Before we can even begin to tackle the insidious realm of bicycles, one thing has to be established right off the bat:
Bicycles are fucking toys.
And this can be proven through a simple logical syllogism:
1. If every child aged 7-12 in the world wants one as a present for their Birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Bastille Day/Hindu Christmas, then it is a toy.
2. Every child aged 7-12 in the world wants a bicycle as a present for their Birthday/Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Bastille Day/Hindu Christmas.
3. Bicycles are fucking toys. 1,2 MP
Hey look! It's Logic! Bicycles are fucking toys and to say otherwise would call into question the core of logic, the foundation of all math, science, argumentation, America, Jesus, and Life. Now that's been established that bicycles are toys, like skateboards, scooters, Barbies, Stretch Armstrongs, and Dildos, we can begin to examine the fundamental injustice and insanity that encompass bicycles on public roads.
Many roads have their own bicycle lanes on them, which by itself is exceedingly troublesome, as there are no other toy-themed lanes on public roads. However, even when there are no marked bicycle lanes, bicycles are still allowed full access to the road that cars, trucks, and motorcycles must share. No other toy shares this privilege. You aren't allowed to ride in the streets on your skateboard or scooter. You can't fashion a roller sled out of Malibu Barbie Convertibles and dual-action stainless steel vibrators complete with bipod and reflex sight and start sliding down the streets of San Fransisco. The police will stop you, take you aside, and say "Excuse me sir, but what the Fuck?"
And remember, while these bicycles enjoy the privilege of sharing the same road as automated motor vehicles, they slow the flow of traffic to a nose-bleedingly infuriatingly slow crawl. Why you ask? Because bicycles lack the ability to match the speed of other vehicles designated for this road. They're doing at best 15 in a 40. Because anything faster would trigger a cascade reaction causing the bicyclist, his toy, and everything within a 40 meter radius to sublimate into magic blue smoke. Its Pascal's 4th Law of Thermodynamijiggery. And all of this is completely acceptable. The bicycle can't go any faster. Traffic has to wait.
However, were I to get a car, open the hood, replace my carburetor with an EZ Bake Oven, fill all my cylinders with a mixture of peanut butter, silly putty, and shame (3 parts, 1 part, 2 parts respectively), square my wheels, and decide that transmissions aren't "in vogue" this season and decide to go without, thereby effectively making and automobile capable of only going 15 miles an hour and take it on to the same public road that the bicycle was just on, this would be completely unacceptable. The police will stop you, take you aside, and say "Excuse me sir, but what the Fuck?"
But how can this madness be? Both are equally hazardous and detrimental to the flow of traffic. Why then is the automobile unfitting but the toy germane? The answer is quite simple:
Bicyclists have Zero Responsibility.
Next time you're driving around, just watch the bullshit bicyclists do. You come to a fourway stop and want to make a right. The car in the lane opposite you turns left onto the street. Then the car on your left goes straight. Finally it's your turn and just as you're spinning your wheel, some douschenozzle bicyclist comes riding up behind you and blows through the intersection. You slam on your brakes and the bicyclist doesn't even look back. Why does this happen? Because Bicyclists have Zero Responsibility.
You're at a stop light and its late. There are no other cars around. Hell you're probably the only person in miles who's even within ten feet of an automobile. You want to just go through the light. No one will notice. But you don't. Why? Because you have a Responsibility. And while you're waiting there a bicyclist fucknugget comes up from behind and blasts right through that red light. He doesn't even look both ways. He just fucking goes. Why does this happen? Because Bicyclists have Zero Responsibility. If you did something like that in your car and had a friend with you, he'd freak out, because you just violated the order of things, the social contract. He'd stop you, take you aside, and say "Excuse me sir, but what the Fuck?"
Really, there's nothing that can exclude you from public road privileges on a bicycle. You can be deaf, blind, mute, retarded, infirmed, elderly, adolescent, legless, armless, headless, illiterate, incapable of discerning visual from olfactory stimuli, from a region of space only capable of experiencing the second, fourth, and nineteenth dimensions of space-time, made out of jam. You can have absolutely no knowledge of the rules of the road, the flow of traffic, or what signs mean. Hell, you can lack the basic knowledge of operational physics that would tell you that two objects cannot cohabitate the same point in space. You can be all of these things at the same time (through some weird ... quantum event where you go back in time and have sex with your own grandmother, then come forward and bear witness to the hideous fusion) and still be 100% qualified to operate a bicycle on any public city, county, state, or federal road. Going 15 in a 40. Ignoring traffic lights.
