Darth Chipmunk

Google, the largest and most successful search engine on the planet wants you to know all about today, Easter Sunday, the day Christianity celebrates the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. Oh wait:

Cesar Chavez’ 86th Birthday

Google basically says “Screw You” to 2 billion Christians and instead alternately celebrates a leftist labor leader’s birthday. But there’s no war on Christianity. Meanwhile, this makes it pretty clear that the left indeed has a religion of their own.

There are two particular commercials making the rounds that both have found a way under my skin. First up, Toyota and an advertisement for the Toyota Tundra:

These jokers actually narrate with the following, as they tow the now retired and defunct Space Shuttle to its museum (Straight from the “You Can’t Make This Up” Dept.):

Let’s Pinch our dreams. Let’s wake them up. Make them real.
Let’s not anything hold us back. Not even 292,000 pounds.
Let’s keep our head in the stars, our feet on the ground, and nothing will be beyond our reach.
Toyota – Let’s Go Places

That’s not irony challenged, that’s freaking irony comatose.

When I was a child man’s quest for the moon represented the best of us (“Us” meaning “Mankind” and our collective ability to overcome insurmountable odds). Today, the space program is an object of ridicule as we have no workable fleet to even service the ISS.

And second on my “Screw You, Dude” list: Nationwide Insurance. Apparently the leftists at the helm really like the Occupy movement, as they parrot their rhetoric in virtually every commercial including or closing with the tag line, “Nationwide puts members first, because they don’t have shareholders.”

Nationwide Commercial

Just speaking for myself, as a shareholder in many companies, the LAST thing I want is for a business to do is listen to me. I invest because I like their idea, business model, product, etc., and I want to help them be successful so I can be successful with my investment. If I invest in an insurance company, I want happy “members” who go right on paying their premiums with a smile. Meanwhile, I’d expect the “members” to understand my investment makes their insurer more financially sound and therefore capable of assisting them as designed, making their stock more attractive, …and you should be getting the point. What’s so nefarious?

But here we are. The scene of a glorified tow-truck pulling a relic across an overpass is “keeping our head in the stars” and “making our dreams real.” And meanwhile people investing in insurance companies are, in reality, subverting insured Americans, because pop culture! It’s shocking. We act like a tribe of monkeys who found a baseball mitt and chatter to each other proudly about the great hat we found. What a bunch of arrogant douchebags.

Logic? Critical Thinking? Common sense, even? Who needs ‘em? What could go wrong?

In the twisted world of American Socialism, leftists can simply re-tool reality in favor of their desired outcomes. I just had a “conversation” with a co-worker who is upset because she claims that a person displaced by recent flooding is being charged by the landlord for the cost of cleaning up from the flood. See, the renter has been living at a hotel on the Red Cross, but the time is up. They had already paid their rent for the month and can’t get back in to the place they rent for at least another week. So they’re kind of stuck. And they’re broke. And the Landlord won’t refund the rent.

I attempted to ask a simple question to get clarification on that last sentence. Because it’s important to note the apparent confusion regarding the difference between charging tenants “rent” and charging tenants for the cost of “cleaning up from the flood”. They are not the same; one is legal and a standard practice and one is illegal and would subject a landlord to a lawsuit. The point is that a landlord doesn’t have to refund rent because of a disaster. And rent not refunded does NOT constitute a “charge for the cost to clean up a flood”. But to a socialist, it does. Because fairness.

Before I even finished my question, my co-worker got up out of her seat, told me she didn’t want to even hear my question, stated that she wasn’t going to argue with me, and she walked out of the room. How’s that for civility? She is not a child. She’s a woman in her ’50′s. And she is so sure of her opinion, that she is hostile to even listening to a question.

When the same pervasive bad behavior that infects our politics and our media bleeds through to our interactions as fellows, it’s hard to see how this will end well. When you can dive bomb someone with your opinion and then shamelessly attack them for even opening their mouth with a reasonable (and factually accurate) response, cutting them off and marginalizing them, censoring them, and then walk away to add insult after dismissing them, what does that say about our direction as a culture? We’ve worked together for nearly 15 years and I know that I will never look at her the same way again. Yet tomorrow she’ll act like nothing ever happened.

It’s not that she hasn’t acted out before. The same “honest” open-minded progressive made the argument last week that 50 years ago people beat their children. When I asked her to clarify, she backed off and corrected herself, clarifying that to her, spanking is synonymous with beating your children. And she’s not alone, is she? At the time I asked her, “When you say things like that, how are we supposed to have honest, respectful discussion?” She didn’t answer. She giggled. She thought it was funny. So I chided her, “And we wonder why we can’t just get along…”

One word: Projection.

Jason Whitlock: “A gun turns some kids listening to music into a murder scene. And uh, you know, if you don’t have a gun, you drive home. You know, kids listening to some loud music, you don’t like it, you go home and complain to your wife. But when you have a gun, you open fire, potentially, and take the life of a child.”

So, Jason Whitlock is so morally rudderless, so homicidally impulsive, he thinks nothing of killing kids at convenience stores because of their loud music he doesn’t like. But thankfully, he doesn’t kill them. Not because murder is wrong, mind you. Not because Whitlock is committed to peaceful behavior. Not because he abhors violence. Not because he wants a better culture for us all. But, because he doesn’t have a gun with him, so… he drives home.

