Just take it easy there non-smokers

Remember Jim Fix? The big famous jogging guy? Jogged fifteen miles a day. Did a jogging book. Did a jogging video. Dropped dead of a heart attack when? When he was fucking jogging, that's when! --- Dennis Leary

I managed to quit smoking and haven’t touched one for about nine months and quitting smoking, cold turkey is easily the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.

To me, the most interesting thing about quitting was how you don’t realize how addicted you are to something until you try to stop doing it. People, while they are smokers have absolutely no idea how much they NEED their cigarettes; as soon as they try to quit, than reality sets in.

I got to a point, about 3 months after I had quit where I was absolutely dumbfounded that something could be legal and this addictive at the same time. I felt like a victim, like I had been taken for a ride. I should have never even had the ability to become that addicted to a bunch of chemicals that I could buy at any gas station. This was the only month of my life where I felt I could identify with the non-smoking activists.

But than six months went by and the cravings subsided and than nine months and I don’t really care anymore. I guess I am about back to neutral about the whole thing. Honestly who am I to judge what anyone else does? The reality of the situation is this, cigarettes are legal, they are addictive, and nobody is forcing anyone else to smoke them.

Smokers, outside of the hood, are adults, who make their own decisions. If they want to smoke, then let them smoke, what do you give a shit?

And stop your bitching about second hand smoke from cigarettes. Do you have any idea what kind of toxic hell you breathe into your lungs every time one of the 64 million cars in this country drives by? It is a horrific, cocktail of burnt fossil fuels, lead, ozone, scorched metal, engine coolant and air that has been forced through layers of disgusting filth. And this is all mixed up, into an aerosol that billows in and out of your lungs, and into the sky, all day long. Yet, you whiny boobs don’t seem to care about that, as long as Steve from accounting walks 50 feet away from the door of your office buildings to smoke his morning cigarette.

Now, the government is attempting to force Big Tobacco to place pictures of defunct organs on their packs of cigarettes. And naturally, big tobacco is refusing and saying that it is unconstitutional; which it is by the way.

I suppose you could amend the constitution to allow for forced speech in advertising, which is detrimental to the company selling the product. But wouldn’t that open a pretty big can of worms?

First off, are there still smokers who think cigarettes are good for them? Every pack they have ever bought came with a handy warning from the Surgeon General about how your head will fall off as soon as you take one puff. Do smokers not have televisions? Have they all just missed the 26 year long “Debunkify” campaign of teens talking about how uncool and unhealthy it is to smoke? Do smokers never go to the doctor who incessantly tells them to stop smoking? What about the dentist? Do all the smokers have dentist that encourage them to keep smoking cigarettes?

Do you think maybe smokers just don’t give a shit what you people think? After all, if they cared so much, they probably wouldn’t be smokers in the first place. Putting a picture of a dead lung on a pack of cigarettes is going to do nothing but make people like me laugh every time they see one. And I am not going to laugh because of how stupid and futile I find the newest non-smoking initiative. I am not going to laugh because of how much taxpayer money the FDA will spend on the operation. I am going to laugh because at that point, I will live in a country where I can’t walk into a gas station without seeing a bunch of boxes with defunct smokers’ lungs all over them.

I hope it catches on. I hope it catches on big time. I hope it gets to a point where I can’t buy a burger at McDonald’s without a picture of some morbidly obese person on the wrapper. I hope that every time I am pumping more, good old fashioned gasoline, into my truck, that I have to watch a video of the polar ice caps melting, in real time, above the pump. I hope that someday, when I decide to take a shower that is longer than some interest group likes, a video of the dust bowl drought begins to play in my bathroom. I hope that every package of meat in the grocery store has some diatribe printed on the wrapper about how this animal died in vein and how I should not eat him. I hope every beer I get at the bar comes in a glass with a picture of some guys liver spots on it. I hope every piece of music that contains explicit lyrics comes with a note about how “The Trench Coat Mafia” liked to listen to Marylyn Manson. I hope every door knob has a flu warning above it, brought to you by Purell. I hope every cell phone comes with a picture of a brain tumor on it.

At that point, in my opinion, America would be the most hilarious thing since the first time I watched Bigger and Blacker by Chris Rock. I don’t even know if I would be able to leave my house without laughing until I gagged.

Luckily, there is not really all that much preventing such hysterically paranoid propaganda from invading our lives. So there is a fairly good chance, unless quite a few things are reformed, that this could eventually become reality for us all; starting with a bunch of packs of cigarettes with black lungs on the boxes.

Don’t get me wrong. It is not bad to care about things, but when you caring about something turn into expensive ridiculousness for us all, than I have a big problem with it. Every time the activists decide to run anything about big tobacco up the flagpole to the Supreme Court, it cost all of the tax payer’s money. Err-go, we are all buying cigarettes.