Meanwhile, I, a car driving, decent human being must attend traffic school, study traffic law, go to the DMV, wade through unending tempestuous sea of bureaucracy and black women who aren't putting up with my sass, apply for a probationary permit, take driving lessons from smelly Russian man who I think is in the mob because the whole time I was driving to various people's houses and dropping off unmarked packages and listening to him describe in explicit detail how he wants to kill the cat at that last house we were at, learn the mechanics of driving with a state-licensed driver for six months, return to the DMV, wade through another unending tempestuous sea of bureaucracy and black women who aren't putting up with my sass, take a driving examination with a man who is equally unimpressed with my witty repartee, get a crappy computer printout as a "temporary driver's license," wait a month, until finally I get a California C-Class Driver's License. So I can finally get out on the road ... and go 15 in a 40 stuck behind some fartknocker on a bicycle who ignores traffic lights.
It seems only reasonable that those who endure more trial and assume more responsibility ought be granted more privilege. But these bicyclists are allowed to be on the same road as those who endured the nine rings of hell that is a government bureaucracy, wasting everybody's time with their slow toy. And when we consider the established mathematical formula of T=M, where T is Time and M is Money, when they steal your time, by the transitive property, they are stealing your money. They are thieves. They are Dirty, Rotten, Self-Righteous, Toy-Riding Thieves.
And furthermore, Spandex? Really?
So the next time you see some jizzmop on a pastel colored one speed coming up from behind, remember: Open you passenger door on them. Your door will take minor damage, but, with any luck, the bicyclist will suffer massive brain damage, because fuck if they ever wear a helmet.
Save the Economy, Vehicular Manslaughter a Bicyclist.
1.8.10
31.7.10
Animals and Why they Need to Die
So here's the deal...
Animal rights activism is a blight and must be purged.
Not too long ago, California passed Proposition 2, guaranteeing California cattle more leg room, while simultaneously passing Proposition 8, guaranteeing gays a ticket to Second-Class-Citizensville, (ironically a first class ticket) so it seems evident that people really give a hell of a big fuck about cows and chickens. Therefore, it seems apt that I comment on the animal rights movement.
Alot of people make a rather big hullabaloo (its a word, ask your parents to ask their parents) about the conditions animals face in factory farming, the euthanasia of stray animals, and use of animals and animal products in general. Petitions are signed, signs are made, pickets are lined, rallies are rallied, obscenity is bandied, blood is drenched, rabble is roused, hub is bubbed. It's a really big deal to a lot of people. Big enough to form massive lobbying organizations i.e. PETA and devote sizeable chunks of their personal time and finances to advance the rights and privileges of our fauna friends. Celebrity endorsements and frequent protests make the issue one of the most visible in our current political spectrum. To America, Animal Rights are Important.
Now, if you would, indulge me in a little thought experiment.
Imagine you are a 12 year old girl named Jette living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You live in a modest hut with your mother and father and your big brother. Your parents spend most of their day subsistence farming, an unpleasant, but not uncommon existence, and one that you family has engaged in for generations, and in all likelihood, you will live out that life as well. Neither you nor your brother have ever been to school nor do you know how to read or write. Your only real contact with the outside world is a white missionary who comes to your village occasionally, offering food and medicine in exchange for supplicancy to his god. On the whole, however, your life is not a terrible one. You love your family and they love you.
One day, you hear a monster coming down the road. Two rusted out pickup trucks blasting 80s metal come tearing up to your village, a Soviet surplus PK machine gun belching death into the huts. Friends, people you've known your entire life are ripped apart before your eyes. Out of the trucks pour soldiers, camo and shemaghs, AK47s firing into the crowds, into the air, everywhere. Some of them boys, the same age as your brother. Your father puts up a fight and catches a rifle but in the face, dazing him and knocking him down. Soldier boys pin him down and take his hands and eyes with a machete. They bind your brother and put him and other boys in the truck to be brought back to camp, where Brown-Brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder will be forced into him and he will be brainwashed into the next class of boy soldiers. The women, you and the girls included are all herded into a circle. Those too young to rape are hacked to death. Those who aren't are. Several men force themselves on you, you first and last sexual experience being at gunpoint. Once the men have had their fill they proceed to machete rape you, your mother, and whoever is left alive, the dirty blade entering your vagina, cutting your insides to ribbons. Right before you fade into oblivion, the bossman hops down from his truck carrying a portable television. Your last vision in this world is of a legion of enraged white kids in San Fransisco dressed in chicken costumes covered in fake blood yelling at customers outside of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The point of this story is this: In that last agonizing moment, would you give one good God damn about how much space some chickens in America had? And what would you think of the protesters? Would you support their cause? Or would you wonder where your outrage was? Where are your demonstrations and rallies? Where are your ballot initiatives?
