Tag: Rants

Holy Crap on a Grape Flavored Ugly Stick!
Yeah, here it is…the second installment of No. More. Stupid.
Please read this! Help me help us all. Repeat after me.

NO. MORE. STUPID.

Can you see where this is going? This is where I continue on my little tryst down You-Have-Got-To-Be-F###ing-Kidding-Me Lane.

Israel needs to take their war to Hamas and not to the Palestinians.

(Just as important. People need to help each other not be like lemmings.)

Where to start? Well…first and foremost, I think a big round of jimmy-kicking needs to be given to the Israeli military and a few extra for the genius that authorized a stealth attack on a boat chuck full of scared-shitless people with nothing but sticks to defend themselves. These guys had the means and the power to easily take that flotilla without injuring a single passenger…instead…they killed 10 and wounded many many more. But I am soooo not going to leave the blame there. This blockade-running flotilla was organized and being led by a veritable army of very seasoned and rather well-known individuals that should have known better than to challenge a military force that is well-known for a zero-tolerance policy. I can say very clearly that there were people there that KNEW that challenging the military as they boarded would be a HUGE mistake….and they still did it.

Where does that leave me? Simple…I weep for the losses of all those families that day. Those responsible include more than just the man trained to pull a trigger. There were shepherds on that flotilla that I am pretty sure could have defused and managed the situation, just as there were military leaders that could have made this a lot safer. But I am not their judge. The rest of the world will happily place the blame somewhere without restraint, and further perpetuating what I refer to as…”the stupid”. Please don’t think I am sympathetic in the least to Israel…quite the opposite, but nothing good can come form deliberately impaling yourself on the spear. Hold yourself and those around you to the same respect for life so that you will not in action or by deliberate inaction cause harm. It’s not an easy path, but it’s insanely self-fulfilling…but unfortunately I don’t think anyone had that idea in mind when the flotilla tried to run the blockade.

I have linked a lot of decent articles related to this issue HERE, read to your hearts content.

How many ways, in how many days, can we let big business take a great big dump in our livelihood?

Next on my list of things I need to air out is (surprise surprise) BP and it’s shining example of why we need to get the hell away from the oil industry, and more importantly make that industry so unprofitable that the mere notion of drilling 2 miles below sea-level to get raw fuel so repulsive that they wont be allowed to drill anywhere…ever again. OH BUT WAIT! They already did it! I have some really good recommended viewing, strangely enough…the 60 Minutes show from May 16th was the best most realistic interview of both survivors and the initial investigator.

60 Minutes – The Blowout – Part One
60 Minutes – The Blowout – Part Two
60 Minutes – The Blowout – Part Three
Google News

Now these links are just the tip of the iceberg, but the videos give you some really clear and unbiased “what-the-F##-happened” without a month’s worth of political posturing to muddle it up. There are some worse things happening though.

Captain Obvious says:

“The spill might have worse effects than previously determined.”

I think this is about all the Captain Obvious we need right now. The rest of what we hear and read about this disaster needs to be factual. in bullshitting everyone, they become ill-prepared. Now, I am a far cry from a chemist, and I am quite obviously not an environmental scientist, but I am a bit of what you might want to call..”well-read”. I happen to know that with only one pint of raw crude you can destroy any plant life living in a square yard, and anything that cant protect itself and move away will die in it too. Now lets do the math:

There are 8 pints in a gallon.
There are 42 Gallons in a Barrel
There are estimates of over 15000 barrels a day leaking for over 49 days
This equates to 246960000 pints of oil.

Now if we only had to deal with the oil, we’d actually be more than able to handle this… it would only utterly decimate about 80 square miles of land. Unfortunately…the 30,870,000 gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico…is in the frickin Gulf of Mexico, where it is slowly diluting into the water, and thereby into everything in and of the Gulf. Now lets say Tony is a really nice guy, and says that the water only dilutes at a ratio of say…1 gallon of oil for every 10 of water.

The problem here, is that diluting the oil doesn’t lessen its potential damage to animals and plant life enough to keep them from getting too sick to live through. So now, if you are playing ball here, we have a true ecological disaster coming that we’re nowhere near prepared to deal with.

The end result is not a few hundred miles of coastline.
It’s 800+ square miles of destructive water that’s still growing and diluting.
..and yes…I am being very very modest about the impact, because I just read another 3rd party analysis that places the impact at about 7-8x larger than my dilution formula.

I hate to say it man…well actually I don’t…this is horrible. Unthinkable. When I go back and watch that 60 minutes video (which by the way is only now being treated with any credibility for some inexplicable reason) I get so incredibly angry. BP, you’re already making insane amounts of money, hows about making the world a little BETTER with all that clout instead of screwing with our childrens’ future.