To me, one of our biggest problems in this country, is this “what about me” mentality. Too many people are going through their lives, paying to much attention to everyone else around them and making things up in their heads about how they are somehow negatively affecting their awful lives. Nothing is ever my fault, it is everyone else, doing things around me that I disagree with that makes my life so drab and boring and worthless. So it is these people, who take it upon themselves to ignore the established order and attempt to pass rules and changes that do absolutely nothing but cost everyone else money, all for a minority of “concerned citizens”.

Do what I do, ignore people. Unless someone is directly effecting what I am trying to get accomplished in the next five minutes, that guy could be smoking crack at a Pizza Hut for all I care. What that guy wants to do is what that guy wants to do. I don’t want to do it. I am smart enough to understand that it would be an awful idea to join him. I am also smart enough to know that if that guy keeps doing what he is doing he is going to either die or go to jail. There is no need for me to take it upon myself to launch an anti-crack smoking at Pizza Hut campaign on the taxpayer’s dime. I’m not going to alert my congressman. These things work themselves out, not everything requires my intervention. I don’t need to get involved with everything that I think it annoying. I’m not going to let things that annoy me take over my life like that. I’m probably just going to laugh about it for ten minutes and go home and cook some chicken that came in a package with a picture of a guy who died from untreated Salmonella.

It doesn't matter how big the warnings on the cigarettes are; you could have a black pack, with a skull and crossbones on the front, called TUMORS, and smokers would be around the block going, "I can't wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet ya get a tumor as soon as you light up!" ---- Dennis Leary

America Deserved it's Credit Rating Downgrade:

As I am sure you are aware, the United States has been downgraded to the AA+ Credit Rating by Standard and Poor. This of course, will force world markets to sell off for a while, but I do not think it is going to doom us all as the world media likes to portray it. But things are going to change. Everything is going to start costing a little bit more as every company who operates under its own credit umbrella (every company you have ever heard of), passes the buck onto the consumers in order to compensate for their higher interest rates. Fine, whatever, what else is new? I don’t think anyone ever expected to ever go to a grocery store and pay what they did in 1986 again.

But eventually, this has to stop. These children in Washington are going to have to find a way to play nice together and stop playing political games with the potential of ruining people’s lives. Luckily for my side of the equation, the vast majority of this country does not blame the president for this debacle. The voting majority realizes that he was blocked in every attempt to get anything done by the Tea Baggers. If anyone is going to be hurt politically by this, it is them and their lackey Johnny Boehner (Thanks for producing this gem Southern Ohio). And let’s face facts, the people who like the Tea Party, have very little to lose, because they don’t fall under the demographic of people who have much money vested in the stock markets.

All blame aside, you can’t keep trying to operate the government with people who have such conflicting ideas of how the world works. The idea of checks and balances is all well and good if you have two parties with some semblance of mutual respect for one another. After all, when this works it prevents any one party from doing whatever they want no matter how horrible the ideas are. But we don’t have these sorts of people in DC anymore. These people absolutely hate each other. You couldn’t run a lemonade stand for very long, at the end of your driveway, if the two people running it had a deep seeded hatred for one another.

The idea is to be able to invoke a healthy, productive debate between two sides of each equation. Not to have a bunch of clowns who hate each other so much that they won’t even use the same bathrooms, yelling at each other and doing everything they can to screw the other side over in order to gain a bargaining chip for a future election. As far as the public is concerned, this has become taxation with the illusion of representation. These people do not have our best interest at heart.

If you talk to anyone in government who stands to gain anything from blocking progress, they generally hide behind the thought that it is a “good idea” to have these sorts of ongoing debates because they prevent some sort of disaster that they made up in their heads from happening. Again, I agree, to a point but there has to be limitations to this debate. After all, with your logic, why not just have two parties running the country, one with all Southern Christians, and the other with all Muslims, and see how productive that “debate” turns out to be. People would get stabbed on live television before they determine whether or not it was a good idea to wear pants outside of their homes. We are about two little steps below this sort of comical ineptness in Washington, right now.

If anything, for how long these kids have been slap fighting with each other in DC, this credit downgrade was a slap on the wrist. Any other organization, who managed to operate at such a low level of progress and results would have been forced into bankruptcy, forget a lowered credit rating, grab a box, put your shit in it and get on Monster.com.

So did the United States deserve its lowered credit rating, you bet your ass it did? It probably should have happened a lot sooner. If you compare this country to a person, it would be like Equifax, feeling so bad for them that it never lowered their credit rating, for decades, even though they were unemployed, addicted to meth, constantly taking out new lines of credit for shit they don’t need, and paying back the bare minimum, if anything, every month, in a currency that is backed by a bunch of metal that doesn’t really exist anymore. How we managed to stay at AAA for as long as we did is beyond me.

