualify for this largesse when so many other people don’t?

The boatloads of other decent people down on their luck didn’t buy multiple homes in pricey Hollywood, expecting the good times to go on forever. They didn’t publicly lambaste the people they hoped would hire them–seriously, if you’re hiring for a position, would you hire the guy who gets on every Christian TV show to talk about how evil you are? Many of those people who declared bankruptcy (if they were fortunate enough to have that option) are probably good, God-fearing Christian folk, too, and perhaps even ones that many of us godless harlot-types would respect for their overall decency, hard work, and lack of pretense. Some may have made mistakes, for sure, but in this society, the rich pay next to nothing for huge mistakes they made with deliberate indifference, wreaking devastating consequences for the whole world. Regular folks, on the other hand, better not charge something extra on their credit cards or they’re screwed for life.

Stephen, honey, sweetie. Maybe people stopped hiring you because (1) Hollywood is notoriously fickle to begin with, (2) you acted like a jerk in public towards the very people who were in a position to hire you, and (3) you just don’t bring anything all that interesting to the table as an actor anymore. (Though if the Christian entertainment market is so damned huge, as it’s purported to be, why aren’t you getting hired for blockbusters in that field?)

Not to mention that whole spending-beyond-your-means thing. Isn’t that what people on your side of the debate love to throw at those of us on our side? Come on now, be honest. Why do you deserve that sort of obscene hand-out for screwing up? It’s not like you’re a Wall Street wizard or anything.

I think a lot of people deserve that kindness more than you, though if people want to donate to you, I say it’s their money and they can do as they please. It just doesn’t make them any more Christian or moral in general than the rest of us. For those caring people (Christian or not) who still cling to the notion of “deserving poor” versus “undeserving poor,” I suggest that there are deserving folks in your own back yard who could use the helping hand a lot more than some Hollywood type who bit the hand that fed him.

Who used a picture of glenn beckas an imaginary fascist come to power in a mock UN- are you single?

Write a long post on earth day and why so much of environmentalism regressively relies on the unpaid labor of women, but its hard to write a long post on my phone and i have yet another raging migraine. Instead i am going to contemplate the best way to sterilize a power drill for at home brain surgery.rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide? And just to make it topical which one is more environmentally friendly?