The thing about this story is that, while Jette and her village aren't real, there are real people that this and worse are happening to. It isn't a rarity. Hell it isn't even uncommon. And it isn't an unknown phenomenon either. With movies like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, and Last King of Scotland receiving such high attention and praise its almost impossible not to know that this is going on in the world. But support for animal rights activism far outweighs support for war crimes and genocides. How can this be?
In order to remedy this seeming cognitive dissonance, the animal rights activist must accept the following conclusion. Suppose you and your dog live in an apartment. You love your dog. You go to the park and play fetch for hours with him. Every night he sleeps diligently at the foot of your bed. And when you're feeling sad, you can always count on him nuzzle himself next to you and offer comfort. One night, tragedy strikes and on your way home from work, your apartment complex catches fire. You arrive at the scene before the fire department and realize you have only moments to act. Trapped inside are your dog and the neighbor's kid. And you don't even like that fucking kid. He's noisy, and smells, and leave piles of flaming dog shit at your doorstep. Hell he probably started the fire, the little shit. In the time before the building collapses you are confident that you have the time and ability to save one and only one victim. So the dilemma is this, who do you save: the dog or the boy?
If you answered anything other than the boy, then you are a Terrible Fucking Person. It doesn't matter how much you love that damned dog, that is a human being who is going to die unless you help. In order to justify saving the dog you have to value dogs and people on the same level which is, if you haven't guessed already, absolutely and irrevocably crazy pants. But an animal rights activist has to accept the minimally equal, if not superior value of animals to humans because Spoilers: this is a metaphor. People are dying. If not from war then from any number of other sources: disease, famine, bicycle accidents, etc. And the activist knows about this. So in order to make signs, dress up, stand outside of fast food restaurants, and yell at passersby, the animal rights activist must first take a moment to quietly say to themselves, "I know that people are suffering and dying out there, and that my efforts could be used to better their lives, if not save them outright. But Fuck 'Em, I've got a cow to save."
The thing is that these are not all bad people. In fact some of them are fundamentally good people that just want to leave the world better than when they found it. They just haven't stopped to think about what they're doing. The real abject fuckwads are the people at the top like Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, because what they are doing is taking what is arguably the rarest and most precious resource in the world, human charity and goodwill, and embezzling it. They are taking public attention away from Jette and war victims and AIDS and Malaria and Cancer and saying "Everyone look at me and my cats!"
So the next time someone comes to you and hands you "literature" on how you can Save the fucking Whales, remember this simple mantra; "Eat a Chicken, Save a Life."
Animal rights activism is a blight and must be purged.
Not too long ago, California passed Proposition 2, guaranteeing California cattle more leg room, while simultaneously passing Proposition 8, guaranteeing gays a ticket to Second-Class-Citizensville, (ironically a first class ticket) so it seems evident that people really give a hell of a big fuck about cows and chickens. Therefore, it seems apt that I comment on the animal rights movement.
Alot of people make a rather big hullabaloo (its a word, ask your parents to ask their parents) about the conditions animals face in factory farming, the euthanasia of stray animals, and use of animals and animal products in general. Petitions are signed, signs are made, pickets are lined, rallies are rallied, obscenity is bandied, blood is drenched, rabble is roused, hub is bubbed. It's a really big deal to a lot of people. Big enough to form massive lobbying organizations i.e. PETA and devote sizeable chunks of their personal time and finances to advance the rights and privileges of our fauna friends. Celebrity endorsements and frequent protests make the issue one of the most visible in our current political spectrum. To America, Animal Rights are Important.
Now, if you would, indulge me in a little thought experiment.
