The Assassination of Common Sense Pt. 6

Long time no bored to death, huh?

So, I'll just jump right into this: common sense must be some sort of rare degenerative mental disorder that only a few people in the world get the pleasure of being stricken with. I've long held true the cliché that "common sense ain't so common", but now it's time to put away polite little sayings and deal with the reality that most people are lucky to not drown themselves while attempting to drink bottled water. Don't believe me? Read on...

Bumper Stickers are Billboards of Idiocy


Today as I'm making the drive West on Main St. in lovely Evanston, I pull up at a stop light behind a woman in a Prius with a bumper sticker that reads "Abortion is child abuse". Immediately I want to ram her car into the Chicago river and dance maniacally around her watery grave, but not for the reason you may think.

Now we won't get into my personal feelings on abortion because they have nothing to do with this story and you don't give a damn anyway. Her little tag of opinion incontinence just made me wonder why the hell people feel like you want to have their personal beliefs vomited all over your brain while driving. Are you actively looking to argue with people? Are you actively looking for your tires to be slashed and/or have your car keyed? Why, oh glorious lord, why?!

Secondly, have you ever had your opinion changed by a bumper sticker? (If you have, please let me know so that I can stop calling you a friend of mine and begin to pepper your car with sticky flags of my opinions.) The answer to the question is no, of course you haven't. Anytime you've seen a bumper sticker that wasn't humor-oriented, you've either A) agreed with what it says and wondered why the person felt it necessary to put it on their car or B) really wanted to ram that person's car for thinking you give a shit about their dim-witted beliefs.

Bumper stickers are for egotistic, self-centered, nut jobs who think other people deserve to witness their amazing intellectual discoveries...or simply put, douchebags. Moving on...

Are You Asking Me to Stab You?

After my foray into the mind of a moron, I stop at Jewel in Skokie to pick up some crackers to go with my lunch. I walk in, meander over to the cracker aisle, and then scramble to pick up my jaw when I see the price of saltines. Seriously, an 8 Oz box of Nabisco saltine crackers was like 3.70 or some shit. The fuck? So, now I'm just standing in a row of crackers being pissed off about the price of a small box of saltines when I notice that the box next to the ones I'm looking at is 2.69. Fuckin' Score!

Then my jaw hits the floor again when I see that it is the same Nabisco crackers as the box I was losing my shit about...only the cheaper one is 16 Oz. This can't be right. So, I try to make sense of this using my Mississippi public school (read: shitty) math skills. Magically, no math known to man can explain to me why one product is priced higher than the exact same product while giving you 100% more in the cheaper item. "Fuck it" I say and make my way to the self checkout. Ah, the self checkout.

So, I get to the line and realize that there are three self checkout machines in the line that I'm in, but only two of them are being used. Meanwhile, there is a line from here to the mythical location of Iraqi WMDs for the two machines that are already in use. I take one look at the empty machine, while not leaving my place in line, and I see the huge symbol for "This shit ain't working" on the screen and go back to standing in line with the other normal people.


Ex: This shit ain't working sign

This little trick doesn't work for the chick in the Metallica jacket who gets in line behind me. She proceeds to look at all of us in the line as if we're from West Virginia (Hey, you're the one in the Metallica jacket asshole!) and promptly walks over to the broken machine. After staring at it for about 15 seconds she finally becomes familiar with the aforementioned sign. Realizing that she is the one from West Virginia, she gets back into the line.

Moments later, as the line has grown to include several other West Virginians at this point and I have moved up to the front of the line, I hear "Excuse me, sir" from a very effeminate male voice in the line "Are you going to use that machine right there?". I turn around to see a freckle-faced kinda man who looks a lot like his voice would indicate and before I can ask him "Are you asking me to stab you?" Metallica broad politely tells him that the machine is broken. This brings me to the point...WHY THE HELL WOULD ALL THESE PEOPLE BE STANDING HERE IF THERE WAS A OPEN, WORKING MACHINE RIGHT THERE YOU FUCKING DOUCHESTAIN!!!!

Why must there always be some asshole in the line who figures everyone else is an idiot and only he/she has a working brain? No matter where you go, Albert Einstein's inbred cousin is always there to show you that he is an even bigger dumb ass than you thought God could ever grace the planet with. I wonder if that person goes home and rants to everyone about his inability to deduce much the same way that I rant about his propensity for making me want to beat them with a frozen ham?

