I AM the law

I embodied an Internet Law today. No…not Rule 34, Poe’s Law.

Poe’s Law states: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”

While the use of the term ‘fundamentalism’ usually implies the far Right (Poe originally formulated this law while trolling Christian usenet boards), an older and somewhat broader definition of the term is: “strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles,” which covers all ideologies.

And it’s true. The availability and anonymity of the internet has allowed every crazy bastard who thinks he knows THE TRUTH to hose down comment sections with his overheated brain drippings.

When Swift published A Modest Proposal in 1729, many readers failed to recognize the satirical intent because – one could argue – they did not have access to vast amounts of information with which to compare ideas, paper and books being too expensive for the common man until the Industrial Revolution a century later. I find it ironic that in today’s “Information Age,” where you can find links to most libraries, any number of magazines and newspapers, museums, encyclopedias, all kinds of video, as well as scientific and governmental data, you still cannot recognize satire, because for every idea you think is just way-out-there wacky, someone’s turned it into a .com and is plastering up huge walls of text and links.

The Letters to the Editor in my local paper is actually what got me started on all this today. This was one of them:

Free to breathe

Hallelujah!! I have never been so happy as to see that North Carolina will be enacting a smoking ban as of Jan. 1! It will be so refreshing to not have to breathe polluted air and see innocent children subjected to the noxious second hand smoke of irresponsible parents or caregivers in restaurants. The next law I would like to see would be one that charges adults with child abuse for smoking around their children.I am so proud of our state government for protecting its citizens from this disgusting habit!

— Robin

This was my comment:

I'm with you, Robin! My child has asthma, which is exacerbated by strong odors, so I'm lobbying Governor Perdue to enact a ban on people wearing perfume or aftershave in public. If people want to use a completely legal product like Old Spice, they are free to do it within their own home where I don't have to smell it. I'm especially looking forward to forcing department stores to dismantle their perfume counters, because we're too stupid to avoid them when we go out. Besides, perfume contains benzyl acetate, which is a known cancer-causing agent, and as it volatizes off the wearer's skin, it can affect everybody nearby. I think you're limiting yourself with the child abuse law, though; violators of my Perfume Law will be charged with attempted murder.

I thought it was a pretty obvious parody, but I apparently overestimated the comprehension skills of the local townsfolk. This is what I got back:

· you are one freakin idiot!

· there are lots of Socialist countries in the world that might be more to your liking. Please don't let the door hit you on your way out of the U.S of A. Let Freedom Ring!

· Wow....I am all for smoke free restaurants. If you must smoke, you can smoke outside and not indoors for the rest of us to sit through. However, a ban on perfume and cologne?? Are you kidding??? I would die without my perfume!

· I think you're a whack job.

I can’t decide whether to feel superior or sad, so I’ll leave you with the words of The Waco Kid:

“You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.”

Everything’s Better with Muppets

The management accepts no responsibility for the loss of childhood innocence from hearing Kermit drop the F-bomb.



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This is a remake I would wholly support.



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I think Rob Zombie would actually do this if asked.

The Time to Act is Now!

There is no more important cause than the call to action to save our planet. This is a movement about change, as individuals, as a country, and as a global community. We are all contributors to this phenomenon, and we all need to be part of the solution. Join our supporters, and become part of the movement to demand our leaders freeze and reduce Continental Drift now.

If you’re not already convinced that Continental Drift is an issue that you need to care about, consider this:

200 million years ago, all land area on the planet was concentrated into one massive continent called Pangaea, surrounded by a pristine ocean named Panthalassa. There was no hunger, no want, no human rights violations, no domestic violence, no hate crimes, no pollution, no animal cruelty. No wars were fought by greedy and oppressive governments. Hypocrisy, spin, and junk science didn’t exist.

Over the next 190 million years, this Edenic land slowly broke apart into individual continents, eventually assuming their current positions, with all their concomitant problems and strife. Our selfish short-sightedness has generally assumed that these are stationary positions, but Continental Drift is still ongoing today.

100% of the scientific community agrees, Continental Drift is a fact. Even those whose disciplines and specialties have nothing to do with geophysical forces, and wouldn’t know a karst characterization if it bit them on the ass, eagerly parrot the party line, if only to preserve their grant funding. I’d remove this part before posting. Editor

If the opinions of people with letters after their names don’t sway you, take a look at the following illustrations. They are every bit as convincing as cherry-picked data displayed on graphs engineered to exacerbate y-axis disparity.

Let’s look at that last image a little more closely:



As you can see, if Continental Drift were to be allowed to continue, the Westernmost tip of Alaska will crash into the Easternmost edge of Russia. The momentum of the collision will push the prevailing mass of the continental plate around in a clockwise fashion, until Mexico meets China. You think the US has a problem keeping a lousy 20 million Mexicans out of their country, wait until they have to try and stop a billion Chinese. Japan will end up being a suburb of Los Angeles, and North Korea will be close enough to North America that even its crappy little missiles will constitute a threat.