So now, the big “to do” is to figure out how we climb back to a AAA credit rating as a country, why? Shouldn’t we fix the broken system that caused us to be downgraded in the first place? After all, if someone is bleeding, you first have to stop them from bleeding before you give them more blood.

My question is this, why do we need all these jackaloons in Washington anymore to begin with? Between the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, we have 535 “representatives”. Each one of these people earns about 155,000 dollars a year. They also, don’t pay for much of anything during their terms. This includes, airfare, most of their food, gym memberships, housing etc. Also, each one has their own support staff, accounting teams, call center staff etc, on their payroll. Currently, there are about 24,000 people in Washington doing nothing but supporting Congressman and Senators. Let’s take a really low estimate and say that each of these 24,000 folks all makes 50,000 per year. If you total all of this up, just paying these idiots, costs the taxpayers about 2 billion dollars a year. Mind you, this is a very low estimate, that doesn’t take into account building maintenance, their housing, their travel, their food, their horrendous decision making, their family’s tagging along, their employees vacation time, employee benefits etc. A grand total would be at least another billion per year on top of the two billion they are already getting paid.

So, as hard as that previous paragraph is to swallow, ask yourself, what are you getting out of these people? There are essential services, that we need some of these people there for, namely defense, anti-terrorism, infrastructure, food safety etc. But I have a hard time believing that the American populous needs 25,000 skin bags in Washington DC representing them. This is 2011. Long gone are the days where communities and regions of America were so cut off from technology and the countries capital that it was necessary to elect someone and send them to Washington to represent you.

So get rid of them. Bring the vote back to the people who they are supposedly voting for anyway. After all, if they are really representing their constituents, as they say they are, nothing would change right? Develop an ultra-secure method of allowing the US population to vote for anything that requires the Senate and Congress to vote for now. Just have all the votes on Thursday nights, once a week and give the people their voice again. This technology is nothing new; you can easily dump online polling data into a massive database and get results in near real time. We were already doing this in 1996. If anything it would be a lot quicker than whatever the hell you call this current system. Nobody would have to ever turn on their televisions and see a bunch of 40 – 50 – 60 -70, something, overpaid, white, racist, dickheads yelling at each other about how much they hate providing armor for troops who are being shot at, ever again. The amount of money, sending these men back to wherever they came from, would save, is nearly impossible to calculate until you try. You force lobbyists out of the equation completely unless they want to try to bribe everyone in the United States instead of just our current collection of corrupt geriatrics in DC.

And above all, it fixes what is broken. You can’t pay off the whole country but you can easily pay off a few hundred representatives of that country. How else do you think Wall Street got its Tarp money? How else do you think real Healthcare reform was filibustered? How else did it take so long to agree upon a debt ceiling deal that second graders understood was completely necessary to saving the countries credit rating? It is because, these men and women who represent us, are paid to vote on things the way that benefits them and nobody else. They then go on camera and SPIN their justifications for these decisions to their constituents however they are told to do so. This is how you have such systemic breakdowns in progress like we just witnessed with the debt ceiling debate. When you know full well, that voting a certain way, or wasting time in other ways, will inevitably damage the lives of everyone in your country, and you do it anyway, your system is irreversibly broken. These sorts of situations should not even be possible. If there is even a method of filibustering elementary decisions like “Hey should we make everything more expensive for everyone in our already poor ass country?”, then you have to reform the system, it can’t work, ever again, period.

Our current ability to do this sort of shit is why our credit was downgraded, and I am glad. I am not interested in watching these sorts of stalemates on CNN anymore. I find it embarrassing and shameful to be lumped in with people like John Boehner and Eric Cantor, in the eyes of my international friends whose countries still enjoy AAA Prime credit ratings and governments that can make trivial decisions for their countries. You have to reform the system to a point where people can no longer do things that ruin their people’s lives. It is that simple. If WE all voted for things, not Congressman and Senators, I really don’t think we would have half as hard of a time making these kinds of decisions. After all, we are free of outside influences like, Big Oil, Wall Street and “Interest” Groups. So we would vote for things because we thought they were right or wrong not because some focus group wanted to pay for a trip to the Sahara for my family if I voted “No” on something.

I am a firm believer that people have to be governed. But I am also a firm believer that people have to do their jobs. And when people don’t do their jobs, they shouldn’t keep them. When people in government stop doing their jobs, we end up where we are, right now. Fire the people who aren’t doing their jobs and let’s take some of the power back from the inept.

Or let’s just keep doing this. I can’t wait to pay 8 bucks for a box of cereal.