Beware, these people live among you.

The Government Is Mentally Deficient

Yesterday there was all this hoopla over the Fed cutting interest rates by a half a point. Today I read an article on how the government plans to expand FHA programs to help distressed home stay out of foreclosure. Both of these events sound like they are good things...if you don't understand our current economic situation and how the country got there. If you do understand these things you'll realize that we have just had two more dumb ideas slapped on the table by our government, which for some unknown reason likes to ignore factual data and research (see Iraq).

The banks have no money. The people who you give your money to for safe keeping, the people who are the main source of money for lending, have no money...the market is illiquid as the they would call it. How did this happen? Well remember 6 years ago when those planes flew into those two buildings in NY? The government panicked as people started freaking out about the events of 9/11 and had to figure out away to keep an already sagging economy from nose diving into the ocean...enter Allan Greenspan. The Federal Reserve, headed by Mr. Greenspan, slashed interest rates to nothing making it extremely cheap for people to borrow money (read: they paid less interest). This caused millions of people to spend like its 1999 because they could spend more and pay less.

Enter the mortgage industry. Mortgage lenders, eager to get in on the huge profits to be made from the rate cuts, started coming up with these "exotic" (read:stupid) mortgage programs to make it easier for people to buy homes and take advantage of this easy credit. Sounds good...it wasn't. A lot of the people who ended up getting homes couldn't REALLY afford them. They got their mortgages on a 2/28 or 3/27 adjustable mortgage that starts out at a low "teaser" rate and then adjusts to reality after the introductory period, or a stated loan where borrowers were allowed to just tell the lender what the earned in income instead of proving it, or interest only loans that make no payments toward the principal balance. The result? Millions of Americans are losing their homes because they couldn't afford them to begin with but bought homes under some rogue lending practice.

Now that people are foreclosing like it's a new dance and mortgage lenders are closing up at breakneck paces, the Fed has stepped in to save us all, but they forgot the saving part. Their move to cut interest rates yesterday is like taking a crack addict to a shoe store to cure his addiction...it doesn't speak to the problem. Cutting the interest rate doesn't help the people who are losing their homes as we speak. At this point they are probably 2 or 3 months behind on their payments and the foreclosure proceedings have already begun. Mortgage lenders aren't going to bring their standards down from panic mode on a half percent cut because, now brace yourself for this one, THEY ARE STILL GOING TO LOSE MONEY ON THE PEOPLE WHO ARE FORECLOSING NOW!!! Oh, but the government has another genius idea to help along in this process.

Let's make FHA the new "Foreclosed Homes Association". Let's lower down payment requirements from 3% to 0% and raise the loan limit from $417,000 to $729,750. In other words, let's turn FHA (who insures mortgages for low and moderate income families) into an agency that insures the same bad loans that got us in this situation to begin with...this will not end well. On a second note, what low income family do you know that can afford the payment on a $729,500 home??!! Exactly my thoughts.

To make a long blog long, the government is painting a red wagon red. They are doing the same idiotic things that got us into this situation to begin with. So while people are at home calculating how the half percent cut in interest rates will help them save money on their new home, that time would be better spent calculating what they are going to do in a year when the house is foreclosed on.

It's Only Wednesday??

I'm getting sick which means I'm more cranky than usual (if that level of cranky is even possible) so here we go...


The Speed Limit:

Is there any reason why most people treat the speed limit like the sign reads "Speed Minimum"? If you try driving 30 mph in a 30 mph zone you'll probably be honked at and fingered (no pun) by every single car you see sans old drivers. I'm on my way to work today driving 40 in a 30 and the guy behind me is acting like I'm parked. We're on a one-lane road and he's constantly trying to pass me in his (insert gas guzzling SUV here)which gets even more annoying because we're on a one-lane road. When he finally gets to an intersection where he can pass me he does so by bolting past me at maybe 50 while giving me a dirty frown which promptly makes me laugh at him.
Here's the big idea: IT'S A SPEED LIMIT!!! If you can't understand these simple terms then you shouldn't be driving.