Canada will find itself in a temperate zone once again, and will sue for the return of their topsoil, crashing the US agricultural industry and judicial system at the same time.

Cambodia will see its economy explode as it imports drugs from Colombia and whores from Thailand. Shortly after, it will be obliterated by armed pimps from Las Vegas, who don’t like competition.

Australia will be scooped up by the lacrosse-stick pocket that is Argentina, and lateraled up to be wedged between Peru and Madagascar, impaled by India’s southern tip. Kangaroos will be integrated into the Hindu system, and koala bears will migrate into Brazil, destroying the coffee crops.

These are just a random sampling of the catastrophic effects that will occur if we continue to ignore this problem.

Simple steps you can take to help:

Change your driving habits
If you are traveling West on the North or South American continents, take great care not to brake too hard; this adds momentum to Drift. Similarly, those traveling East should drive faster and brake harder, offsetting the Western thrust. Opposite directions apply to those traveling across Eurasia.

Lose Weight
The classic formula P=mv means that momentum (P) is a function of mass (m) times velocity (v). Every pound you lose dramatically decreases the total momentum of Drift.

Purchase Drift Offsets
If you are unable (or unwilling) to significantly decrease your own personal consumption, you need not feel guilty. For a small fee, you can arrange for an equivalent mass of biomatter to be destroyed. It may be one old-growth tree in the rainforest, or several children starving to death in Africa, but however it works out, you can sleep soundly, knowing that you did your part, and are safe from charges of being hypocritical.

Blame America
Despite not having the largest population, or land area, or natural resources, America still has the most money of any other country in the world. Saving the planet isn’t going to be cheap, and by blaming America, you can use the resulting guilt as a lever into its collective checkbook. Insisting that America take the lead in crippling its economy to try and fix a naturally-occurring process, while not producing any measurable effect on the nominative issue, will at least take it down a few pegs, and be good for some laughs.

No Kids Allowed

There’s a restaurant in Chicago that has taken a bold stand, and I fully support their position. I hope to see it spread nationwide.

Dan McCauley, the owner of a local café, A Taste of Heaven, caught two kids literally climbing the restaurant walls while the parents just sat nearby doing nothing. He told the family that they were no longer welcome to dine there. The next morning, he posted a sign in the window reading “Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven."

The sign has provoked many reactions, both for and against his position. Some parental groups have even called for a boycott of the café.

As I stated, I support Mr. McCauley’s decision, but I don’t think it’s enough. Consider:

- Children are noisy. I hate going into a restaurant and being subjected to their shrieks and cries. There is also some real concern that extended exposure to the high-pitched decibels can lead to serious health risks like tinnitus.
- Children are messy. The sight of their food-covered faces puts me off of my meal.
- One of my friends was hit by a fork thrown by a child, and had to have stitches. Clearly, children pose a physical danger to other patrons.
- As a parent, it shows a frightful lack of personal responsibility to allow your children to negatively impact others’ dining experience.
- Children’s Advocacy Groups are merely pushing their own opinions on the rest of us, without considering the societal impact of their recommendations.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? We should ban children completely from restaurants. I imagine that we could even expand the ban to all public places. How much damage is caused by children in grocery stores and malls? Anything that is broken is lost revenue, and employees have to spend more time picking up after the kids, which impacts efficiency. All of this is passed on to the consumer in the form of higher prices.

Don’t even get me started on kids in cars. They are a dangerous distraction to the drivers. Their demands for attention, spills, and yelling can lead to accidents, driving up both insurance and health care costs. We should no longer allow children in cars.

Places where children gather together in large groups, such as day care centers, schools, summer camps, and parks, should be closed down immediately. They are nothing more than disease reservoirs. If one child gets sick, they all get sick, and spread the illness to their families, who pass it on to coworkers, etc. The children are creating hazardous conditions for any patron, but especially for the employees, who have a higher exposure rate.

Children are expensive, too. In fact, the top three governmental expenditures every year are: #1, Social Security; #2, various family support programs such as Welfare; and #3, the Department of Education. By way of comparison, the Department of Defense ranks #4 in spending. Obviously, families with children cost society more money than those without. We should eliminate the tax credits for kids, and instead impose a tax penalty, to recoup some of that money. It’s only fair to ask them to shoulder the burden of paying for the system they are driving to the breaking point. In addition, individual families should be sued, with the money going to bolster Planned Parenthood programs to help people break the habit of live births.

Obviously, some families will insist that they have the right to take their kids with them anywhere they go. They’ll whine about “free markets”, “property-owner rights” and “individual choice.” It is equally obvious that these people are selfish, and have no concern for others. Therefore, I will be petitioning my city council to turn these suggestions into laws.

After all: It’s because of the children.