Imagine you are a 12 year old girl named Jette living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You live in a modest hut with your mother and father and your big brother. Your parents spend most of their day subsistence farming, an unpleasant, but not uncommon existence, and one that you family has engaged in for generations, and in all likelihood, you will live out that life as well. Neither you nor your brother have ever been to school nor do you know how to read or write. Your only real contact with the outside world is a white missionary who comes to your village occasionally, offering food and medicine in exchange for supplicancy to his god. On the whole, however, your life is not a terrible one. You love your family and they love you.
One day, you hear a monster coming down the road. Two rusted out pickup trucks blasting 80s metal come tearing up to your village, a Soviet surplus PK machine gun belching death into the huts. Friends, people you've known your entire life are ripped apart before your eyes. Out of the trucks pour soldiers, camo and shemaghs, AK47s firing into the crowds, into the air, everywhere. Some of them boys, the same age as your brother. Your father puts up a fight and catches a rifle but in the face, dazing him and knocking him down. Soldier boys pin him down and take his hands and eyes with a machete. They bind your brother and put him and other boys in the truck to be brought back to camp, where Brown-Brown, a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder will be forced into him and he will be brainwashed into the next class of boy soldiers. The women, you and the girls included are all herded into a circle. Those too young to rape are hacked to death. Those who aren't are. Several men force themselves on you, you first and last sexual experience being at gunpoint. Once the men have had their fill they proceed to machete rape you, your mother, and whoever is left alive, the dirty blade entering your vagina, cutting your insides to ribbons. Right before you fade into oblivion, the bossman hops down from his truck carrying a portable television. Your last vision in this world is of a legion of enraged white kids in San Fransisco dressed in chicken costumes covered in fake blood yelling at customers outside of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The point of this story is this: In that last agonizing moment, would you give one good God damn about how much space some chickens in America had? And what would you think of the protesters? Would you support their cause? Or would you wonder where your outrage was? Where are your demonstrations and rallies? Where are your ballot initiatives?
The thing about this story is that, while Jette and her village aren't real, there are real people that this and worse are happening to. It isn't a rarity. Hell it isn't even uncommon. And it isn't an unknown phenomenon either. With movies like Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond, and Last King of Scotland receiving such high attention and praise its almost impossible not to know that this is going on in the world. But support for animal rights activism far outweighs support for war crimes and genocides. How can this be?
In order to remedy this seeming cognitive dissonance, the animal rights activist must accept the following conclusion. Suppose you and your dog live in an apartment. You love your dog. You go to the park and play fetch for hours with him. Every night he sleeps diligently at the foot of your bed. And when you're feeling sad, you can always count on him nuzzle himself next to you and offer comfort. One night, tragedy strikes and on your way home from work, your apartment complex catches fire. You arrive at the scene before the fire department and realize you have only moments to act. Trapped inside are your dog and the neighbor's kid. And you don't even like that fucking kid. He's noisy, and smells, and leave piles of flaming dog shit at your doorstep. Hell he probably started the fire, the little shit. In the time before the building collapses you are confident that you have the time and ability to save one and only one victim. So the dilemma is this, who do you save: the dog or the boy?
If you answered anything other than the boy, then you are a Terrible Fucking Person. It doesn't matter how much you love that damned dog, that is a human being who is going to die unless you help. In order to justify saving the dog you have to value dogs and people on the same level which is, if you haven't guessed already, absolutely and irrevocably crazy pants. But an animal rights activist has to accept the minimally equal, if not superior value of animals to humans because Spoilers: this is a metaphor. People are dying. If not from war then from any number of other sources: disease, famine, bicycle accidents, etc. And the activist knows about this. So in order to make signs, dress up, stand outside of fast food restaurants, and yell at passersby, the animal rights activist must first take a moment to quietly say to themselves, "I know that people are suffering and dying out there, and that my efforts could be used to better their lives, if not save them outright. But Fuck 'Em, I've got a cow to save."
The thing is that these are not all bad people. In fact some of them are fundamentally good people that just want to leave the world better than when they found it. They just haven't stopped to think about what they're doing. The real abject fuckwads are the people at the top like Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, because what they are doing is taking what is arguably the rarest and most precious resource in the world, human charity and goodwill, and embezzling it. They are taking public attention away from Jette and war victims and AIDS and Malaria and Cancer and saying "Everyone look at me and my cats!"
So the next time someone comes to you and hands you "literature" on how you can Save the fucking Whales, remember this simple mantra; "Eat a Chicken, Save a Life."
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