This is a damn shame:
I was reading an article earlier about how Jesse Jackson was going around some cit BEGGING parents in black neighborhoods to send their kids to school. Come the fuck on black folks!! Our people spent all those damn years trying to get a good education for us and now we ain't even sending our kids to the school we fought for them to go to?! You might as well go up to your grandmother and spit in her face. And throw whatever ideas you have of Jesse out the window; he's not my favorite person on the planet but at least this time he's getting some TV face-time over a good cause. My mom would've beat the black off of me (and believe me she tried a few times) if I didn't go to school. We lived in the projects, we had no money, but we were gonna get that "edumencation" whether we liked it or not. Why is it that the same people in our community who are the biggest seller of the "White man holding me down" game are also the same people who don't do anything to uplift themselves?

Kanye West Vs. 50 Cent = A Loss For All Music Fans:
In all the hoopla over the Kanye vs. 50 9/11 CD release, I couldn't wait until a friend of mine came over with his *ahem* advance copy *ahem* of both CDs. My verdict: Kanye's album=marginally entertaining, 50's album=shit sandwich. Which is to say they both failed to make a positive impression on my ears. The release date drama is a loss for fans and a win for both artists and their record labels. The artists and the labels get to cook up some nonexistent beef between the two artists over who will sell the most albums (which record labels mistakingly think means it was a better album)which makes the sheepish fans go out and buy more albums. It's really a wonderful strategy in a time where a top selling hip hop album may not even go platinum. The fans lose because the artists and labels are not selling you music; they are selling you image. Neither one of these CDs is a musical masterpiece despite what Kanye and 50 supporters may have you think. Go fork over your hard-earned money on 9/11 for some hot garbage if you want to, but I'll be at home with money in hand and better music on my mind.


A Gay Senator Is Only Newsworthy For So Long:
It was entertaining, it was shocking, it was an undeniably dumb move, but for the love of everything holy can we please move on from this? Whether Larry Craig resigns or shows up at the next press conference dressed as Shirley Temple, this story has lost it's flavor. Even I posted a little video connected to the incident last week...and then I moved on with my life as most other Americans did. There are 300 million other more important stories going on in the world and the media is reporting on some senator who tried to pull a George Michael in the bathroom like it's the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Keep beating the story to death and keep watching those ratings continue to fall...or take the revolutionary approach and report the NEWS. Just a thought

Mike Vick...I'm tired of seeing you

Mike Vick went from Superman to idiot faster than his 40 time. I was a big Vick fan, no matter what the critics said about his throwing arm I always wanted to see him succeed in the NFL because if for no other reason the dude was just gangsta on the field. The Ron Mexico herpes scandal didn't move me. The secret compartment water bottle ain't faze a brotha. Hanging dogs in the back yard...man, 3 strikes. At first I was not worried about the dog fighting scandal because it didn't really seem that serious. Being from Mississippi, I always knew people who had pit bull fights and no one ever really flinched at the idea. Then the details of the incident came out and when I heard he was hanging and drowning dogs who didn't perform I almost threw up at the idea. But you know what disturbed me even more? The waste of talent and potential.

I grew up in the projects in poverty so to see someone make it and get rich like Vick did is special to me. To see him, and countless others, throw it away in the dumbest ways possible makes me a little more than peeved. I wish I could say it was an isolated case, but it's not. I've seen it time and time again; and Michael Vick I'm tired of seeing you.

I'm tired of seeing the same story in Maurice Clarett who went from talented freshman at Ohio State to running from the cops with an AK on his lap. Or how 'bout being arrested for robbing 2 people with a .45 over a $150 dollar cell phone. Clarett, like Vick had all the talent in the world and threw it away.

When Rae Carruth was arrested for conspiring to murder his ex and their unborn baby I was in shock. I was in shock of the crime and in shock over how Carruth could throw away an entire career over a family that he made more than enough money to support.

Tank Williams, Pacman Jones, Jamal Lewis, and even Hall of Famer Michael Irvin have had more than their share of run ins with the law. What is the problem? You got it all, yet you wanna let it all go to Hell over some of the dumbest shit to ever cross a human being's mind. Get it together, for real, or you're gonna start to see NFL teams pass on great players with troubled pasts because their investments will spend more time in the courts than on the field; which doesn't help anyone in the process. The players, teams, owners, and fans all suffer when idiot players can't be happy living in multi-million dollar homes , having women throw themselves at them, and rolling around naked in their money. I'd take that life over a PMITA prison anyday.