Yeah, see that’s the other point of common sense that the media is only hinting at. BP isn’t going to speculate…I don’t blame them. It’s going to be years, and I am sooo not talking about 1 or 2 years. What does the worlds most powerful oil company working with the world’s most powerful military have to take this on?

Absolutely nothing. Who is going to reimburse the thousands of businesses that will be forced to close? How many families are being fed from that industry? I haven’t even touched on all the animals that are getting killed because of BP’s need to save a goddamn dollar.

Why I am mad? Because i think Dolphins are not “as” smart as we are, I think they are way way more intelligent, and we just totally ruined their homes in the gulf for a decade. Because The number of displaced families from the destroyed gulf industry is going to be a stresser on every other state those families are forced to relocate to, and most importantly because this was soo F###ING avoidable that I think that BP should be forced to profit share ALL their profits (not stocks..income) over the next ten years with the families that are displaced by their craptastic drilling practices.

Texas is a beautiful state filled with great people that carry guns and don’t have to pay a state income tax…dumping oil in our back yard isn’t a really great idea. Watch what happens when Texans start feeling the pinch on this. BP is going to have to answer to an entire state of pissed off armed people with half a mind to put their ass-kickin boots on.

On to my next piece of rantaholism…

Immigration.
More importantly, the insanity it is quickly creating in people of all nationalities, legally and illegally residing in the United States.

The quick and the dirty, our immigration system has failed to regulate the number of people crossing our borders illegally. Our cultural policy of “blame everything on the government” allowed us to completely destroy the pride nationalized citizens had in becoming American. Our society now thinks that even though it is wrong, we need a method either quickly removing illegal immigrants from the United States, or a method by which they can become citizens that would be acceptable to the United States citizenry as a whole.

What you know:
Arizona made it legal to check the ID of anyone a police officer thinks may be in the United States illegally.
What you don’t know:
These rights are already afforded to Border Patrol and all Federal Officers assigned to Immigration-related task forces. It’s already State Law in almost every state of the union that you provide valid state identification upon request by any law enforcement officer, Federal, State, or Local. All Arizona did was enabled their popo’s to help the border patrol.

My mom has told me this story many times. When my family immigrated to the U.S., my grandfather forbade anyone in the family to speak anything but English. Why, because this is America, the language of preference in almost every social and business demographic is English…yes…even in Texas and California. Up north it’s not Central-American Spanish, it’s Canadian-French. But the ideal is the same…everyone learns English, or they are at a severe disadvantage. Now I am not saying that my Grandfather was 100% right, but my family speaks English, and most fo them speak French still too…but there was NEVER any doubt about which language was to be prioritized. Unfortunately cultural complacency and apathy have led to an extreme of the exact opposite. In Texas, our public schools are forced to use curriculum necessitating the fluency of Spanish instead of English. This puts ALL children at a huge disadvantage.

I think that it should be mandatory that children learn at least one additional language before they are even out of elementary, but I do NOT think that the educational system should be force feeding Spanish to kids based on the decisions of the SBOE, who has of late proven very clearly that they are incapable to making experienced decisions.

So where are we? Simple. If you’re hoping that the Immigration Reform includes a nice little blanket amnesty grant (like Bush tried to do a few years ago)…you can forget it.
Too many people are feeling the economic pinch right now and Texas hospitals are being completely taken advantage of by people that aren’t in the country legally because they know the hospitals are (and have been for some time) obligated to treat them in any potentially life threatening situation.

If you are expecting the government to aggressively pursue illegal immigrants back across the border, you’ll be disappointed. Here’s why.
There is a very significant demographic in Texas that are legal, naturalized citizens of the U.S. that are from Mexico. These are voters, and politicians like voters. They like them so much that they are willing to ignore the polls that say 70% of America thinks that despite its potential for abuse, a law allowing law enforcement officers to verify a person’s resident status within the country.

My bottom line? Two changes need to occur. First, they NEED to change enable law enforcement to do their jobs. If someone is in the states illegally, they are here illegally. By that same token, I think people and families that work here and can prove they are making the effort to become AMERICANS should definitely be afforded the opportunity. A program then enables people to be proud of being here (legally) would turn public opinion into gold in this, and no one is willing to put in the work for it. Sad really. I know some awesome hard-workng families around my place that truly deserve to be here without the threat of being shipped off. At the same time, people move to other countries with criminal pretenses as well…

Okay so that it for now. Comment, Rant back at me, whatever, but whatever you do, care about it. 😉

-Tony