So yea. Guns are the problem. Seriously.

H/T: Weasel Zippers.

A Warm Thank You

To the Editor:

This 50-something, white, conservative Republican wishes to thank America’s youth for sacrificing their financial futures and standard of living so that boomers, such as my wife and I, can look forward to a long and comfy retirement, which we could easily have afforded on our own. Now we have the youth as our guarantors and providers of a little something extra.

As reported by the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research, Americans aged 18 to 29 voted 60% to 36% for Barack Obama. Prior to Obama’s re-election, I believed that it was morally wrong for my generation to pass a crushing national debt on to the next one.

The debt will top $20 trillion before Obama moves out of the White House, and it will include spiraling retirement-related costs that the administration has shown zero interest in bringing under control, largely driven by baby boomers piling into the Social Security and Medicare systems.

With the president’s electoral crushing of Mitt Romney, my overriding sense of morality and guilt have vanished. Thank you, kids!

Edwin D. Schindler

Woodbury, N.Y.

H/T Instapundit, Powerline and Barrons.

Sometimes it’s hard to even know where to start. So let’s cover the basics. The picture on the right is Lindsey Stone at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Next to a sign that says “Silence and Respect” she is flipping the bird and yelling (or acting as if she is yelling). Stone then posted the picture on her facebook page. Yes, she really is that fucking stupid. Twice over.

When the Interwebs found her picture, and it went viral, her reaction to the explosion?

You stupid simpletons. Just because I was flipping off a sign that says Respect and yelling at a sign that says Silence, at one of the most hallowed and revered cemeteries in the country, OBVIOUSLY there’s no disrespect intended to those interred. Only a retard or a Romney voter would come to that jackassed conclusion. I’m a hip douchebag, unlike you, OBVIOUSLY. I’m a risk-taker and an Authority challenger. I smoke next to no smoking signs. I live on the edge.

Ugh.

So now that she’s erased her facebook account, and been suspended from her job for being sub human, the concern trolls are out in force wondering if it is worth ruining her life over. But it’s a bit late to be asking that question, yes? Lindsay should have asked herself that question 10 seconds before taking that picture, no?

Listen, at some point our culture will snap. Something will happen and everyone will suddenly realize what “The Real World” and Snookie have done to us: Killed our sense of decency. When the snap happens, there are going to be a lot of humans who can no longer act the part.

That picture shocks the hell out of me. Not because of what Stone is doing specifically, but because she acted in the absence of any impulse to stop herself. I’m embarrassed for her because she should be ashamed of herself. We chipmunks, even on the Dark Side, have a conscience, a little voice in our head that speaks to us and warns us when we’re doing something we should rethink. Like pausing to consider before darting into the street for that big acorn, or taking into account the unintended consequence before unleashing force-lightning at the damned paper boy. The results could be bad.

There’s a real problem. Stone isn’t alone. There are millions of people just like her.

[Updated:] Stone’s employer has terminated her. They were at Arlington National Cemetery on a company trip. There are still lots of “people” standing up for her right to free speech. Talk about not getting it. Lindsey is free to “speak her truth,” be herself and do stupid things. She is not free from the consequences of her actions.

It has only become apparent to me in the last 10 years or so. But millions of Americans really don’t seem to understand this whole “Freedom” thing.

My progressive, leftist burg has an ongoing “problem” with transients. To clarify, transients are not necessarily homeless. I mean, yes, they are homeless in the strict sense of the term. But they are “travelers” living a mobile subsistence lifestyle, sometimes by choice, sometimes not so much. In the ’70′s it was far out. But things have changed.

There are a lot of them. And there are many stories of aggressive panhandling, intimidation, drunk-in-public and other generally bad behavior at our parks, at the freeway off-ramps, at the fast food joints, at the grocery stores, etc., leaving the city fathers feeling the need to do something. So they’ve had the Chief of Police on a mission to research the problem and come up with measures to make it less comfortable for the transients to choose our burg as a regular stop on the tour.

I joked with my Councilman, a self-identified progressive who called Obama “His President”, that it seemed odd to me that the City would act so belligerently to people simply exercising their freedom to move about and live a life of their own choosing. I pointed out that our local tolerance of medical marijuana was, in reality, a world-wide stoner-beacon that attracted every dope-head on the planet. When you figure in the generous Social Services benefits and the staff only too happy to assist them with every benefit they can possibly qualify for? Well, you have created a certain environment.

Perhaps by trumpeting our acceptance of mush-minded stoners and signaling our submission to the drug culture, and by making it easy and comfortable accept food stamps and welfare and social assistance, and by de-stigmatizing the people who use those taxpayer force-funded charities, we’ve sent a very strong message that these leeches are welcome and their behavior encouraged.

Some of us tried to tell you. But you said “shut up”, because neanderthal.

So, they can spare me the feigned surprise that there is a high population of this particular socio-economic group that they’ve suddenly discovered is unsavory and undesirable (and violent). The pretense is insulting. Now that they have achieved the desired progressive results, progressives are attacking the very people they’ve worked so hard to attract and who’ve worked so hard to get here.

Not really so progressive after all.